Companion to Empire: A Genealogy of the Written Word in Spain and New Spain, c. 550–1550 (review)

The recent controversy around the publication of the Diccionario biográfico español by the Real Academia de la Historia¹ raises questions germane to this excellent study by David Rojinsky on the subject of empire and writing, principally in juridical and historiographic modes, from the early Middle Ages to the early colonial period in the Iberian Peninsula and Spain’s New World colonies. Regardless of the evident ideological bias and epistemological shortcomings of the Diccionario in laying out history along the coordinates of generaciones y semblanzas (whatever our feelings about totalizing discourses, we can, after all, invariably find something useful in a decent biographical encyclopedia), the polemic around the Academia’s costly, publicly-funded project conjures up the ghosts of imperial illusions and the realities of writing deployed as an instrument of political power that Rojinsky examines with such acumen in his exploration of the concept of imperium and its links to the written word.

The most sensational criticism of the Diccionario pertains to the biography of Francisco Franco, entrusted to the historian of the Catholic Monarchs, Luis Suárez Fernández, a well-known defender of the dictator. The grotesque responses from the Academia’s director (including statements whose blatant sexism makes them almost comical) betray the conservatism of an institution that is a holdover from a time when Ancien Régime elites sought to legitimate the political, social and cultural order with the creation of royal academies to regulate language, supervise the historical record, and subordinate the sciences and the arts to the authority of the Crown. The controversy also reflects the uneasy situation in a country where nationalism conjures up the authoritarianism of the recent past and black legends from centuries before, as well as contemporary political and cultural rivalries at the regional level. There is always an inherent defensiveness in projects such as a biographical dictionary drafted according to a notion (“Spain”) that is an anachronism at best when applied to earlier periods of history in the Iberian Peninsula. Seneca in this encyclopedia is implicitly as much a “Spaniard” as Pedro Almodóvar—recalling, in turn, efforts by medieval and early modern ideologues to claim the philosopher from another empire for imperia of their own.

Rojinsky’s study scrutinizes this very sort of anachronism in the legitimation of political power at several emblematic moments in the millennium spanning the sixth through the sixteenth centuries (Isidore, Alfonso X, Nebrija, the colonization of the New World). This is no small task. He marshals an impressive and varied array of sources for his arguments, and his book has the distinct virtue of examining texts in Castilian as well as Latin and native Mesoamerican languages. Though increasingly scholars of the early modern period in Europe are directing their gaze across the seas, east-, south- and westward, studies like Rojinsky’s are still rare, not only for his Transatlantic focus but also for his deft examination of related premodern phenomena.

The book is not a facile narrative plumbing the Middle Ages for the origins of early modern empire. On the contrary, in a Nietzschean or Foucauldian vein, Rojinsky presents what have been standard way stations in canonical accounts of the development of political institutions and the evolution of Latin to Spanish not as points on a continuous teleological line but rather as unique moments when related concepts, discourses, and technologies are deployed in historically and culturally specific ways. His book militates, in other words, against transhistorical continuities and essences. Rojinsky is of course not blind to the fact that ideologues and jurists from later periods habitually turned to earlier texts in order to bolster claims to political authority, and he provides numerous examples of this (Jiménez de Rada and Isidore; the Siete Partidas and the...