La creacion de un discurso historiografico en el cuatrocientos castellano: Las siete edades del mundo de Pablo de Santa Maria

Abstract

La creacion de un discurso historiografico en el cuatrocientos castellano: Las siete edades del mundo de Pablo de Santa Maria. By Juan Carlos Conde. Textos recuperados 18. Salamanca: U. of Salamanca, 1999. 491 pages. In the preface to his edition and study of Pablo de Santa Marfa's Las siete edades del mundo, Juan Carlos Conde draws his readers' attention with unnecessary humility to the honors his dissertation received, maua distincion and a prize from the Real Academia (12-3). To judge from this project derived from his dissertation, they were honors well deserved. His introductory material reveals a meticulousness that is essential to the successful completion of an edition neolachmanniano (Conde's terms [12]), or, more precisely, more Blecuensi (Me acojo a los presupuestos que Blecua expone en su Manual [185]). Besides the introductory study, he has provided a superabundance of information pertaining to the 21 extant witnesses (132-84) and a detailed justification of his stemma (184-230), evidence of what must have been an impressive dissertation. Conde persuasively defends his editorial methods, citing the difficulty of choosing a best manuscript from the poem's complicated textual history (251). Besides a carefully prepared text, he also provides a semi-paleographic transcription of a refundicion with copious glosses (from 1460) as well as a facsimile of the earliest surviving printed version (Rosembach 1516). Conde's explanatory notes to his edition are limited to variants and justifications of editorial decisions. He sends his readers to his introduction for textual exegesis (256). There he convincingly dates the poem 1416-18, when Santa Maria carried out important functions in the royal bureaucracy, most notably as Juan II's tutor; the poem may have been educational material for the young king, still under his mother's regency (22). Conde improves upon past studies by showing the poem's principal inspiration in the Tudense's Chronicon mundi and the Cronica de 1344, supplemented by other sources, such as biblical exegeses, Vincent of Beauvais' Speculum, the Alfonsine chronicle tradition, the Cronica de los tres reyes, Lopez de Ayala, etc. Though he confesses that his analysis of the ideological underpinnings of the poem adds nothing substantially new to earlier studies by Deyermond (109), Conde points out the significance of Santa Maria's emphasis on the Visigothic kings' legendary betrothal to Amazon queens, given the poem's composition during Catherine of Lancaster's regency (117). In Conde's introduction, I would have appreciated discussion of the implications of a converso's cultivation of post-Biblical historiography when the practice was insignificant in the medieval Jewish tradition. …