 If there is one formal characteristic found in medieval philosophical texts of every relevant period and among all the religious affiliations of its practitioners, it is the citation of authoritative texts, whether scripture, Plato, Aristotle, or other revered teachers. To contemporary readers, such references seem to show a slavish deference to authority and lack of autonomy or originality in the writer. The explanation of this phenomenon is, of course, a good deal more complex. The main way of approaching authoritative sources used by medieval writers was to find ways to forge agreements with and among authorities by reinterpreting them. Besides the strategies we might recognize in modern practices of interpretation, there are number of ways in which medieval authors make a greater effort to bring an author’s view into conversation and agreement with contemporary discussions. This sometimes involves placing an author’s claims in a larger context, such as supporting Aristotle’s metaphysical claims but in a limited way, as valid only for the sublunary world. So, for example, Maimonides argues that Aristotle’s account of the eternity of motion makes perfect sense as an inference from the world as we now experience it, but is limited to that context. Just as a boy reared on an island without women would have difficulty imagining how children might be conceived and born, Aristotle, Maimonides argues, might simply have had an experience too limited to allow him to develop any other accounts of the origin of things (Maimonides 1974, 295). Maimonides’ handling of Aristotle in this example is more colorful and explicit than other medieval thinkers, but the principle he uses is common. Alternatively, medieval interpreters often take a given citation out of context and assign it a new context. Hence, for example, Aquinas cites Augustine in support of his claim that theology is a science analogous to an Aristotelian science as described in the Posterior Analytics; however, Aquinas does not note that Augustine uses the term ‘science’ in a much older and less technical way (Aquinas 1981, I, q. 1, a. 2). Alan of Lille supports the Pauline claim that the “invisible things of God are known through the visible things that are made” only after arguing that the kind of knowledge in question is the knowledge of faith (Alan of Lille 1954, 135–6). While Aquinas cites and supports the categorization of sin in terms of Gregory the Great’s scheme of the seven deadly sins, he clearly subordinates Gregory’s classification to his own way of organizing notions of sin (Sweeney 2012b). Though these examples are chosen to show the difference between modern and medieval interpretive practice, we cannot attribute such interpretations to bad faith on the part of writers like Aquinas or Alan of Lille or Maimonides. That is, they are not deliberately misinterpreting their sources. Rather their strategies for harmonizing authorities discordant with each other and with their own views are part of a hermeneutic whose basic assumption is that these authorities are all seeking and attempting to express part of a single truth. It is not a distortion or disservice to an authoritative source to put its views in a new context, making them appropriate to contemporary issues and fitting that source into the picture of the truth as it is presently known. The underlying concordance of all authorities is taken as a given and interpreters work toward showing how it might be operative in particular cases. As Silano notes, many of the tensions and even outright contradictions between authoritative sources would have disappeared had the compilers, commentators, and masters determining a question placed those authoritative claims in their historical/cultural context rather than simply set them against each other. But they would also, thereby, deprive these sources of their normative status, in the same way in which a judicial decision interpreted in terms of its historical/cultural context is no longer binding (Silano 2007, xxv–xxvi). Silano points out that the task of the 12th and 13th centuries in the Latin West is the establishment of authorities which will form the parameters within which discussion and dissention can take place, rather than their dethronement through historical relativization (Silano 2007, xxv–xxvi).