The humble proof-reader in José Saramago's História do cerco de Lisboa, who inserts a negative in a text where the author had intended none, thus changing retrospectively the course of historical events, raises some of the most pressing questions preoccupying contemporary novelists: the issues of truth and relativity, the possibility and implications of multiple authoring, and the potency of authorship as narrative authority. Impersonalizing authorship, by turning it into a process involving one or more agents and various stages, does not, however, remove textual author-ity. As Cervantes magnificently demonstrated in Don Quixote five centuries ago, it can also, paradoxically, reinforce that which it seeks to obscure. The sovereign subject – the Cartesian cogito – may have been pronounced dead by mid-twentieth-century literary theory, but it would be premature to assume from this the demise of the closely related concept of authorship – all the more so since we are currently witnessing a ‘return’ or ‘rebirth’ of subjectivity, albeit in radically modified form. Indeed, one of the consequences of recent radical interrogations of the subject has been to decentre the notion of a unified and sovereign self in favour of multiple subjectivities writing from a plurality of perspectives. What has accompanied these changing views of the subject is a reconfiguration of authorship, and not for the first time in the history of Western letters.

An author is conventionally agreed to be the originator, creator, or primary source of something (auctor), whether text, act, or event; he or she bears responsibility for and carries authority over his or her creation (auctoritas). The origin of the word thus bears the traces of two fundamental ideas: genesis and control. Yet, the relationship between these is not necessarily simple or direct. To the medieval mind, the human author derived his creativity and authority from God, and worked within the field of a complex critical apparatus that allowed for the interplay of multiple determinants in Scriptural exegesis.