WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

y likening to reality. If a reader was not tempted to accept truth simply because, in being vivid
and wonderful, it resembled his reality, then a historian could present even subjective
experiences with a measure of objectivity.
I will argue that the social setting for these new ways of thinking of history was the
Trastamaran Revolution of 1369, and that in evaluating upon its influence, historians used overt
fiction as a way to portray the Revolution’s events. This was because, in deposing a sovereign
and implanting a usurper, the Revolution managed to make the separation of the concept of true
authority from the real ways in which this authority was justified into an acceptable experience.
In Castile, the removal of a king from power had profound effects—particularly in the creation
of narratives—because the thirteenth-century literary achievements of Alfonso X had cast
narrative creation and political achievement in the same frame. In Castile, political discourse not
only involved the making of a political persona but the fashioning of truth through story telling.
In fact, it is in describing the Revolution that Guzmán and Ayala most clearly display
how truth may be represented without appealing to sensory “presence.” They do so in two ways:
first, they make the experience of an event independent of its true occurrence; second, they
distance a reader’s chronological experience of reality from the chronological presentation of
truth in history—that is, in their writings a reader cannot understand the passage of time read in
history as the passage of time lived in his life. To portray timeless and objective truth, Fernán
Pérez de Guzmán and Pedro López de Ayala purposely sought to detach readers from the act of
story telling so that a subject’s personal projections would not taint the objectivity of the
historical events portrayed. This way of writing made narratives “true” not because an author
could attest to the veracity of their events, or a reader could sympathize with them, but simply
because their structures could be repeated for any time, place, or person.
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