Questions of authority are perennial. Authority has been and still is a key topic in many studies of history, society, literature, and religion, just as it is a key issue in contemporary societies. In spite of the scholarly attention, authority continues to have an elusive quality. Reframing Authority provides new perspectives by focusing on the role of materiality and media for questions of authority, as well as on the changing roles of authority historically and cross-culturally. The volume argues that forms of mediation and materiality are crucial in any constitution, contestation, or transformation of authority. New understanding of authority can be gained by focusing on materiality and media in situations where authority is created, contested, or transformed in different historical eras and cultures. As the in-depth historical case studies show, authority is dependent upon a range of media and materiality forms – objects, paraphernalia, spaces and spatial practices, visual culture, literary forms, technologies, and bodies. Thus, authority is vulnerable and in need of continual maintenance, as struggles against, negotiations of, and transformations within authority constellations demonstrate. Reframing Authority demonstrates the fundamental relational nature of authority, makes a contribution to broader debates in the human sciences and offers a long historical perspective, ranging from ancient Rome and Christianity, to medieval literature, the early modern, modern, and contemporary eras in Asia, the Middle East, Western Europe, Mexico and the US.

Authority has been a key topic in many studies of history, society, and literature. Authority suggests an uneven relation of influence, the power to motivate and gain obedience, or an ascribed prestige, recognition, or status. Yet, studies of authority have rarely taken seriously into account the props, paraphernalia and other material media through which authority is upheld, changed, or overthrown. This chapter offers a theoretical introduction to the key concepts of the book – authority, materiality and media – and discusses the theoretical intersections between these concepts which underpin the book’s basic argument that forms of mediation and materiality play key roles in any constitution, contestation, or transformation of authority. We argue that new understandings of authority can be acquired by focusing on the role of materiality and media, as well as on the changing roles of authority historically and cross-culturally. This chapter also offers a presentation of the sections of the book and of the contributions.

This contribution discusses religious authority changes in late antique Gaul, where spatial and literary media played important roles in how religious authority was maintained, negotiated, and transformed in the context of Western Europe in the aftermath of the Roman empire. The analysis uses critical spatiality theory and its tripartite understanding of space – material space, designed space, and lived space. It focuses on how the authority of the desert space, and ascetic practice, was negotiated through the literary medium of Eucherius of Lyon’s Epistula de laude eremi (In Praise of the Desert), as well as on how the authority of the text as a medium is constructed. This analysis then forms the basis for a discussion of religious authority changes in late Antique Gaul following the success of ascetics as bishops, and the role of spatial and literary media in this process. In a world of large scale societal changes, literary media promoting ascetic holy figures, and the ascetic space of the desert, played a decisive role in transformations of authority. Such media were created and used by ascetics, bishops, and theologians as weapons with which to change forms of religious authority, in an era in which the status of asceticism was a matter of contention and the authority of monks and church leaders was insecure. The authority transformations of the era became consequential for Western European history.

Texts – and the stories and teachings they contained – travelled far along the Silk Road in the hands of merchants, missionaries, monastic communities etc. The intricate itineraries and the many languages and scripts used on the way have received much attention, and we can therefore document some of the stages of development and transformation that a story like the Barlaam and Josaphat story went through in its long journey from Sanskrit India to Norse-writing Norway. But in studies of such transfers of texts, translation has mainly been seen as a linguistic enterprise. The present contribution argues that material aspects of this process also need to be taken into account. It analyses the material conditions into which texts were embedded on the way. The transformation from stringed palm leaves, to single parchment leaves or rolls, and then to bound codices also had an impact on the structure, presentation and symbolic value of the texts. Layout, the place and possibility of illuminations, as well as the portability and physical resilience of the written text all depended on the traditional manners of book production, and these varied immensely over the expanse of the Silk Road. Being authoritative to various degrees in themselves, texts entered, when translated and re-circulated, into a universe of multiple authority holders where translators (in a broad sense) would have to reinvent authoritative presentations of the new text, acting in many ways as vendors of it.

In this contribution, I discuss authrity, 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.

This paper explores burial culture and tombs as material media through which ancient Roman non-elite citizens could lay claim to authority and thus obtain social recognition and standing in the local community, as well as exercise power over members of their familia. The focus of the paper is a case study of a 2nd-century tomb complex, Tomb 100, in the Isola Sacra necropolis near Rome´s main harbour city of Portus. It argues that the design, in particular the decoration and dedicatory inscription on the façade of the tomb, constitutes a condensed communication of identity manifestations which served to bring the patron and her family into the limelight in terms of social status and standing within the local community. The tomb in question thus serves as an example of how the ‘deathscapes’ of Roman cities offered an obvious opportunity for both the living and the dead to stage authoritative positions and social status via self-representations aimed at the local contemporary community, as well as posterity.

