Gower's critique of academic discourse would not be possible without the tradition of vernacular translation which emerges from the interpretive practice of the medieval schools. We have seen how translation redirects and assimilates those practices into a vernacular hermeneutics. The tradition that I have examined here, translation of auctores from the arts curriculum, articulates some of the most important critical structures that govern the relationship between Latin and vernacular in the Middle Ages. Constructing such a history of translation invites us to study medieval critical practices themselves more critically, to analyze criticism the way we have come to interrogate literary texts, making visible the competing forces of signification within seemingly unified theoretical systems. Thus we see that when rhetoric in antiquity most boldly proclaims its difference from grammar is when it is most grammatical in its orientation; and when medieval exegesis professes its subservient and supplementary relation to master texts is when it most threatens to overtake and displace those texts.

A critical reading of the history of criticism yields more, however, than the intellectual satisfaction of showing how theoretical systems subverted their own claims to coherence. It also helps us to discern what was ideologically at stake in academic representations of textual culture. Latin exegesis of the auctores must profess its own supplementarity (and the exegetes must believe this) because the raison d'être of Latin clerical culture is to function as a sign of continuity between the pagan and the Christian intellectual imperia: in the interests of such continuity, medieval criticism cannot propose to outdo and supplant the revered auctores.