Crafting past and present : the figure of the historian in fifteenth-century Castile / Michael Stephen Agnew.

Format:

Book

Manuscript

Microformat

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Agnew, Michael Stephen.

Contributor:

Brownlee, Marina S., advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Penn dissertations--Romance languages.

Romance languages--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--Romance languages.

Romance languages--Penn dissertations.

Physical Description:

xxviii, 326 pages : illustrations ; 29 cm

Production:

2000.

Summary:

A moment of significant political and social change, the fifteenth century in Castile also witnessed a remarkable expansion and diversification of historiography. With particular emphasis on texts produced for or about the Crown, this study explores the extent to which certain writers of the period, engaged in the representation of the distant or recent past, were conscious of the constructed nature of historiographical discourse and how this awareness affected their claims to authority. Given the scarcity of contemporary theoretical texts, authors, representation of the office of cronista and their overt intervention in their works (as characters or as narrators and editors) provides an ideal locus for the study of their approach to the recording of the past. Gutierre Diaz de Games, author of a chivalric biography (the only writer analyzed for whom royal history is secondary), and Alfonso de Palencia, a humanist historian, may represent ideological extremes, but through prominent self-representation each seeks to legitimate his uniquely innovative text. Juan de Mena's representation of past and present in his Laberinto de Fortuna reflects Enrique de Villena's ideas regarding historiographical eloquence. In response to the quandaries of a contingent world, Mena offers his text as artifact and himself as a problematic vate and poeta. Pedro de Corral's Cronica sarracina presents history as a mise-en-abime of textual representations whose original is always irrecoverable, and his metafictional experiments, including the invention of three apocryphal chroniclers, highlight a self-conscious elaboration of a "Neogothic" ideology. Fernando de Pulgar produces a more enduring standard for royal propaganda, yet as an outspoken writer of epistles and as the silent presence in his Cronica de los Reyes Catolicos, he reflects the contradictoriness of the absolutist ideology to which he contributes as a mythographer of the present. These writers all exhibit a highly-developed self-awareness regarding their role as crafters of historiographical discourse, bolstering their claims to truth by presenting their works as human artifice and asserting a thorough command of their rhetoric: fictiveness becomes a guarantor of truth.

Notes:

Supervisor: Marina S. Brownlee.

Thesis (Ph.D. in Romance Languages) -- University of Pennsylvania, 2000.

Includes bibliographical references.

Local Notes:

University Microfilms order no.: 99-76394.

OCLC:

187484879