This article analyses visual and written materials which indicate some of the interesting changes that the authoritative, Christian dogma of bodily resurrection underwent in modernity. These materials document a growing gap between the authoritative creed and people’s beliefs, which cannot, I argue, be attributed solely to intellectual changes, but which was also highly reliant on changes in material living conditions and medical and hygienic progress. The article suggests that the belief in the resurrection of the body was quite firm in the general population even in the 18th century – the century of the Enlightenment, but that it faded towards the end of the 19th century due to changes in the material conditions of life, such as medical progress and a decline in child mortality. My sources are gathered from the predominantly Lutheran former Duchy of Schleswig, and particularly from northern Friesland, and consist of personal letters, sermons, and visual sources such as church paintings and gravestone images. By means of selected examples, I investigate what the authoritative dogma of belief in the resurrection of the body meant to ordinary people. I trace the causes of this belief, and reflect on why it faded towards the end of the 19th century.

The historical narrative in the Book of Mormon matches the presuppositions of early 19th century audiences, but is seriously challenged by advances over the last century and a half in disciplines as diverse as anthropology, archaeology, genetics, and linguistics. In the face of such challenges, Mormon intellectuals attempt, in the words of Bruce Lincoln to “produce consequential speech, quelling doubts and winning the trust of the audiences whom they engage” (Lincoln 1994: 4). Doing so has made apologists engage with opponents on the latter’s turf. Mormon writers construct both defensive arguments and proactive claims that the story in the sacred text can be superimposed on what is known about pre-Columbian America. This article analyses the types of defensive arguments made in Mormon apologetic discourse, and their attempts to assert the authority of a particular reading of scriptural mythology over the scientific consensus. In the contemporary period, the rhetorical force of science is unparalleled. Numerous religions have therefore attempted to find an ally in science, or at least emulated its external characteristics. Mormon writers are found to be part of that historical trend. The article analyses the ways in which LDS Church members and secular readers differ, also in terms of their views of who is an authority and what constitutes authoritative discourse, and how secular and Mormon discourses concerning the past become radically incommensurable.

At the turn of the 20th century, Anglo Texans dominated the town of Gonzales, Texas, at all levels regarding political, socio-economic and cultural features. According to the local newspaper’s coverage of Gonzales life, the county’s legal, political and cultural institutions represented an authority that was only implicitly racially defined, but that nevertheless was unquestionably Anglo Texan. Building on Hanna Arendt’s definition of authority and applying a narrative approach as the main methodological tool, I describe how The Inquirer defined authority within the framework of a narrative of progress and in relation to two other co-existing narratives, a Southern narrative and a frontier narrative. The progress narrative can be seen as part of the important social, economic and demographic changes that the region went through at the time, changes that challenged Anglo Texan dominance on several levels. In this chapter I study this process by using a specific conflict that involved ethnicity, violence and power. In June 1901, Gregorio Cortéz was accused of killing the Gonzales County Sheriff Richard Glover, and I use this case as a prism through which I study how mob violence seriously challenged The Inquirer’s progress narrative and the idea of Anglo Texan authority. I analyze how the newspaper tried to overcome the conflict between the high level of violence against African Texans and Mexican Texans and the idea of Anglo Texan authority. The Inquirer ultimately failed to do this, and as a perspective on the analysis, I discuss how the progress narrative was reshaped over the succeeding years.

Previous studies of Danish Jews have mainly focused on the social and cultural struggles between the East European immigrants, who arrived in Denmark from 1904, and the established Jewish community in the early decades of the 20th century. However, I argue that a much more fundamental conflict was taking place within the community in the years preceding WW1, namely a struggle over the very definition of what Jewishness and what the Jewish community could and should entail, as seen in other European Jewish communities. The struggle was influenced by the appearance and the integration of a large group of Jewish immigrants but it was also a struggle that preceded their arrival and went beyond their presence. More precisely, it was a modern repetition of the old struggle over whether Jews belonged intrinsically to a global collective that spanned the emerging nation states, or, as the 19th century emancipatory dictum went, belonged as any other citizen to their respective nation-states with their Jewish faith as a private asset at the side. I look at this community struggle not via an analysis of the official channels and loci of politics per se – such as leadership, organisation or representation – but through unfolding and analysing how authoritative versions of Danish Jewishness were challenged through a medium, namely, the journal Jødisk Tidsskrift, which aspired to reconfigure the very foundation upon which this Jewishness was rooted. As I show in this analysis, through the mediation of the journal, that is, through the content of the articles, the design and format, as well as its distribution pattern, the Danish Jews began to be relocated within, and more closely tied to, a world Jewry and to an allegedly Jewish peoplehood. The journal challenged the Danish Jewish authorities and also attempted to reconfigure the very position from which these authorities could and should speak from in the future.

