«Generaciones y Semblanzas»: Memory and Genealogy in Medieval Iberian Historiography (review)

278ReviewsLa coránica 33.1, 2004 Folger, Robert. «Generaciones y Semblanzas»: Memory and Genealogy in Medieval Iberian Historiography. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2003. 234 pages. ISBN 3-8233-6006-X The phrase that opens this study of the genealogical and mnemonic strata of the historiography of medieval Iberia, or more accurately, of medieval Castile, signals the ambitions as well as the ambitiousness of the author's task. "In the beginning was Generaciones y semblanzas" (9), Folger announces-, recalling the words that open the Gospel ofJohn, which in turn rewrite the opening of the book of Genesis. It is paradoxical, yet partiailarly germane to Folger's project that John 1:1 introduces an extended meditation on spiritual genesis, replacing the human genealogy ofJesus of Nazareth that the synoptic gospels narrate. Folger's inquiry meticulously teases out both the genealogical underpinnings ofearly Iberian historiography and the word's subsumption of genealogy, arguing that the continuity of legitimate rule in Castile is crafted not out of biological succession but out of the very texts that proclaim that continuity. An exhaustive analysis of Fernán Pérez de Guzman's Generaciones y semblanzas comprises the core of the book and serves as the linchpin for a broader inquiry into the mnemonic and genealogical pragmatics of Castilian historiography in general. One of Folger's overarching goals is to challenge a modern inclination to read Pérez de Guzman as a proto-humanist. He attributes this tendency to a bias toward a teleological construction of literary history which erases the alterity of late-medieval texts by lodging them in an evolutionary arc that drives inexorably toward modernity and which casts Generaciones y semblanzas and its author as convenient figures of transition . Folger divides his study into two parts. The first focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on Pérez de Guzman's text. Chapter 1 strives to dislodge Generaciones y semblanzas from modem misreadings and recuperate the horizon of expectations that informed the work's original reception. He also tries to recover the social logic of the work in uses which, Folger claims, have been ignored by modern scholarship. Earlv readers of Generacicmes y semblanzas recognized and utilized its genealogical and mnemonic agency', commissioning slightly altered editions to exalt their own forbears and to confirm their aristocratic family history. Folger also excavates the instance of possibly deliberate misreading that has informed modem critical reception of the text. One 1512 edition published by Cristóbal de Santisteban, the earliest print edition of the text, appends it as a third section to a longer La CORoNiCA 33.1 (Fall, 2004): 278-81 Reviews279 work called Mar de istorias, a florilegium of world history that includes biographies of the illustrious men of the ancient world. This offers false testimony ofa Guzmanian project concerned with the reaiperation ofthe ailtural values embedded in classical historiography. This chapter also situates Pérez de Guzman's semblanzas in their immediate literary context, comparing them to those deployed in Pero López de Ayala's chroiiistry, where short, written portraits comprising bodily and characterological description serve as literary epitaphs to commemorate the roval figures whose deaths they mark and to bring closure to the narrative of a particular reign. Chapter 2 offers a close reading of Generaciones y semblanzas and details the multiple pragmatics that mark both its prologue and the series oísemblanzas that comprise the body of the text. In the prologue, Pérez de Guzman elaborates an ars historiae only to refuse to enact its precepts, announcing instead that what he offers will be more akin to a register of illustrious men. The semblanzas themselves, Folger shows, go on to confound this latter expectation , by expanding into narrative historiography punctuated by allusions to eyewitness testimony and decrying a lack of adequate archival evidence in Castile. Pérez de Guzman's departure from the Avalan model oí semblanzas consists in the absence of a narrative frame that supports the portraits, the inclusion of aristocratic figures in the registry, and, most importantly, the way in which the Guzmanian semblanzas operate not as epitaphs or posttexts , situated outside of the narrative to mark its closure, but as pre-texts, opening the way to the...