By Carolina Iribarren
It was not terribly recently (1967) that Roland Barthes’s field-shaking essay “La mort de l’auteur” (“The Death of the Author”) first appeared. In it, Barthes argued that, in the late nineteenth century, the “empire” of the author—that “modern” figure peddled by “classical criticism” and bolstered by the rise of individualism, positivism, and “capitalist ideology” itself—began to cave and crack under the pressure of such figures as Mallarmé, Proust, and Breton, who, in depersonalizing, hypostatizing, and collectivizing language, gave the lie to authorship as a useful critical category. Ultimately, Barthes’s argument was a panegyric on interpretative freedom: on the reader’s right to engage with literary texts independently, on their own terms, sans the “theological,” if not authoritarian, mediation of the critic. As revolutionizing as Barthes’s intervention was for the study of literature, it carried with it another important implication: by equating authorship with modernity, it further entrenched in a generation of literary scholars the historiographical prejudice—rooted back in post-Enlightenment thought and Romantic aesthetics—that authorship qua concept was a modern (post-1500) formation. “The author is a modern character, no doubt produced by our society as it emerged from the Middle Ages,” the French writer asseverated.
But was the notion of authorship truly alien to the medieval period? What, then, to make of a Chrétien de Troyes, known and venerated by name from the twelfth century on? What happens when assumptions like Barthes’s about the modern birth of the author are bracketed and medieval texts (many of them recognizably authored) are examined anew? Those are the questions guiding Julien Stout. An Assistant Professor of French at Princeton University, Stout has recently published L’auteur retrouvé : l’avènement des premiers recueils à collections auctoriales de langue française au Moyen Âge central (Droz, 2025). Centered on a group of Old-French authorial collections from the High Middle Ages (ca. 1100-1340), Stout’s study leaves behind the tendency prevalent in medieval studies today that takes for granted the anonymity—generalized and defining, as Burckhardt claimed in his seminal history of the Renaissance—of medieval culture. The book shifts the conversation away from the over-studied anonymous, oral song to the authored manuscript tradition. In doing so, it not only challenges established assumptions about vernacular authorship in medieval French literature but also invites us to reconsider our own triumphalist narratives of modernity, subjectivity, and individualism. Carolina Iribarren interviewed Stout about his book.
Carolina Iribarren: I would characterize your book as having two sides. On the one hand, there is a conceptual engagement with the question of authorship. This question is itself transhistorical—it spans many centuries—and animates much literary discussion to this day. On the other hand, there is a sustained engagement with historically specific, geographically rooted cultural artifacts. Indeed, I would say that the bulk of the book is a painstaking examination of those 25 manuscripts by 17 authors active in France from 1100 to 1340 that you single out for their inclusion of authorial markers (e.g., proper names). To start, could you talk about the experience of researching and writing such a vast, multifarious project?
Julien Stout: It was absolutely daunting, as reflected in the size of the book. Overall, the project participates in the historiography around the birth of authorship and the medieval author in particular. I respond to many different pre-existing opinions, both on the theoretical level and in terms of material evidence, while also trying to assert my own original approach. On the theoretical side, I was heavily inspired by Alain de Libera, his Archéologie du sujet. I really liked what he had to say about the absence of subjectivity in the Middle Ages; I used that as an anchoring principle, in a negative sense: rather than adopting that point of view, I felt galvanized by it to reevaluate the place and significance of this question of subjectivity in the entire corpus of late medieval theory, even its most anti-humanist corners. As for the material, the archives provided the grounding force. For me, it was a question of how exactly one tests the limits of modernist theory by grounding your analysis in concrete examples—by looking through the Dictionnaire des lettres françaises and going through every single author’s manuscript tradition, however time consuming and exhausting. In the end, I wanted to bring something new to the conversation, by pivoting both theoretically and with examples, even well-known ones, like Rutebeuf and Adam de la Halle. I wanted to locate a methodology capable of reframing the narrative.
CI: You mention Alain de Libera and his thesis concerning the absence of subjectivity in the medieval period as a major influence, however negative. It seems like your point of departure was to acknowledge the predominance of that view of the Middle Ages—as a pre- or anti-modern period marked by anonymity and amorphous collectivity and therefore fundamentally inimical to the subject and the individual auteur—only to better relativize it, complement it, or altogether debunk it. How did this intuition first come to you that the Romantic/anti-humanist perspective may not be the whole story? How did you begin to suspect that a distortion regarding the Middle Ages’ relationship to subjectivity (and hence to authorship) might have taken place?
