Feldt & Høgel/Reframing Authority, 4. The Material and the Implied Library

In this contribution, I discuss authority, materiality, and media in relation to medieval libraries and textual culture in Western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. More specifically, I focus on some aspects of textual retrievability, storage and authority that I find both important and relevant for a literary media history, but which have tended to fall out of focus both before and after a material turn in literary studies – possibly because they are located in between a concrete material and a more abstract space of intentionality and ideals. I draw on examples from 12th and 13th century historical writings in order to analyse the specific conditions under which a new avenue to authority opened up in literary culture, and the roles played by forms of materiality and media for understandings of or transformations of authority, in medieval text culture in Western Europe. My key prism for this investigation is the medieval library, in terms of its material and physical form, but also of its accumulated and imagined form.