WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

history,’ emphasized the sense perception of truth as well as the type of tradition which this story
deployed. This pragmatic emphasis is what the Venerable Bede uses to justify his own Historia
Ecclesiastica in front of Isidore’s stringent categories of verisimilitude. 237 Bede understands that
Isidore’s emphasis on sense perception makes most medieval histories—including biblical
stories—unreliable as most of these are filtered by “fama vulgante” ‘common report’ and do not
always come from eye witnesses. 238 To solve this dilemma, Bede relies on a simple schema: he
argues that oral tradition can be used if the historian does not personally vouch for the truth of a
story and if the cultural precedent for such a tradition is understood. 239 For Bede, a story is true
due to its exemplarity—its ability to repeat a respect tradition faithfully independently of its
teller’s physical eye-witness-like proximity to the truth of events. 240
It is clear that Guzmán’s criticism of stylized and poetic stories, although not explicitly
citing Bede, extends his ideas when he refuses to grant personal sense perception a privileged
truth-telling status. In the Prologue to Generaciones, Guzmán argues that false histories are
popular precisely because they circulate “maravillas” ‘wonders,’ which take an ocular and
temporal presence that prompt readers to assume their truth without question. This is implied by
the etymology of “maravillas” which comes from the Latin “mirabilia” ‘looked at things’ and
“mirar” ‘to look at.’ Guzmán basically follows Bede’s support for “fama vulgante” ‘common
fame’ to its logical conclusion: if most history is already subjective, a writer should not appeal to
a particular experience of truth to justify his story but to a more universal approach. 241 The
237
Roger Ray, “Bede’s Vera Lex Historiae,” Speculum, 55.1 (1980): 17.
238
Ibid. 15.
239
Ibid. 14.
240
Ibid. 21.
241
This explains why, for Guzmán, Biblical accounts could stand for history at times and as pure allegory at others
despite witnessing super natural events—the miracle was seen by a reliable narrator and its witnessing referenced its
reality. This so much can be inferred from his commentary on Gregory’s Dialogues: “Los muchos milagros que en
él se cuentan por testimonio verdadero de aquel santo doctor el qual apenas cuenta milagro que o él mesmo no lo
viese o no gelo relatasen aquellos mesmos que los vieron y tales relatores que ningún omne rrazonable y discreto e
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