WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

condemned by the moral precepts advanced in the letter) and to insert themselves into history (so
as to relate to the narrative to their involvement of an evil monarch from the throne).
8. Reading without Time: Portraying Truth in History
To a Trastamaran reader, the events depicted in Ayala’s chronicle simply could not have
a direct historical relationship to its moral meaning. That is, their complexity made it difficult to
read in them a “moral” of the unfolding of history. Following the Prologue to the Corónica, this
fictional letter appears to be true only in relating to universal ideals—to an atemporal plane—and
not from reflecting the personal, lived experiences of its teller. Yet following the narrator’s way
of presenting events in a personal viewpoint, these universal ideals are presented as if they
occurred to someone in sometime. As such, the only way to read Benaharin’s letter following
Ayala’s guidelines is in the most rudimentary level without interpreting it generally as a
traditional speculum or specifically as an account of history. In essence, Benaharin’s letter must
be read as an actual letter delivered to the king at a particular time regardless of how stylized and
fictional it appears.
If we think of this clearly fictional letter as part of true history, what becomes apparent is
that the time when Pedro receives the letter is more important than its message: after his victory
at Nájera and before his final defeat at Montiel. These two battles (Nájera, where Pedro, with
English help, took back his throne after fleeing the advance of Enrique’s mercenaries, and
Montiel, where Enrique and the French attacked a weak Pedro without his English allies)
coincide with the rise and fall of the king and allow the letter to introduce dramatic irony to the
chronicle. By the battle of Nájera, the reader knows that Pedro has run out of time to govern his
country well, and therefore, that this letter arrived a little too late to have any effect on his
policies or to reverse the cruelty of the policies outlined through most of the chronicle.
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