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Imperial Histories from Alfonso X to Inca Garcilaso: Revisionist Myths of Reconquest and Conquest

:	Roberto González-Casanovas
:	Imperial Histories from Alfonso X to Inca Garcilaso: Revisionist Myths of Reconquest and Conquest
:	Digitalia
:	9781882528240
:	1
:	CHF 63.30
:

:	Neuzeit bis 1918
:	English

:	221
:	DRM
:	PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
:	PDF

This study situates medieval, renaissance, and colonial Spanish chronicles about the Reconquest of Iberia and Conquest of America in comparative cultural contexts of Iberian expansion. The book’s purpose is not to survey or compare the chronicles themselves in terms of discrete traditions, contents, or forms, but rather to construct a critical model of national-imperial historiography as a discourse of cultural authority and reception. These issues are examined in relation to the authorial-editorial frames in works from Alfonso X of Castile and James I of Aragon to Columbus, Cortés, Cabeza de Vaca, Las Casas, Díaz del Castillo, and Inca Garcilaso, they are accompanied by parallel readings of Portuguese, French, and Italian works by Barcelos, Joinville, Compagni, and Camões.

CHAPTER 1 Critical models of cultural historicism for Iberian history and historiography (p. 1)

1.1 Cultural textuality and cultural interpretation: History as context, inter text, and metatext

The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed important developments in cultural- literary theory as well as in medieval and renaissance cultural studies.

Among new critical points of reference one finds these collections: the revised MLA manual for modern languages and literatures edited by Gibaldi 1992, new cultural-literary studies edited by Greenblatt&, Gunn 1992, new philology edited by Nichols 1990 and new medievalism edited by Brownlee&, Nichols 1991, contemporary critical concepts edited by Lentricchia and McLaughlin 1990, new historicism edited by Hunt 1989 and Veeser 1989, Renaissance historicism edited by Kinney&, Collins 1987, and Spanish Golden Age cultural-textual discourses edited by Godzich&, Spadaccini 1986.

What these critical developments (based on work undertaken by semioticians and historicists of previous decades) have in common is a turning away from the positivism and formalism of earlier twentieth-century scholarship and a return to the more broadly defined rhetorical and cultural approaches to the study of texts that characterize much of classical, medieval, Renaissance, and modern traditions of interpretation.

Like most academic revolutions, the varieties of contemporary theory, such as new historicism and new medievalism, amount to an attempt to revise a whole area of studies, redefine critical purposes and methods, and restore what are perceived to be the most authentic and comprehensive bases of scholarship: for the humanities, these now appear to be hermeneutical issues in cultural studies.

For those who may not be aware of just what is involved in the passage into the poststructuralist and postdeconstructionist era of contemporary theory, it is helpful to concentrate on shifting definitions of textuality, context, rhetoric, and hermeneutics.

Here a brief review of critical terms is in order. First, textuality has been opened up to include more of the spectrum of classical, medieval, renaissance, and contemporary notions of the complex phenomenon of signification.

Zumthor noted a decade ago that to understand medieval text writing and reading the critic needs to apply semiotic and historicist theories, which better reflect medieval interpretation itself (and much the same could be said of renaissance culture):

A dialogic critical discourse.... A narrative never concluded. Is it not in these terms that writers of the Middle Ages spoke of ancient texts (in the same position for them as the medieval texts for us)?

Copying, rewriting, glossing, moralizing by means of the multiple analogies through which that world represented itself, in a commentary that was incessant, open, perpetually reopened onto an actual and changing audience, simultaneously playing several games on several levels....

[FJrom the socio-historical context to the poetic idea manifested in the text, and to the structures of the text (including its phono-syntactic organization), historicity is precisely that shifting network of analogies that unify these elements, in the same way as, for a thirteenth-century contemplative, other analogies linked the microcosm to macrocosm, the human soul to the starry sky, assuring their coherence in an incessant cosignification.

	Contents	8
	Preface	11
	Chapter 1: Critical models of cultural historicism for Iberian history and historiography	12
	1.1 Cultural textuality and cultural interpretation: History as context, intertext, and metatext	12
	1.2 Cultural-historicist approaches to historiography: History as discourse, example, and critique	15
	1.3 Cultural revisionism in historiography: From mythopoetics to ethical rhetoric	20
	Chapter 2: National-imperial propaganda of the Castilian/Hispanic Reconquest	22
	2.1 The Alfonsine historical discourse on Hispania	22
	2.2 Fecho d'Espanna, fecho d'Imperio: cultural politics and poetics	23
	2.3 Señorío as royal authority: History-making and history-writing	29
	Chapter 3: Popular myths of the Reconquest in Alfonso X's prosified epic songs	32
	3.1 Epic discourse in vernacular chronicles: Heroic historiography	32
	3.2 National stories as historical-poetic canon: Gestas to estorias	34
	3.3 Cantares de gestas as narrative example and historical authority	37
	3.4 National heroes as historical exemplars: Count Fernan González	45
	3.5 Epic texts and types as models for the Alfonsine chroniclers	51
	Chapter 4: Chivalric and crusading revisionism in Iberian royal-aristocratic chronicles	54
	4.1 Chivalric codes in Ibero-Christian frontier chronicles	54
	4.1.1 Iberian transformation: history of reconquest as refoundation	54
	4.1.2 Prologues: national historiography as courtly mythography	55
	4.1.3 Christian restoration: story of reconquest as reconversion	66
	4.2 Mirror of Christian chivalry: St. Fernando III as crusader-king	67
	4.2.1 Reconquest deeds: past and present	67
	4.2.2 Critical models: Alfonsine history of Iberian crusade	69
	4.2.3 Historicist model: Alfonsine history on Fernando III	70
	4.2.4 Reconquest heroes: champions and exemplars	73
	Chapter 5: Heroic typology and historical authority in late-medieval Romance chronicles	75
	5.1 National history and vernacular propaganda	75
	5.2 Royal reformation in Alfonso X	76
	5.3 Aristocratic adventure in Jaume I	77
	5.4 Political hagiography in Joinville	79
	5.5 Social prophecy in Compagni	80
	5.6 Courtly chronicles and popular reception	82
	Chapter 6: Discourse of changing eras in histories and stories from the Reconquest to the Conquest	85
	6.1 Ages of expansion and discovery: Old and new frontiers	85
	6.2 Historical interpretation of conquest as mission	87
	6.3 New Iberian narratives about New Worlds	98
	Chapter 7: Cultural-historical transition in Colón's rhetoric of quest and Utopia	100
	7.1 The cultural rhetoric of discovery	100
	7.2 Colón's medieval