Donald Pease on the idea of the Author. From “Author” in Critical Terms for Literary Study. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin eds. 105-117.

106-07—The word “author” derives from the medieval term auctor, which denoted a writer whose words commanded respect and belief. ….Auctores established the founding rules and principles for these different disciplines and sanctioned the moral and political authority of medieval culture more generally. Over the centuries the continued authority of these founding figures derived from medieval scribes’ ability to interpret, explain, and in most cases resolve historical problems by restating these problems in terms sanctioned by auctores.

Such restatements commanded authority because they organized otherwise accidental events into an established context capable of making them meaningful. The continued authority to make events meaningful in customary or traditional ways provided all the evidence necessary to sustain the autores’ power….

Auctorial sanction and monarchical rule remained more or less unquestioned until late in the fifteenth century, with the discovery of a New World whose inhabitants, language, customs and laws, geography, and plant and animal life did not correspond to referents in the auctores’ books…. A related effect was the appearance of what Renaissance historians now refer to as “new man,” individuals within Renaissance culture who turned the “news” sent home from freshly discovered lands into forms of cultural empowerment for unprecedented political actions and their personification by new agents within the culture. Among these new cultural agents were “authors,” writers whose claim to cultural authority did not depend on their adherence to cultural precedents but on a faculty of verbal inventiveness. Unlike the medieval auctor who based his authority on divine revelation, an author himself claimed authority for his words and based his individuality on the stories he composed.