Imperial Histories from Alfonso X to Inca Garcilaso: Revisionist Myths of Reconquest and Conquest

CHAPTER 1 Critical models of cultural historicism for Iberian history and historiography (p. 1)

1.1 Cultural textuality and cultural interpretation: History as context, inter text, and metatext

The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed important developments in cultural- literary theory as well as in medieval and renaissance cultural studies.

Among new critical points of reference one finds these collections: the revised MLA manual for modern languages and literatures edited by Gibaldi 1992, new cultural-literary studies edited by Greenblatt &, Gunn 1992, new philology edited by Nichols 1990 and new medievalism edited by Brownlee &, Nichols 1991, contemporary critical concepts edited by Lentricchia and McLaughlin 1990, new historicism edited by Hunt 1989 and Veeser 1989, Renaissance historicism edited by Kinney &, Collins 1987, and Spanish Golden Age cultural-textual discourses edited by Godzich &, Spadaccini 1986.

What these critical developments (based on work undertaken by semioticians and historicists of previous decades) have in common is a turning away from the positivism and formalism of earlier twentieth-century scholarship and a return to the more broadly defined rhetorical and cultural approaches to the study of texts that characterize much of classical, medieval, Renaissance, and modern traditions of interpretation.

Like most academic revolutions, the varieties of contemporary theory, such as new historicism and new medievalism, amount to an attempt to revise a whole area of studies, redefine critical purposes and methods, and restore what are perceived to be the most authentic and comprehensive bases of scholarship: for the humanities, these now appear to be hermeneutical issues in cultural studies.

For those who may not be aware of just what is involved in the passage into the poststructuralist and postdeconstructionist era of contemporary theory, it is helpful to concentrate on shifting definitions of textuality, context, rhetoric, and hermeneutics.

Here a brief review of critical terms is in order. First, textuality has been opened up to include more of the spectrum of classical, medieval, renaissance, and contemporary notions of the complex phenomenon of signification.

Zumthor noted a decade ago that to understand medieval text writing and reading the critic needs to apply semiotic and historicist theories, which better reflect medieval interpretation itself (and much the same could be said of renaissance culture):

A dialogic critical discourse.... A narrative never concluded. Is it not in these terms that writers of the Middle Ages spoke of ancient texts (in the same position for them as the medieval texts for us)?

Copying, rewriting, glossing, moralizing by means of the multiple analogies through which that world represented itself, in a commentary that was incessant, open, perpetually reopened onto an actual and changing audience, simultaneously playing several games on several levels....

[FJrom the socio-historical context to the poetic idea manifested in the text, and to the structures of the text (including its phono-syntactic organization), historicity is precisely that shifting network of analogies that unify these elements, in the same way as, for a thirteenth-century contemplative, other analogies linked the microcosm to macrocosm, the human soul to the starry sky, assuring their coherence in an incessant cosignification.