“What is an author?” Michel Foucault posed this question to unsettle modern assumptions about authorship as a natural or self-evident category. This paper approaches the question from a historical angle, arguing that one of the most enduring concepts of the “author” in European literary culture emerged through the work of intermediaries who did not themselves occupy the traditional position of author. Focusing on medieval glossators and grammarians, it reframes authorship as a collaborative, layered, and fundamentally mediated phenomenon.

The paper centers on a minor but consequential misreading of Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae by glossators active around the turn of the thirteenth century. In their pedagogical efforts to explain Latin auctor and auctoritas, these glossators proposed an etymological backformation by analogy with the Greek authentēs and authentia. Although philologically mistaken, this analogy proved remarkably productive. It was later taken up and systematized by sixteenth-century humanist scholars, giving rise to the neo-Latin forms author and authoritas, from which modern European vernaculars ultimately derive their terminology of authorship.

Rather than treating this development as a curiosity of lexical history, this paper argues that it exposes the fundamentally mediated nature of authorship itself. The modern “author” appears here not as the recovery of a classical figure but the outcome of cumulative acts of interpretation, error, and pedagogical transmission—many of them anonymous and institutionally marginal. By locating authorship in grammatical abstraction rather than literary production, this paper advances a model of “authorship without authors” that foregrounds the decisive role of intermediaries in shaping literary authority. In doing so, it offers a historically grounded framework for rethinking ancient authorship as a socio-cultural phenomenon constituted through mediation rather than individual origination.