JS: I was trained by scholars who really leaned into this poststructuralist, Freudian, anti-humanist tradition that is reader-centric and for which the author is merely a construction. At the same time, I met others who used the vocabulary of subjectivity, if only to conflate it with authorship—it was always author-subject, author-subject. As I was starting my dissertation, Alain de Libera published his Archéologie, wherein was the provocative claim that the medieval subject is essentially blasphemous; that, as Aristotelianism and even Augustinian thought have it, human beings cannot be subjects. Yet Michel Zink, one of the most influential scholars of medieval authorship, uses Hegelian terms in his book La Subjectivité littéraire (The Invention of Literary Subjectivity) to argue that there were medieval authors. So, I started to wonder, what do we miss when we deny subjectivity or apply that author-subject conflation to the medieval period? And I began to reassess both the anti-humanist and the subjectivist accounts: those who say that the medieval ages are an anti-subjective moment and those who say it is a proto-subjective one. My book aims to rediscover and assess the medieval theories and practices of authorship that have been obfuscated by such modern theories of subjectivity.
CI: Foucault is central to this reassessment. You turn to his famous chiasmus, from “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur ?” (“What Is an Author?”), to frame your argument. In that essay, he argues in favor of that view of the Middle Ages as a period of anonymity and posits a turn, in the early eighteenth century, when works of literature begin to be associated with proper names, such that a cult of the author can be said to have properly emerged. Obviously, you push against that teleological reconstruction of the birth of the modern subject-author, but you also keep part of the Foucauldian framework. In particular, you borrow from Foucault the distinction between author-subject and author-function. Because for you there’s something valuable methodologically in the latter. Could you spell out what is at stake in that distinction and why it’s important to your intervention?
JS: Foucault’s chiasmus is genre oriented. He says that in the Middle Ages texts that were seen as scientific did bear proper names, and that that connection between scientific work and the author actually gets lost in the late seventeenth century. This is the exact inverse of what happens, according to him, to literary texts, which truly begin to have authors and be subjected to copyright at the end of the eighteenth century. It’s a very impressive argument. Heidegger and Nietzsche also make similar moves, where it’s not about historical evolution but instead about these moments of reversal—those points de bascule—and the first moment is the opposite of what comes next… It’s catchy on a philosophical level. But it’s not really accurate on a historiographical, evidentiary level. That said, I’m very appreciative of this distinction Foucault makes, because it isolates the authorial function. That’s what I’m interested in: “author” as a manuscript feature, an editorial category, and a category of reception. What I do in my work is locate the moments when it’s absolutely certain that authorship is a function in a text, meant to be noticed by medieval readers, and look at it closely.
My primary criterion, then, was to identify manuscripts that assembled a series of texts one after another—forming an oeuvre clearly marked, through the recurrent appearance of the author’s name in both text and paratext, as an authorial collection. This approach required me to consider only tangentially certain figures revered by modern readers, such as Marie de France, since no extant manuscript actually preserves her “complete works” or explicitly celebrates her name. Instead, I concentrated on cases like that of Adam de la Halle, whose name appears over one hundred times in his collected works! Because part of my audience is so skeptical of the very notion of medieval authorship, it was crucial to focus on these extreme examples.
CI: It caught my eye that, in your presentation of the corpus, you put emphasis on the fact that you’re bringing highly recognized figures and minor ones together. Could you talk more about your bibliographical choices and your selection process? What constitutes a minor figure in this period? What constitutes a major one?
JS: My colleague Ariane Bottex-Ferragne, from NYU, published a book on the medieval bestselling author Le Reclus de Molliens. He’s a bestseller in the sense that he has fifty-five copies or so. Jean de Meun, author of Le Roman de la rose, has about two hundred copies starting in the fourteenth century. That can be seen as major in medieval contexts. What counts as major is modern terms is whoever is taught in the curriculum and is overanalyzed—for instance, Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes. Then there are figures like Baudouin de Condé—now relatively obscure but once central to the tradition of single-author manuscript collections.
