WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

In the Etymologiae, the real use of Isidore’s categories is to gesture to the type of
personal relations suggested by a reader’s immediate encounter with text. It is sense perceptions
and not analytical distinctions which are the backbone of how Isidore thinks that truth should be
properly presented. Thus, he takes “fabula,” coming from the Latin “fando” ‘to be speaking,’ to
be as unreliable as the ephemeral voice and heard rumor, and he argues that “historia,” which he
reads as coming from the Greek “histôrein,” meaning to “videre vel cognoscere” ‘to see or to
know,’ to be as reliable as the immidiate witnessing of reality. 235
A writer’s physical, lived nearness to truth provides a stricter understanding of the truth-
value within a narrative, and it helps explain why an event like the Trojan War, which is
arguably full of the impossible things found in fictional romances and epics, may be considered
“historia” in Isidore’s framework. The mythical portraits of Helen, Paris, Achilles, and Hector,
are “historiae” and not “fabulae” or “argumenta” because Dares, the alleged sole survivor of the
fall of Troy, witnessed their deeds which were, later, “in foliis palmarum ab eo conscriptam esse
ferunt” ‘written in palm leaves by him as they say.’ 236 In turn, Aesop’s stories are “fabulae” not
so much because they have animals speak but because they staged the poets’ sayings in
dialogues—i.e., they were explicitly fashioned (from the Latin term “fictum”) by words.
Following Aristotle, Isidore gives experience authority to determine truth and finds mediating
narrative only a poor substitute.
Nevertheless, Isidore’s reflections on the mimesis of truth in story telling were far from
inarguable laws for medieval historiographers. The medieval understanding of verisimilitude in
narration, which stretched as far as Jerome’s idea of the “vera lex historiae” ‘the true law of
235 Ibid. 357, 359. It is difficult to know if Isidore knew that “histôrein” meant “to inquire.” On the one hand, the
Greek meaning would have implied that “historia” and “fabula” were no different from each other; on the other,
Isidore’s relation of “videre” ‘to see’ with “cognoscere” ‘to know’ suggests that in reading the Greek as judgment he
could have merely inferred that knowledge was sight.
236 Ibid. 359.
144