WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

habit of temporal, narrative unfolding. Because these chronicles unhinged their similitude to the
passage of time, they gave a reader the ability to think reality without equating it with his lived
experiences. These exemplary narratives taught a reader how to internalize events outside of
temporal progression. We can therefore speculate that Castilian historians taught their readers to
divorce the authority of a message from their real surroundings (to have an apathy for everyday
experience) so that the legitimacy of authority (the sympathy for its day-to-day actions) could be
maintained.
If authority was only to be authorized through direct representation, through making a
reader believe that his experience of reality was an experience of truth, the type of mystification
of Trastamaran discourse could have happened in a different way. In his Corónica, Ayala could
have had the speculum written by Benaharin as a concluding moral of Pedro’s life, as the first
type of history which they young king received, even as a type of moral to get from the events in
history. In other words, he could have used Benaharin directly as a mouthpiece for Trastamaran
propaganda without affecting the timing of the narrative just as he did with the prophetic letter.
Instead, he chose to let this fictional speculum affect the whole movement of the chronicle,
making the timing of its delivery—the very thing that hinted at its fictionality—the focus of its
role in the narrative.
Consequently, Ayala’s divorce of truth from discourse has less to do with protecting an
image of authority but with mainting a praxis associated with its unfolding. Because it was
mistimed, Benaharin’s letter could not effectively teach Pedro (or even Enrique) how to rule in a
time of crisis. What the speculum could do was to authorize Ayala’s perspective on the
Revolution: to make his view point of history true by tying them to a moral truth. Guzmán does a
similar move: he criticizes the grounds of his own historical practices, the tension between trust-
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