"Hablillas o Lazarillo de Tormes": On the Early Modern Limits of Literature and History

The essay focuses on a reference made to Lazarillo de Tormes in a historiographic dispute at the royal court, involving Jerónimo Zurita's Anales de la Corona de Aragón. It is argued that in the polemic on history-writing there are important clues as to how early moderns conceived and elaborated distinctions between historical and literary writing. The articulation of that difference developed in close association and engagement with discourses of "fact," rooted as they were in the Spanish legalistic tradition. The analysis of the interrelation of history and fiction offers evidence of how contemporary readers interpreted Lazarillo de Tormes in the early 1560s.