History and Chronicles in Late Medieval Iberia: Representations of Wamba in Late Medieval Narrative Histories by Aengus Ward (review)

The book under scrutiny here is the culmination of an ambitious study. It has been the intention of Aengus Ward (Ph.D., 1995, Birmingham) to examine a large number of textual representations of the seventh-century Visigothic King Wamba in order to delve into the question of the existence of a chronicle genre in late medieval Iberia. Ward, a Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Birmingham, has previously published critical editions of late medieval Iberian chronicles and a number of articles on historiography, authorship, and manuscript culture. The importance of his contribution to the recent strengthening of research on medieval Iberian historiography is undeniable.

Eighteen different accounts of the reign of Wamba make up the source material for Ward’s study. According to the author, among those of the pre-711 period, that of Wamba is the only reign that receives a disproportionately extensive treatment in late medieval Iberian historiography. Ward’s selection of sources rests on the criteria that the chronicles pertain to the period from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, and that Wamba’s reign is depicted within them in a relatively lengthy manner. Furthermore, genealogical connections between these texts have been established by previous research, and Ward argues that besides this direct connection there is an indirect relationship, since the texts possess the same content in largely the same form.

The methodology is meticulously explained, and involves a number of steps, which are marked by chapter-divisions. Ward emphasizes the need to start with the empirical investigation of the evidence, the manuscript texts, and from there move on towards a more theoretical level of genre analysis –where genre is defined as the “codification of discursive properties” (184), and as a historically situated and descriptive concept or analytical tool. The assumption that the meaning of the texts is a function of their manifold contexts is a starting point. Ward’s theoretical foundation is a testimony to his wide reading of previous work by people from the same field, and by more theoretical authors (such as Koselleck and H. R. Jauss, Bakhtin, Todorov, Bourdieu and Hayden White).

Chapter One is an overview of the contextual information left to us concerning the production of the eighteen sources chosen to function as a corpus. Context should here be understood, in the usage of Ward (partly influenced by G. Martin’s previous work in the monumental Les Juges de Castille), in a very broad and complex manner. It comprises the enunciative (implying a close connection to the actual writing of the text), the socio-political, and the cultural contexts surrounding the production and reception of the chronicles. Furthermore, the manuscript tradition and the intertextual relationships at hand play an important role. Add to this the concept of a narrative context, best understood in connection with Jauss’ formulation of a horizon of expectation for a presumed audience. We do well in remembering that although we know almost nothing of the average reader of these works, we can gain access to the experience of some readers-become-writers who transform the information in their sources into new narrative accounts (90–91). Ward rests most of his assumptions in this contextualizing chapter on previous research and writing by philologists and other hispanists, such as G. Martin, P. Linehan, D. Catalán, I. Fernández-Ordóñez, and not least Ward himself. Generally the information is agreed upon by most specialists, but in some cases the standpoints of scholars are sufficiently divergent as to offer grounds for entirely dissimilar readings of the sources. The vernacular Estoria de los godos is an example: according to Ward it is a Castilian translation of R. Jiménez de Rada’s Latin Historia Gothica pertaining to the late 1270s or late 1280s, whereas Catalán and E. Jerez Cabrero would pose it as an Aragonese text of the 1250s...