WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

their readers without waiting to be assessed for their “truth” value, the true objective nearness of
the narrator’s sight to the event, which he allegedly witnesses, is irrelevant.
Guzmán’s indictment of fictional histories is that they privilege the “here and now”
when, in telling “maravillas,” they use the feel of real experience to convince readers to accept
false events. Of course, Guzmán knows that a historian can also use “maravillas” to depict true
things. However, his main concern is that through experience truth as “maravillas” a reader still
accepts a “truth” based upon its appearance (upon its affinity to his reality) and not based upon
its objectivity—and so deriving truth through “maravillas” necessarily implies a focus on
superficial appearances and not objective reality. This is why Guzmán uses his Prologue to both
formulate a correct way of writing and a correct way of reading. He knows that it is how a reader
approaches a text and not what he actually gets out of it that determines truth. Accordingly, he
describes false historians as “entremetidos” ‘interlopers’ whose wonderful language both stands
in between truth and reader interrupting their relationship to history.
If, for Guzmán, “maravillas” stand between truth and a reader by exchanging real facts
for the feeling of “looked-at” reality, then we would expect that, by removing the feeling of
presence from story-telling, a writer could not only create true stories but also stories which
could rely on impossible events (on “fabulae”) to tell truth. As we will see, this is how fifteenth-
century Castilian historiography departed from (and improved upon) the medieval story telling
tradition that focused not merely in the experience of truth (Isidore) but also on its impersonal
reliability (Bede). Particularly, I will argue that Guzmán and his greatest influence (the historian
Pedro López deAyala) saw in stylized and fictional ways of telling things—in forms of narration
that displaced a reader from his everyday reality—the possibility of removing the “presence” of
reality by making reality appear like pure fiction and not tempting a reader to believe in a fiction
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