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  • Los viajes literarios de Pascual de Gayangos (1850–1857) y el origen de la archivística española moderna
  • Richard Hitchcock (bio)
Los viajes literarios de Pascual de Gayangos (1850–1857) y el origen de la archivística española moderna. By Miguel Ángel Álvarez RamosCristina Álvarez Millán. (Estudios Árabes e Islámicas Monográficas, 12.) Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. 2007. 508 pp. €35. isbn 978 84 00 08520 9.

Pascual de Gayangos (1809–97) is widely known as an Arabic scholar, bibliophile, and compiler of the four-volume Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Spanish Language in the British Museum (1875–93). He had an English wife, and spent long periods of his life in London, notably 1837–43 and 1870–97. In the 1830s he rejected repeated offers to become a naturalized Englishman, and when he returned to Spain after the publication in London of his History of the Mohammedan Dynasties of Spain in 1843, he immediately became immersed in the upper echelons of the literary and academic world in Madrid. In 1846 he was appointed Professor of Arabic in the University of Madrid and two years later became a Numerary member of the Royal Academy of History in Madrid. He was a prolific correspondent and from his letters an enormous amount of information has been forthcoming.

The authors have centred this book around eight literary journeys that Gayangos undertook between 1850 and 1857 throughout the Iberian Peninsula. In 1850 a governmental commission was established with the purpose of searching for and collecting together documents proceeding from suppressed monasteries. These were to be brought to Madrid and officially deposited in the Royal Academy of History. They stayed there until they were transferred, in 1866, to the newly established National Historical Archive (Archivo Histórico Nacional). Gayangos was entrusted with this task. He had the authority to examine manuscripts and documents either in situ or wherever they were being kept, including regional entailment offices. He was the sole determiner of what should be preserved, and therefore may be said, in large measure, to have been responsible for the substantial initial corpus of documents and manuscripts that was to form the National Archive. In this undertaking he travelled 11,000 kilometres over a seven-year period, sometimes by diligence, often by horseback, to inaccessible places. He personally visited eighty regional capitals and townships, and an estimated 120 archives and deposits, frequently encountering local opposition to his task.

When the National Archive was founded, 97,000 loose documents and 346 codices were transferred. It is not known for how many of these Gayangos was directly responsible — certainly many thousands of documents, all of which he selected and identified. The authors not only chart his progress over these seven years, but also provide an invaluable documentary resource, the publication of more than eighty letters preserved in the Library of the Royal Academy of History, mostly written by Gayangos during the course of his journeying. The authors accurately describe these letters as a kind of ‘official diary’ of the expeditions, as they were addressed mainly to the officials of the Academy. Yet, apart from mentioning the day-to-day inconveniences, refusals of access, and numerous difficulties encountered, Gayangos goes into extensive detail about his finds, such as the 9,000 volumes discovered in an upper room of the Institute of Palencia, the walnut shelving from a monastery in Castile to be relocated in its entirety to the Academy, and the remarkable discovery, in a room that had been blocked up for eight years next to the library in the monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, of an extraordinary cache of sixty-four vellum codices, which despite the reluctance of the custodian monk were transferred [End Page 489] in toto to Madrid. The authors point out that in this latter instance Gayangos was exceeding his original brief, which was to rescue cartularies and documents in all shapes and sizes, including those written in Arabic, which he was, through his training as an Arabic scholar, readily able to identify. The transfer of the codices was an example of his using his ‘own initiative’, and because they did...

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