Description:
Authoring the Past surveys medieval Catalan historiography, shedding light on the emergence and evolution of historical writing and autobiography in the Middle Ages, on questions of authority and authorship, and on the links between history and politics during the period. Jaume Aurell examines texts from the late twelfth to the late fourteenth century--including the Latin Gesta comitum Barcinonensium and four texts in medieval Catalan: James I's Llibre dels fets, the Crònica of Bernat Desclot, the Crònica of Ramon Muntaner, and the Crònica of Peter the Ceremonious--and outlines the different motivations for the writing of each.
For Aurell, these chronicles are not mere archaeological artifacts but rather documents that speak to their writers' specific contemporary social and political purposes. He argues that these Catalonian counts and Aragonese kings were attempting to use their role as authors to legitimize their monarchical status, their growing political and economic power, and their aggressive expansionist policies in the Mediterranean. By analyzing these texts alongside one another, Aurell demonstrates the shifting contexts in which chronicles were conceived, written, and read throughout the Middle Ages.
The first study of its kind to make medieval Catalonian writings available to English-speaking audiences, Authoring the Past will be of interest to scholars of history and comparative literature, students of Hispanic and Romance medieval studies, and medievalists who study the chronicle tradition in other languages.
Brief description:
Jaume Aurell is associate professor in the Department of History and dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Navarra, Spain. He is the author of two books in Spanish, La escritura de la memoria. De los positivismos a los postmodernismos and La cultura del mercader en la Barcelona del siglo XV, and one book in Catalan, Els mercaders Catalans al quatre-cents. He is also the editor of the Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century series. His articles and essays have appeared in such publications as Annales, Biography, Rethinking History: Journal of Theory and Practice, the Journal of English and German Philology, and the Journal of Medieval History.
Review Quotes: "Authoring the Past is a most thoughtful and engaging book, one that reflects Aurell's deep knowledge not only of the texts discussed but also of the previous studies they have inspired. His readings are original, and his contextualization of the works in a European framework is most welcome. Aurell provides many engaging excerpts from the texts, which he renders in English (and the shorter ones also in Catalan). . . . [T]his book will hold an appeal for medievalists, historians, and literary scholars alike, particularly those who focus on historiography, medieval culture, courtly literature, and monarchical power and ideology."--Nuria Silleras-Fernandez, University of Colorado at Boulder "American Historical Review"