WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

ecclesiastical and political technologies experienced in their every day life, because they were
like Ayala.
These two strands cause a paradoxical situation when joined in one portrait: they require
that an everyday experience of nobility be visualized as an exclusive ideal of authority. If a
fifteenth-century reader valorized a noble for his authorial erudition and political power, he also
knew that this is possible because noble culture as a whole had and even encouraged an easier
access to knowledge. In other words, a writer’s political and literary prowess, although
something to be aspired to, was something available to most educated fifteenth-century readers,
making Ayala’s portrait neither a special nor an everyday depiction but a cultural desire of
expressed in a reader’s everyday experience.
To put the matter bluntly, in fifteenth-century Castile, the writing of stories by the
nobility was a political fad. Guzmán feeds into this popular image by calling the Chancellor a
man “de grant discriçion e abtoridad e de grant conseio” ‘of great discernment and authority and
of great counsel.’ He imbues Ayala’s portrait with clerical “discriçion” ‘discretion’ and political
“conseio” ‘counsel.’ 259 He thus places Ayala as a proper noble—who embodies political and
ecclesiastical ideas fashionably. However, in implying that Ayala’s political and literary prowess
makes him an “abtoridad” ‘authority,’ he introduces uncertainty to this portrait. A reader
sympathizes with Ayala by going back and seeing how “political” and “clerical” lives were a
common experience which everyone wanted to emulate, but in so doing, he experiences one
major question: why does this figure have a claim to special “abtoridad” ‘authority’ when all that
I see in the portrait is my common cultural proclivities? There can only be one answer: either
259 Although I do not wish to speak of the genre biography that emerged in the fifteenth century, it is worth keeping
in mind that the default framework for these sketches was the fictional ideal of chivalry even when the sketches
displayed important clerical figures far removed from secular interests (Ibid. 488). Guzmán’s portrait of Ayala, thus,
represents an oddity in advancing both values equally.
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