A Genealogy of Castilian Historiography: from Nomina Regum to Semblanzas

Abstract

While the taller alfonsi was working on the Estoria de Espana, a monk of the abbey of Saint-Denis, named Primat, completed the first sec- tion of the so-called Grandes Chroniques de France (1274), a chronicle of the French kings from their supposed Trojan origins to his own era. Around 1350 the Grandes Chroniques were further elaborated and up- dated. The impressive work done by the monks at Saint-Denis, and later by a royal official, is by no means unrivaled, as is often claimed (Gabrielle Spiegel, Chronicle Tradition 1 2). The parallels between French and Castilian regal, official historiography are numerous and de- serve an in-depth comparison. I want to focus on a marginal aspect which is central to the understanding of the structural coherence and social logic ( Spiegel, Past as Text. 26) of French and Spanish royal historiography from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century: sketches of the kings which conclude the account of the events which occurred during their reign. In a perceptive article Gabrielle Spiegel has argued that the me- dieval historical text is a transparency and history (is) apprehended as perceptual field (Genealog) 46). Hence the historiographical la- bor is shaped by structures preexisting in the historiographer's Lebenswelt . Spiegel calls these structures 'perceptual grids', which di- rected the historian's glance at relatively fixed categories of human experience and governed both the nature of his perceptions and the manner in which he transmitted them (46). It is her claim that gene- alogy is the principal perceptual grid diat moulds the Grandes Chroniques de France. Written and read in the genealogical mode, history becomes