Who is an author? This is an apparently easy question to answer: an author is the person who has written a text. But the question may become a bit more complicated if we take into account, for example, that the person who writes a text has not necessarily thought up the words that they use, and are perhaps simply transcribing that which they have heard others say, adding words of their own or not. There are, then, those who write texts that someone dictates to them; faithful, or not, to that which they are being told. Others happily copy texts written by another hand, with or without saying so. In the case that they do not say so, today we consider them to be plagiarizing, that they are lying in attributing to themselves what others have written before. And if they do say so, we consider that their function has been that of compiling, making known or spreading through a text the knowledge and thoughts of others, put together and ordered, perhaps, in another way; a function that can become quite important and original. There are also people who produce texts which usurp knowledge thought up and elaborated by others, but which had never been written down before. Authorship, then, is related to the elaboration of texts, but it is a concept that is rich in subtleties. An author can be someone who has never directly written anything, but has caused another person to write down what they have thought.

Today, the authorship of texts is a privileged way of recognizing someone’s capacity to inscribe in the world that which is considered to be significant or new. Habitually, this is considered to be an individual capacity, attributed or ideally attributable to a person who, with their sex and their name, is considered to be the origin of the knowledge, thoughts, representations and feelings that are captured in a text in the written word. Often, it may be interpreted that the individual attribution of authorship of a text endows its writer with authority, recognized thus as the cause or origin of a text. That is: a text signed with a name gives authority to that person. It is precisely because of this that women’s historiography has devoted so very many efforts to the recovery of individual women authors of texts; it is an attempt to restore authority to women. Restore it, because on many occasions it had been previously usurped; there are many cases in which there have been attempts to deny that one woman or another had written a text, especially if it was recognized as being important. As Luce Irigaray says, patriarchal cultures base themselves symbolically on the murder of the mother, hence the political value of affirming maternal genealogy. Women’s historiography has wanted to make feminine authority visible through the recognition of women as having been the producers of texts, of having been authors.

In the Middle Ages, individual authorship was not valued to the same extent that it has been in modern societies. Because of this, to understand how, in the Middle Ages, mechanisms were produced that lead to the inscribing of meaning in texts, helps us to look at the complexity and richness of the subtleties of the concept of authorship of today. In fact, in the Middle Ages, the question of authority and authorship functioned in the opposite way to how it does in the modern world: it was the recognition of authority that created authorship, in a process whereby the origin and/or the source of the knowledge could be completely absent from the production itself of the text. Thus, we know of the subtle and complex thought of some intellectuals through the notes that their students took when listening to their lectures in university classrooms. Above all we have the great example of the Gospels: text of knowledge par excellence, a text from which Jesus is absent as the author, although it is his authority, previously recognised, that generates its writing; writing that results from the mediation of someone in whom authority is recognised as the narrative witness of something attributable to another person. Often, too, we are presented with medieval texts without a name, without an attribution of authorship, that is, their author did not sign them, and the person who afterwards copied them down did not necessarily record who was at the origin of their production. This anonymity does not seem to have negated the authority of the medieval texts; the authority of a text without a signature and without the attribution of authorship did not decrease for those who at that time heard or read it.

In the Middle Ages, the importance of relationship in authorship is very visible.

It was not only the women sponsors or the relationships of patronage that had an extremely important direct function in the production of texts. Other characteristics of medieval culture also meant that relationship had a fundamental importance in the process of writing. There were above all two. In the first place, the fact that it was a manuscript culture, a culture in which, therefore, the texts were open to the silent intervention of editors and copyists, meaning that it was difficult to for an author to secure a written text as fixed. Secondly, medieval culture was one where the oral played a fundamental role not only in the transmission of texts but rather, strictly speaking, in its creation. The many texts that were dialogued or in the form of dialogue that have been conserved (amongst them La Cité des dames, de Christine de Pisan) are an explicit example of the importance of relationship in the process of elaborating a text. Recognising the authorising action of the other does not imply, necessarily, the negation of the self: Christine de Pisan writes in the first person, but her writing is represented as an incitation and as a product of relationships that authorise it. A self that can also be recognised as such through the recognition of authority of the other: it is Adonça de Montsoriu, the editor of the Vita Christi of Isabel de Villena, who puts Isabel’s authorship in writing; Isabel herself seems not to have signed her text. In doing so, she makes her literally into an author, although her companions and first receivers of the text in the community very probably had always known that Isabel was the author.

The Crònica de Sant Pere de les Puel·les les is an account written in Catalan probably at the end of the thirteenth century, although the versions that we know today are from the second half of the fourteenth century. It tells of a supposed Carolingian founding of the monastery and the effects that the raid of al-Mansur had on the monastic life; a raid that we now know took place in 985, although the dates offered by the chronicle are different and we cannot afford them historical credibility. According to the account, the act of aggression destroyed the life of the community and made a prisoner of the Abbess Madruí, who lived as a slave in Mallorca, until she escaped with the help of a relative, freeing herself heroically of slavery. Her act of freedom consisted of returning to the monastery, where she found a welcoming community, working and with a new abbess; little after arriving, the chronicle has her die. Her return liberates the monastery from a symbolic slavery: that of living in a history, a thread of meaning that was broken by masculine aggression. Her return restores to the monastery a time and genealogy of its own, which in this way is, through circumstance, interrupted but not usurped.

La Crònica de Sant Pere de les Puel·les debió ser originalmente compuesta oralmente por las monjas del monasterio de manera colectiva, en relación de reconocimiento de la autoridad de la voz de la otra, en un diálogo que lleva a la elaboración de una memoria común. Y esto, independientemente de quién escribió las versiones que hoy conocemos. Su escritura deriva de la voluntad del monasterio de reconocer la autoridad femenina, y de la capacidad de preservarla significante en el mundo.

The Crònica de Sant Pere de les Puel·les must originally have been composed orally by the nuns of the monastery in a collective manner, in a relationship of recognition of the authority of the voice of another, in a dialogue which led to the elaboration of a shared memory. This is independent of who wrote the versions that we know today. Its writing is derived from the wish of the monastery to recognise feminine authority, and from the capacity to preserve it as meaningful in the world.

The history of the composition of the text of the Crònica de Sant Pere de les Puel·les allows for the reflection in the classroom upon the way in which the action of women, that which they have wanted to inscribe in the world, often fails to respond to the modern formulas and definitions that are based on individuality. The slogan “The anonymous is feminine” becomes a very concrete reality in this example, an example that permits, in a more general way, a reflection upon the need to give value to all that which has meaning although it does not have a name.

In the classroom context, the elaboration of a story through the dialogue between the members of the group can become a practice of collective authorship, done consciously in the first person.

After reading the fragments of the chronicle, a walk through the streets of the Sant Pere neighbourhood of Barcelona, with a map in the hand, may help us to reflect, with the example of the monaquism, upon the historical capacity of intervention in the world of projects that are strictly feminine, as well as acting as a practical class of urban history.