WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

technologies used to create them. Indeed as the fifteenth century progressed, the secular nobility
began to rival the Church in its ability to hold and disseminate knowledge. At the end of the
fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century, only famed and powerful nobles, like the
Aragonian Arnau de Vilanova, or kings, like Martin el Humano of Aragon and Juan II of Castile,
could afford libraries to match ecclesiastical holdings. By the end of the fifteenth, many secular
nobles spent a sufficient amount of capital to surpass their clerical counterparts. For example, the
wealthy landowner, the Majorcan Miguel Abeyar could brag about owning 471 books whereas
Luis de Acuña, who as Bishop of Burgos presided over one of the highest dioceses in Spain, only
held 363. 257 This proliferation of knowledge and clerical culture was possible because libraries
and scriptoriums were not only symbols of erudition but of political advancement. 258 The
entrance of the contemplative life into everyday noble culture was thus physically the product of
a de-centering of boundaries by the adoption of knowledge-producing technologies outside
exclusively clerical settings.
Given this context, we can say that Guzmán’s readers understood the combination of
political and literary authority which Ayala embodied in two complementary but parallel lines.
The first centralizes two ideals of authority into one body. It assimilates the figural body of
linguistic and political authority with one ideal that had its origin in the life of Alfonso X. This is
the image which Ayala’s virtues appear to typify and which his “uncertain” royal lineage seems
to allude. The second way which Guzmán’s readers were able to relate Ayala’s authority is based
on dissemination. Readers can understand Ayala’s portrait as real because of the dispersion of
257 Ibid. 191.
258 Guzmán himself witnesses to this conjunction of values in his Coplas de vicios y virtudes: “Sciencia e
caualleria/…esta noble compañia/ es muy grande de juntar;/pero junta nin ha par,/ nin precio su grant valia”
‘Science and chivalry/… this noble company/ is very hard to join;/but there is no equal match,/ nor price of its great
value’ (qtd. in Luis Fernández Gallardo, “La Biografía como Memoria Estamental: Identidades y Conflictos,”
La Monarquía como Conflicto en la Corona Castellano-Leonesa, ed. José Manuel Nieto Soria (Silex: Madrid, 2006)
453 note 158).
158