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La "Cronica Sarracina" como obra historiografica
Abstract
Cronica Sarracina was one of the most widely read books of its time. It was very popular, and contemporary historians considered it a proper historiographic work. Despite this fact, later opinion believe it to be stylistically poor. It was also considered to be a fictional work because it used myth, legend, and dream material. In order to clarify this discrepancy, the present work focuses on three fundamental points: the nature of the historical discourse, the role of the narrative in historiographic writing, and the literary conventions of the Middle Ages. In order to be considered a proper historiographic work, the work must represent the actual facts, that is to say, the facts that exist outside of the author's consciousness. The traditional historical discourse starts from this premise, but concentrates on accumulating referentiality to affirm the existence of the external reality that is independent from the discourse that announces it. However, the most recent theories hold that the events and the realities represented in a historiographical work are not independent from the discourse that announces them. The story mechanism is inseparable from the way in which we perceive and represent our world. Taking as a starting point the instability of the boundaries established among the principal forms of discourse, especially in the case of the discourses produced prior to the nineteenth century when the rules of their formation were different, this document asks whether Cronica Sarracina is a proper historiographical work. It examines the criteria of the truth and objectivity in force at the time of the Cronica's writing, the literary conventions that govern its narrative structure, and if its narrative structure contributes to the representation of the truth. The document explores the role of those aspects historically least acceptable, that is to say, those concerning chivalry and those that were traditionally labeled as myth, and how these contribute to the representation of the truth.
Subject Area
Literature|Middle Ages|Middle Eastern literature
Recommended Citation
Milojevic, Ljiljana, "La "Cronica Sarracina" como obra historiografica" (1996). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9709629.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9709629