Archipelagoes: Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel

Notes

163 Introduction 1. See Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, 5. The argument on generic overlaps with geography is developed throughout the book. 2. The single most important book to have addressed the relations between cartography and literature for the early modern period, on both sides of the colonial Hispanic Atlantic and focusing on the sixteenth century, is Padrón, The Spacious Word. 3. For the history of Homeric epic in Spain, from the Latin translations to the romance versions, see Serés, La traducción en Italia y España durante el siglo XV. 4. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 116. 5. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 290. 6. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 123, 128–29. 7. Ibid., 79. 8. The subtlety of Certeau’s reading of causal links between stories and space does not always make it easy for the reader to establish the limits of the parallel between them, for if one is to make synonyms of them, there would be no difference between architecture and literature, between urban planning and creative writing. And, while there are similarities, one cannot reduce them to equivalents. 9. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 115, 117. 10. Certeau draws from another critic to support his distinction between space and place: “Merleau-Ponty distinguished a ‘geometrical’ space (‘a homogeneous and isotopic spatiality,’ analogous to our ‘place’) from another ‘spatiality’ which he called an ‘anthropological space,’” Certeau summarizes. “This distinction depended on a distinct problematic, which sought to distinguish from ‘geometrical’ univocity the experience of an ‘outside’ given in the form of space, and for which ‘space is existential ’ and ‘existence is spatial’” (117). 11. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 68–85. The example he gives is that of maps. It is important to notice that here because cartography will inform our study of medieval practices of space later on. Considering the map here, as an illustration of Lefebvre’s theory of space, will find a deeper articulation later on in this chapter. Notes 164 Notes to introduction 12. Ibid., 17. 13. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 34. 14. See, for instance, how Oscar Martín analyzes this change in sentimental fiction in “Allegory and the Spaces of Love.” 15. Slowly/spacedly duplicates in the translation the meanings contained in one word in the original. Translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. 16. Isidore, Etimologías, book 5, 29. “Time is divided in moments, hours, days, months, years, lusters, centuries and ages. Moment is the minimal and most reduced time, and has its name after the movement of the planets. . . . Hour is a limit of time, just as edge is the limit of a sea, a river, or dress.” Admittedly, Isidore here confuses two terms, but the idea is that time is but a limited space. 17. See Le Goff, La Naissance du purgatoire; also Gourevitch, “Le Marchand,” especially 267–313. 18. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 59. Zumthor’s argument is here reminiscent of Greek perceptions of limits, especially those related to the ocean and its ambiguous denomination in ancient Greek, pontos, meaning, of course, bridge, passage, or path, but as Romm, recalling Benveniste warns, as a bridge that has been traced over an unstable medium, and therefore, more of a warning than a call to journey. See Romm, The Edges of the Earth, 16 n.22. 19. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 18–24. 20. Le Goff, L’Imaginaire médiévale, 123–126, 134. 21. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 22 and ss. 22. Le Goff, L’Imaginaire médiévale, 137. 23. Le Goff, The Birth of Europe, 47–56, 89–90. 24. Isidore, Etimologías, book 5, 27. “That is why those who return are called postliminium, for they return from exile where, ejected unjustly, they lived outside the limits of their homeland.” Exilio, in Spanish, is taken from the Latin exsilium, derived from exsilire, which means “to jump outside,” and appeared first in Spanish between 1220 and 1250, but was rare, eloquently, until 1939 (Corominas, Breve diccionario etimológico, s.v. exilio). Popular etymology takes us further: ex-ilio, “outside the island” or “outside, upon an island,” “isolated.” 25. Geremek, “Le Marginal,” 384. Matvejevic, Mediterranean, mentions this as well: “Leafing through the writings of a little-known historian of the fourth century, Ammianus Mercellinus, I came upon the concept of poena insularis (island punishment , 15.7), which seems to have entered Roman legal terminology before the decadent period” (165), remarking on...