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

This book constitutes a history of writing in Spain and New Spain in the Pre-Modern and Early Modern Periods. Specifically, the work focuses on the relationship between writing and empire, which are understood as textual culture and territorial expansion respectively. David Rojinsky adopts a post-philological perspective in which historical discontinuity and the rejection of mythical origins are the focus of our attention. In other words, the author rejects the notion of historical linear continuity across the different writing practices manifested over the thousand-year period in question (550–1550 AD), and there is no sort of search for a unique and mythical origin of the language, as would be the focus of a traditional historical analysis. According to this post-philological line of argumentation, the only continuity of the language would lie in the permanent relationship between writing and imperial power. Clearly underscoring this lack of continuity, the author explains that even the concepts of writing and imperial power do not show a constant meaning in the different contexts and epochs under consideration. Rather, their meanings are constantly in a state of flux. The main theoretical bases of the book are Michelle R. Warren’s Post-Philology and the Foucauldian genealogical re-interpretation of Nietzsche’s wirkliche Historie.

Chapter One deals with Latin writing in the Iberian Peninsula and its ideological function before 711, mainly in the Etymologiae, sive Origines and Historia de Regibus Gothorum, Vandalorum et Suevorum by Isidore of Seville. Rojinsky explains how writing and the multiple meanings of imperium were used both to support the new Romano-Gothic, political and religious unity in the Iberian Peninsula, and to oppose the threat of the Byzantine Empire. The chapter ends with an analysis of the relationship between grammatica and imperium in the Visigothic law-codes, and their influence on the Pre-modern Period in Spain. Chapter Two explains how the written word both in Latin and in the vernacular were crucial to the functioning of the new centralized monarchies that appeared in the West in the thirteenth century. Jiménez de Rada uses the Latin language in his historiographical works to underscore the historical continuity with the Hispano-Gothic origins and to make the rest of Europe aware by using Latin, the international language. However, with Alfonso X, Castilian is used to show this historical continuity and to support a central monarchy in Castile. Rojinsky pays particular attention to the Siete Partidas, as a pragmatic example of language planning in which the alliance between vernacular writing and political power is very clear. This vernacular code of law homogenized the municipal fueros, opposed regional fragmentation and the power of the aristocracy, and became the fastest way to administer the newly-conquered territories. In Chapter Three the author follows Benjamin’s advice of taking a quotation from the past out of its original context and placing it in the present of the historian so that there can be a dialectal confrontation between modern interpretations and the so-called original meaning. David Rokinsky places Nebrija’s famous quotation “siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio” in the context of Nebrija’s philological corpus in Latin and in Castilian. This way the author demonstrates that although imperio referred to power in the quotation mentioned above, the statement was part of a rhetoric to promote the Castilian right to rule the world. Chapter Four analyzes how alphabetic writing in Latin, Castilian and Nahuatl was used to support ideologically the expansion of Christian culture in America. By focusing on Martyr D’Anghiera’s De Orbe Novo, Decades (1516), the author explains the use of the Classical trope of the Golden Age in America, as well as the topic of the peoples without writing and the noble savage. The author indicates that with the contrast between alphabetic writing and other forms of writing, and between writing and...