WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

could.’ It must record both an accurate perspective and also a method to preserve objectivity and,
in turn, readerly trust to the veracity of the narrative.
Ayala’s synthesis of Bede and Isidore, however, takes him further than either because, in
focusing on readerly trust and not writerly accuracy, he places the onus of truth in the reader’s
hands. As long as there are no privileged ways of telling truth, no one witness—even an
assiduous historian—can guarantee the reliability of the events in a story. Rather, Ayala reasons
that, to make a story be true, a writer’s intentions must accord to universally true principles
which any reader can vouch as true. This is why the ancients used writing to keep their memory,
so that humans could retain “buenos exemplos para fazer bien” ‘good examples to do the good.’
Writing is not only the product of collective memory but of collective memory in accord to
moral goals outside the flow of time.
For Ayala, stories are true as long as they reflect some universal Truth. The Good, as just
such a timeless moral marker determined by reason or by God and represented through moral
exempla, assures a story’s objectivity—its Truth—and hence its repeatability to any reader.
Writing truth, therefore, constructs the “remembrança perdurable” ‘everlasting remembrance’
not only of an event but also of a particular way of representing and experiencing events. This is
because stories introduce a type of atemporality that, in describing the past, also imagines what
the future will look like by tying events to morals worthy to be emulated. Through the “arte de
escribir” ‘the craft of writing,’ a writer can imprint his experience beyond the finite memory and
shifting generations of man in physically and conceptually according a text to an atemporal plane
through the writing of graphemes on a page and representing analytical principles in history.
This is not to say that Ayala writes history with another aim aside from chronicling things
which he sees. Shaping a story to match “buenos exemplos” ‘good examples’ is not a way to add
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