The connection between authorship and meaning in medieval Latin literature is an intricate matter. First of all, the concept of authorship in the Middle Ages essentially differed from our modern perception. Even more importantly, the frequent anonymity and fragmentary survival of the corpus of medieval Latin literature represents a challenge for our present understanding of this textual evidence. Last but not least, the process of losses of medieval texts has been neither random nor straighforward. In this talk, I will offer glimpses into the complex process of authorial attribution in the Middle Ages and discuss how it functioned, the agencies through which these attributions were chanelled, and how all of this could have affected the meaning of the texts. As a case in point, examples from the literary production of the early Czech Reformation of the 15th century will be discussed. This well-defined group of texts is a suitable model for illustrating how a canon of (in this case Hussite) authors is formed and what the manifold problems with authorship attributions are. Prague was a vibrant centre of literary exchanges in the 15th century and the textual evidence stemming from this period can perhaps help us examine some questions that may seem heretical today: Who has the authority to ascribe an author to a text? And do we really need an author?
Petra Mutlová is an Associate Professor at the Department of Classical Philology at Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia. Her research interest lies in the field of Medieval Latin language and literature, especially textual criticism, intellectual exchanges and the transmission of late medieval manuscripts. She mainly focuses on the period of the Czech Reformation and the textual production of late medieval Bohemia. She has published critical editions of several medieval literary and diplomatic sources of Bohemian origin. Since 2005 her team has been preparing editions of the Latin works of Jan Hus (Magistri Iohannis Hus Opera omnia series) for the Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis of Brepols Publishers.