WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

problem with “maravillas” ‘wonders’ is that they fool readers into substituting truth for what is
merely subjective experience by making fabulous and poetic descriptions stand for true events.
This also implies that if a reader’s belief in truth can be so easily manipulated by a
narrative style, then “estorias” ‘stories’ do more than represent concepts: they also make a type
of reality for a reader. Guzmán, therefore, understands “estorias” ‘stories’ in the fullest sense of
its Castilian meaning: true histories, fictional stories, and drawn illuminations. 242 To write
“estorias” is jointly to manipulate the truth (in the manner of narratives) and to present an
immediate reality to the senses (in the manner of pictures). Stories both allow us to reflect as
well as impose truth on us. Stories tell “la verdat del fecho como paso” ‘the truth of the event as
it happened’ but also the possibility to create “fama e renombre a los que non lo meresçieron”
‘fame and renown to those who did not deserve it.’ 243
“Estorias” are able to manipulate a reader’s reality simply because the act of reading
already evokes cultural values and emotions in a reader’s mind. This means that the conceptual
categories of “historia,” “argumentum,” or “fabula” as truth, possibility, and falsehood are
irrelevant because some “truth” is always imminent in any form of narration. This is the
underlying reason which allows Guzmán, in an echo of Bede, to condemn false historians who
rely on sensory presence to pass falsehoods as truths but care very little about the type of truth
they mean to narrate. It is also why he refuses to follow Isidore and claim that truth is guided by
a witness’s nearness to an event. Because “estorias” already suggest vivid and life-like images to
mucho menos devoto podría contra dezir” ‘The many miracles contained in it are told through the true witness of
such a holy doctor who only tells the miracles that he himself witnessed or those same witnesses who saw it and
such that no reasonable or discreet man (and much less devote man) could gainsay’ (qtd. in Fernán Pérez de
Guzmán, Mar de Historias, ed. Andrea Zinato. Padova: Unipress, 1999) 25) Guzmán’s focus on a “true witness”
directly repeats Bede’s reliance on spoken tradition.
242 So the famous Ysopete Ystoriado is the Illuminated collection of Aesop’s fables; the precedent for this slippage in
meaning was already present in Castilian collection of tales, particularly in Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor in
which drawn miniatures explaining the moral stories are introduced as “estorias.”
243 Pérez de Guzmán Generaciones 5.
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