When I say “minor,” I refer to three overlapping criteria: modern scholarly reception, the number of surviving authorial copies, and historical influence. Chrétien de Troyes, for example, was immensely respected as the initiator of the Grail legend and was cited by his contemporaries as a model of eloquent French. The fact that we have only one surviving single-author collection of his romances does not diminish his importance, though it does put it into perspective. To modern eyes, authors such as Angier and Jacques de Baisieux—the least studied and least copied in my corpus—appear extremely minor. Jacques’s single-author collection was even destroyed in the 1904 fire. They seem to have left little trace in their literary world beyond their own authorial collections. The term “minor,” then, remains flexible—but it works.
CI: So, going back to Foucault’s questionably neat genealogical reconstructions, would it be correct to say that the Romantic-poststructuralist view of medieval literary production as fundamentally a-subjective and authorless is not wrong so much as incomplete: it leaves out the essential fact that the author as an editorial category or a category of reception did exist in the Middle Ages and remains operative in some key (if now “minor”) texts?
JS: Yes, it’s both. When you look at Latin authorship theories of the moment, you find established literary and scientific authors—e.g., Ovid and Virgil—and they are revered. Even vernacular authors like the troubadours could be monumentalized. In the French case that I examine, you have both a culture of anonymity and a few established authors. Anonymity, you know, can be complimentary to authorship; they coexist. You see this in the pseudo authorship tradition that goes all the way back to pseudo–Saint Paul, pseudo-Aristotle… There is a whole series of in-between practices that put pressure on the assumption that the Middle Ages were a time when everything was anonymous, a period where everybody seemed to be in a dreamy, semi-conscious state. However, I focus on twenty-five manuscripts and seventeen authors, and that’s nothing compared to the countless writers who do not have authorial collections. These authors range from twelfth-century Anglo-Norman didactic writers such as Philippe de Thaon and Angier to thirteenth-century “autobiographical” authors like Rutebeuf, Adam de la Halle, and Watriquet de Couvin. I also include lesser-known translators and hagiographers such as Pierre de Beauvais and Guillaume le Clerc de Normandie, as well as authors of fabliaux like Gautier le Leu, Jean de Condé, and Jacques de Baisieux. I make it very clear that French authorship is a very marginal and very fuzzy phenomenon outside of the corpus.
CI: Still, I can’t help feeling that your argument, your spotlighting of authorship in varying forms and degrees in the Middle Ages, invites us to revise a certain philosophy of history premised on a progressivist understanding of the development of subjectivity—from formless anonymity and collectivism in the Middle Ages to full-fledged individuality and selfhood in the modern period. Do you think that enriching our understanding of authorship in the medieval period, as you purport to do, in any way destabilizes the teleological presuppositions that shape our notions of self and subject today? You show that the story actually included authors, names, and editorial practices anchored in authorship from the beginning. What are the implications of that recognition for contemporary philosophical models of the subject or the self?
JS: Pierre de Jean Olivi, a thirteenth-century minor theologian, actually uses a concept—that of the reflexive, agential soul—that is quite close to that of the subject. There’s also a great article by Jacob Schmutz (“L’existence de l’ego comme premier principe métaphysique avant Descartes”) which shows that the certainty of the self as a primary metaphysical principle, associated with Descartes and then Kant, can be traced back to thirteenth-century debates—even Augustine has an equivalent of “I think, therefore I am”; he says, “I doubt, therefore I am.” It’s not at the center of the epistemological system of the Middle Ages, but there are genealogical traces. The thirteenth century is also a moment when private confession becomes mandatory. All these elements are part of a redefinition of the self or the individual that will have an impact later. However, I myself really enjoy not thinking about what comes later, instead focusing on how a twelfth-century, a thirteenth-century reader might have perceived the shifting definition of authorship. For example, all of my authors, but especially Rutebeuf, Adam de la Halle, Guillaume le Clerc de Normandie, describe themselves as individual sinners, and their poetry as personal sins, and this in turn leads to a more individualized—let’s call it subjective—approach to literature. How was that change perceived at the time? I focus on texts that say they have an author, not because I’m trying to use the past to deconstruct the present, but in order to reconnect with questions, theories, and practices that have largely been forgotten but that in reality participated in the production of pivotal literary and cultural categories. My aim is to render the medieval experience of authorship in its complexity. That’s my hope.
