Jaume Aurell

Jaume Aurell i Cardona

This innovative study explores the emergence, survival, and continued cultural importance of historical texts considered to be 'classics'.

The Making of a Historical Canon

What is a Classic in History?

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.

History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia

Authoring the Past

E. H. Carr wrote, "study the historian before you begin to study the facts." This book approaches the life, work, ideas, debates, and the context of key 20th- and 21st-century historians through an analysis of their life writing projects viewed as historiographical sources. Merging literary studies on autobiography with theories of history, it provides a systematic and detailed analysis of the autobiographies of the most outstanding historians, from the classic texts by Giambattista Vico, Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams, to the Annales historians such as Fernand Braudel, Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, to Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Annie Kriegel, to postmodern historians such as Carolyn Steedman, Robert A. Rosenstone, Carlos Eire, Luisa Passerini, Elisabeth Roudinesco, Gerda Lerner and Sheila Fitzpatrick, and to "interventional" historians such as Geoff Eley, Jill Ker Conway, Natalie Davis and Gabrielle Spiegel. Using a comparative approach to these texts, this book identifies six historical-autobiographical styles: humanistic, biographic, ego-historical, monographic, postmodern, and interventional. By privileging historians' autobiographies, this book proposes a renewed history of historiography, one that engages the theoretical evolution of the discipline, the way history has been interpreted by historians, and the currents of thought and ideologies that have dominated and influenced its writing in the 20th and 21st centuries.

From Documentation to Intervention

Theoretical Perspectives on Historians' Autobiographies

Rocío G. Davis

Ana Beatriz Delgado

This collection focuses on how literary creativity and historical inscriptions produce texts that require nuanced readings of forms of life writing. These reflections support the use of life writing as an interpretative frame for historical information, validating it for historical discourse as the act of telling and writing one's story affirms as it performs identity. The approach is based on a methodology that connects genre studies and historiography, to arrive at conclusions about the writing of the history of globalization, immigration, racial and ethnic negotiation.

Genres, Performance, and Culture

Ethnic Life Writing and Histories

The first systematic study of the practice of royal self-coronations from late antiquity to the present.

The History and Symbolism of a Ritual

Medieval Self-Coronations

Monserrat Herrero

Angela Miceli

This book aims to provide a new perspective on the subject, dealing with the events (historical events and intellectual discourses) connected with the political theology rather than with the imaginary or fictional, and more based on an interdisciplinary approach (from the more theoretical and deductive political philosophy and theology to the more practical and inductive law history, intellectual history, political history, and art history). It thus explores in depth the practices of political theology through history - focusing on philosophical and intellectual discourses, historical gestures, liturgies, art, representations, and symbols.

Jaume Aurell

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