Chronica Hispana saeculi VIII et IX ed. by Juan Gil

Abstract

Reviewed by: Chronica Hispana saeculi VIII et IX ed. by Juan Gil Hélène Sirantoine Gil, Juan, ed., Chronica Hispana saeculi viii et ix (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 65), Turnhout, Brepols, 2018; hardback; pp. 563; 4 colour illustrations; R.R.P. €340.00; ISBN 9782503574813. None of the texts gathered in this volume of the prestigious Brepols series ‘Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis’ needed a new edition. And with good reason, since the editor Juan Gil, a member of the Real Academia Española since 2011, is the same scholar to whom we already owe the excellent editions, published decades ago, of the four Latin narratives included in this issue dedicated to Hispanic chronicles of the eighth and ninth centuries. However, eadem sed aliter (as Gil notes in his prologue, p. 7), they now find themselves for the first time presented together, allowing readers to contrast two very distinct moments that punctuated what is otherwise regarded as a historiographical desert for the early Latino-Iberian Middle Ages. The mid-eighth century saw the composition in al-Andalus of two texts that Gil included in Volume i of his Corpus scriptorum Muzarabicorum (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1973). The Chronica Byzantia-Arabica [End Page 239] was crafted around 741–44 by an anonymous author (Christian or recently converted to Islam) on the basis of an oriental, probably Greek, text. It presents in parallel the history of Byzantium since the reign of Phocas (602–10) and that of the growing Islamic Empire up to the year 741. To this core were interpolated notices about the Hispanic Visigothic kingdom up to its conquest by Muslims, narrated in quite a detached manner. In that sense, the neutrality of this early chronicle strongly differs from the lamentations found in the Chronica Muzarabica, which a Christian dhimmi, probably a cleric, crafted soon after. This second composition also chronicles concomitantly the history of Byzantium, Islam, and Iberia since the early seventh century up to 754, the date of its completion. Its author, however, contemplated the settlement of Muslims in the peninsula with much more bitterness. Thus, the Chronica Muzarabica constitutes the first chronicle in which the idea of the ruin and loss of Christian Iberia, promised to a great future, emerged as a historiographical theme. This theme would be elaborated upon in the next two chronicles, which Gil had previously edited as Crónicas asturianas (Universidad de Oviedo, 1985), along with a Spanish translation by José Moralejo and an introductory essay by Juan Ruiz de la Peña. Crafted in the curial milieu of the expanding Asturian kingdom of the late ninth century, this historiographical revival must be linked to the propagandistic agenda surrounding the figure of Alfonso III (866–910), and marked the emergence of two intertwined ideological stances: that of ‘Reconquest’—an interpretation of the historical interaction between Asturias and al-Andalus as the progressive recovery by the Christians of a territory conceived as theirs—and neo-gothicism—a political project glorifying Asturian kings as the regenerated successors of their Visigothic ancestors. Conserved in two versions, both dependent on an archetype no longer extant, the Chronicle of Alfonso III offers biographies of the Visigothic, then Asturian kings, from Wamba (r. 672–80) to the end of the reign of Ordoño I, Alfonso III’s father, in 866. As for the Chronicle of Albelda, completed in 883, it compiles brief Hispanic geographical and chronographic miscellanies, followed by longer historiographical ordines dedicated to Roman, Visigothic, and finally Asturian rulers up to the ongoing reign of Alfonso III. It incorporates in its final paragraphs the Prophetic Chronicle, predicting the collapse of al-Andalus and restoration of the Visigothic kingdom by November 884. Novelties in the edition of the four chronicles are limited, although Gil notes that new readings resulted from the discoveries in their manuscript transmission made by Francisco Bautista. The three-hundred-page introduction, however, offers introductory chapters for each chronicle, scrupulously updated in light of the studies they have been the object of since Gil first edited them, including by himself. The choice of an uneven structure of presentation makes it perhaps the most challenging part of the book for the neophyte who, without...