CI: It must be challenging, I imagine, to position your study as an intervention. There’s a polemical edge to it. From your theoretical framing to your archival choices, you’re definitely pushing back against the grain of recent medieval scholarship. You offer your study as a kind of corrective to this old yet unresolved debate in literary history that revolves around authorship. What do you think is the state of the conversation concerning the medieval author, after an intervention like yours?
JS: Well, I presented this book two weeks ago and still got a very common question, which is, why do you, French people, always focus on this question of the death of the author? Which indicates that the presentation wasn’t really heard because the book is basically not about the death of the author. Rather, it examines how the questions of the author’s death and resurrection are deeply entangled with theories of the subject—an enduring obsession not only among French thinkers, but among humanists more broadly. The humanities have, after all, placed subjectivity and the “self” at the very center of academic inquiry. Even the most critically innovative scholarship remains steeped in these notions of the self and the subject, often equated with the figure of the author. This is why it can be so difficult to make myself heard when I insist that I am writing about the author before the era of the self, before the era of the subject, which are anything but universal and atemporal. So, I think there will be a multilayered reception: some people will look at the book and say, “yet another book on medieval French authorship” and dismiss it; and then there will be another audience, probably the new generation of grad students, who will be open enough to engage with it.
CI: You’re trying to move the field beyond the poststructuralist doxa.
JS: That would be the greatest honor—to influence readers, even slightly, to be more cautious about the constant impulse to privilege modernity, or to justify the Middle Ages only through a dialogue with the modern period. Too often, this takes the form of seeing the medieval either as its “other”—the absolute opposite of what we define as “modern,” in the Burckhardtian sense—or as its prelude, what Zink, following Hegel, calls the “infancy” of modern literature: a body of work valued chiefly for the greater things it is thought to have made possible. Though I am not naïve enough to believe that I can access it directly, I work under the assumption that the primary interest of medieval literature is medieval literature itself.
CI: One of the first things that struck me about your book was the impersonal, “anonymizing” use of the pronoun nous, “we.” As the first sentence reads, “Pourquoi se risquer à proposer, comme nous nous apprêtons à le faire, une étude de plus sur l’auteur au Moyen Âge ?” (“Why risk proposing, as we intend to do, yet another study of the author in the Middle Ages?”). Of course this is largely a rhetorical convention, especially in French academic writing: to bolster the impartiality of one’s scholarship by concealing or denying one’s own subject position. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if, after having meditated so profoundly on the issue of authorship and, to some degree, subjectivity, you have noticed that your own relationship to writing and the act of creating under a proper name has changed?
JS: The fact that it is a convention doesn’t mean that it’s not significant. There are all sorts of ways that the self is annihilated during the writing of a book. There’s this idea of crushing the self in order to be able to produce something in one’s name. When you study subjectivity in particular, there’s also a fear of developing a double personality—of becoming, like that book by Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre (Oneself as Another). There were many instances when I thought I was being written just as much as I was writing. There’s this beautiful image by the twelfth-century mystic Hugh of Saint Victor, who says that we moderns are like little people standing on the shoulders of ancient giants. That’s very much how I feel. As a writer, you are humbled by the past and the generations of thinkers who came before you and are speaking at the same time, even though it’s only your name on the book cover.
Julien Stout is Assistant Professor of French at Princeton University. His research focuses on literature, music, and material culture from the Middle Ages, with a special interest in questions of authorship, multilingualism, and modernity’s relationships to the medieval past. He has published on Chrétien de Troye’s Conte du Graal, the paratextual phenomenology of late-medieval booklists, and the poetics of youth in medieval literature. His next book project, Sounding Foreign: The Poetics of Multilingualism in Christian and Jewish Vernacular Song, brings together sound studies and codicology in the first joint study of Christian and Jewish vernacular multilingual songs in Old French, Occitan, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic.
Carolina Iribarren is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of French at Princeton University, where she specializes in twentieth-century literature and thought, with an emphasis on aesthetics, ethics, and ecology. Her articles on Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, the history of literary criticism, and related topics have appeared in French Studies, the Journal of Modern Literature, and The Cambridge Companion to the American Essay, among other venues. She is currently working on a monograph on Weil’s philosophy of art, notably her ideas on beauty and their social, decolonial, and environmental implications.
Edited by Jacob Saliba.
Featured image: Illumination from manuscript collection Recueil d’anciennes poésies françaises, ca. 1275-1300, via Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.
