Medieval Studies Interdisciplinary Workshop

Finlay Darlington-Bell (Romance Languages and Literatures), Read My Desire: Authorial Editions and the Question of Selfhood in Medieval Italy.

The emergence of the libri d'autore (authorial editions of vernacular texts) marks a pivotal moment in fourteenth-century Italian literary history. In this period on the peninsula we begin to see authors play a major, scribal role in the physical production and compilation of their works. The rise in the scribal role of the author can be seen as a response to, or rather a consolidation of, the question of the self that had first appeared in the twelfth century. This talk argues that the authorial edition of the text is an attempt to remedy the rupture inherent to the self—that is, the division between desire and symbolic authority. The libro d'autore in this sense comes to represent an external self—an exterior object structured according to the language of the author's desire, whilst at the same time offering the paradoxical semblance of a unified whole that incorporates that same desire.