El "Libro del linaje de los señores de Ayala" y otros textos genealógicos: Materiales para el estudio de la conciencia del linaje en la Baja Edad Media (review)

Arsenio Dacosta has brought together five genealogical texts pertaining to the Ayala family that were produced between the late fourteenth and late sixteenth centuries, with the intention of facilitating research on one of the most important Castilian lineages. These texts are:

1. 1. El libro de los linajes de los señores de Ayala, which Fernán Pérez de Ayala, father of the Canciller, wrote in the first person in 1371. There are four extant manuscript witnesses, one in the Real Academia de la Historia (used as the basis for the present edition), two in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, and another in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Segments of the text were previously edited in support of biographies of Fernán López de Ayala.

2. 2. Continuación del "Libro del linaje" y "Andanzas" de Fernán Pérez de Ayala, which is an apparently incomplete text that the Canciller produced between 1385 and 1407. It was written in the first person as well, and like its predecessor has been partially published in biographies.

3. 3. Relación fidelíssima de las sucesiones del linage de Ayala, an anonymous and little-known text that was probably composed during the reign of Juan II of Castile. The sole extant copy seems to date from that era. The genealogist Luis Salazar y Castro included some of this text in his Pruebas de la historia de la casa de Lara (1694).

4. 4. La generación y linage que descendió de don Fernán Pérez de Ayala, which was commissioned by the then head of the family, Garci López de Ayala, around 1470. It is clearly connected to the Relación fidelíssima but has never before been edited.

5. 5. Genealogía de la Casa de Ayala en al año de mill y ciento y ocho [sic], an anonymous work that was compiled some time between 1605 and 1611. It is housed in the library of the Monastery of San Juan Bautista de Quejana (Álava), which the Canciller founded in 1378. It is edited here for the first time.

The editions of these five important works have been meticulously executed. Dacosta facilitates the reading process by resolving abbreviations, adding punctuation and accents (where necessary), and moderately modernizing spelling, all without compromising the integrity of the original texts. He has also done a thorough job of annotating the editions by identifying persons referred to, explaining events mentioned, defining legal or other specialized language, and making reference to items in the book's seventeen-page bibliography that will provide further information to the reader.

Dacosta's preliminary study provides more than sufficient information to introduce the reader to issues concerning the Ayala family's strong desire to control their own story. These include a study of its foundation myths and the collective efforts of some family members to create and maintain prestige among rival aristocratic lineages. In this section, Dacosta discusses individual and collective uses of memory as well as its manipulation. The Ayalas were particularly adept at exploiting both facts and fancy in order to accentuate or obscure their participation in past and contemporaneous events. By emphasizing their marital ties to other members of the high aristocracy they sought to aggrandize themselves, providing information on their line of succession and its ties to other noble families. But the desire to control information also worked in an opposite manner: the Canciller himself attempted to conceal the fact that the Ayalas had their origins in the illustrious House of Haro, which he apparently believed diminished their singularity.

In addition to the useful introductory study, the carefully edited texts and the bibliography, Dacosta has provided eighteen genealogical trees that clearly represent the...