WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

meaning to his personal experiences; it is only a means to change its temporality in the eyes of
the reader and so to assure its truth. Ayala still thinks of the events in history as worthy to be
written regardless of their intrinsic moral worth. In tying the “here and now” of his experiences
to an atemporal Good, Ayala attempts to prevent future generations from reading his own
chronicles as subjective. Similitude to universal moral principles, therefore, literally keeps a
“estoria” “guardada” ‘kept and guarded,’ keeping it from death and guarding it from
misinterpretation by future readers.
The goal of a true “estoria” is to universalize events without diluting the specificity of
their past—to keep a writer’s temporal experiences intact while still guaranteeing that such
experiences would be read as objective by the future. As a result, Ayala formulates the problem
of historical truth decidedly as a readerly and not writerly issue. It is a reader’s changing pathos
across time—his changing feeling on the objectivity of what he read—that must be prevented by
linking a writer’s experiences to objective principles, and it is a reader’s ability to forget that
must be remedied through the craft of writing. Without readers, history may not be true.
The first hint that Guzmán takes Ayala’s theory of disciplining readership to maintain
historical truth at face value comes in Generaciones y Semblanzas when he openly writes
biographies from “fabulae”—narrative traditions that have been handed down without an actual
eye-witness—or as Guzmán labels them, “relatos” ‘re-sayings.’ 245 Appropriately enough,
Generaciones most explicitly makes use of “relatos” when describing the veridical basis for its
portrait of Ayala:
Don Pero Lopez de Ayala, chançiller mayor de Castilla, fue un cauallero de grant linaje…
Algunos del linaje de Ayala dizen que uienen de un infante de Aragon a quien el rey de Castilla
dio el señorio de Ayala, e yo ansi lo falle escrito por don Ferrant Perez de Ayala, padre deste don
245 In fact, one of the requirements that Guzmán places on a proper historian is the absence from the immediate
events so that true chroniclers do not write about the kings under which they serve to avoid bias. The work of the
historian, then, would always be that of the compilator of sayings and not the immediate witness of events
(Generaciones 5-6).
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