This article asks the questions of how we can understand the authoritative role and iconographic presence of Atatürk in modern Turkish life and state formation? The chapter argues that in the formation of the modern Turkish republic we can observe historical processes of the transformation of charismatic authority into the political legitimacy structures of a modern state. From a Weberian perspective the legitimacy of Atatürk’s early rule rested predominantly on his personal qualities as a “national hero” and military leader. In order to transform Atatürk’s charismatic authority into a lasting order of rule, however, it had to be routinized through traditional and/or legal means. This routinization of charismatic authority took place by the mediation of broad variety of material artifacts incarnating elements of Ataturk’s charismatic personality. The chapter claims that in modern Turkish state formation Atatürk’s charismatic authority has gradually been transformed into the abstract authority of corporate actors and related state institutions. At the same time, Atatürk has assumed a key role in the modern subjectivation of the Turkish people as citizens of the republican state. In these interdependent processes of modern state and subjectivity formation, the iconographic manifestation of Atatürk’s symbolic power in Turkish everyday life has played and still plays an essential part. In the visualized omnipresence of Atatürk we can see the materialized expression of both the rationalized authority of modern Turkish state institutions and the central point of reference for the self-hermeneutics of the Kemalist modern Turkish subject. In Michel Foucault’s terms, we can observe a complex dispositive of discourses, social practices, institutions and artifacts that together make the authority structure of the Turkish republic. The iconographic presence of Atatürk is the material dimension of an authority structure, which reminds us of Bentham’s panopticon and thereby of the crucial development of the execution of state power from means of domination to technologies of the self.

The authority of South India’s smārta Brahmins has long been under pressure. The challenges have not only come historically from the anti-Brahmin sentiments of the South Indian political environment. Globalization and “Westernization” are addressed as more acute challenges. Due to these developments, the traditional ritual knowledge and lifestyle have almost died out. So today, smārta leaders attempt to revitalize traditional “values” and render them authoritative. Traditional values may be articulated as certain ideas and attitudes, but they are first of all revitalized through bodily and material practices in rituals and habits of dress, food and lifestyle. Smārta leaders organize sessions where people are taught some of these rituals, followed up by how-to books that explain both the ritual details and how to dress and cook in a traditional fashion. The present chapter examines the recent popularization of the almost extinct smārta pañcāyatanapūjā, a worship of five gods in the form of five aniconic stones from five different places of South Asia ranging from Northern Nepal to Tamil Nadu in the South. The popularization of this tradition uses various media – from how-to book literature, television, and the internet to the commoditization of ritual utensils. Weakened authority is strengthened through the pañcāyatanapūjā, where the five stones represent the Hindu South Asia as an integrated geographical and religious unit. The material presented in this chapter is used to discuss the interplay of authority, materiality and media with contemporary identity politics.

Questions of authority are perennial. Authority has been and still is a key topic in many studies of history, society, literature, and religion, just as it is a key issue in contemporary societies. In spite of the scholarly attention, authority continues to have an elusive quality. Reframing Authority provides new perspectives by focusing on the role of materiality and media for questions of authority, as well as on the changing roles of authority historically and cross-culturally. The volume argues that forms of mediation and materiality are crucial in any constitution, contestation, or transformation of authority. New understanding of authority can be gained by focusing on materiality and media in situations where authority is created, contested, or transformed in different historical eras and cultures. As the in-depth historical case studies show, authority is dependent upon a range of media and materiality forms – objects, paraphernalia, spaces and spatial practices, visual culture, literary forms, technologies, and bodies. Thus, authority is vulnerable and in need of continual maintenance, as struggles against, negotiations of, and transformations within authority constellations demonstrate. Reframing Authority demonstrates the fundamental relational nature of authority, makes a contribution to broader debates in the human sciences and offers a long historical perspective, ranging from ancient Rome and Christianity, to medieval literature, the early modern, modern, and contemporary eras in Asia, the Middle East, Western Europe, Mexico and the US.