Cluster E ssay

P r e s e n t l y o l d : T i m e a c c o r d i n g to
three early modern codices

H e a t h e r Ba m f o r d
Department of Romance, German & Slavic Languages & Literatures, The George
Washington University, Washington DC.

Abstract This essay examines three relatively unknown sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Spanish codices. I analyze how the bibliographers and historians associated with
them discussed the concept of time, documented it and tried to control it by appealing to
the concept of truth through the use of autograph documents and the creation of time
divisions within the codex. As a faulty corollary, the end of the essay discusses the var-
ious times that these early modern codices convey in the present. Each codex conveys a
positive perception of anachronism, or the acceptance of the ‘layered’ multiple tempor-
ality of an old document among other old documents. Further, the codices acknowledge
that the meaning of a past object depends on what users do with it in the present, and
that individual letters and autograph documents enable the present user to achieve a
sense of connection with the context of a given historical figure, rather than representing
a past moment of existence.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2013) 4, 335–351.

doi:10.1057/pmed.2013.12

The Spanish cultural historian Fernando Bouza remarked that nineteenth-century

historians framed the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as encompassing the
initial stages of modernization to ‘explain their own concurrent realities, endow-
ing [these centuries] with a certain logic – from the modern state to industrial
production, including, along the way, the bourgeois family, the individual
subject, and of course, science and intellect’ (Bouza, 2004, 5). This ‘anachronistic
prejudice,’ or understanding of the past as an evolution of concepts leading to
the present, had a negative effect on early modern manuscript studies. While

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manuscripts circulated widely in Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

interest in print culture and medieval manuscripts turned attention away from
early modern manuscripts (Bouza, 2001).
This essay challenges this ‘anachronistic prejudice’ through examination of
what three relatively unknown codices, organized and amended by early
modern bibliographers and historians, say about time. Specifically, I analyze
how they discussed the concept of time, documented it and tried to control
it by appealing to the concept of truth through the use of autograph
documents and the creation of time divisions within the codex. In the
approximately 125 years during which the codices were produced and
amended – roughly between the reign of Philip II (1554–1598) and Philip V
(1700–1724) – historiography infused the notion of truth with new force.
Works or accounts from the late medieval period to the beginnings of the early
modern period were reexamined, allowing primary sources that came into
fashion during the Renaissance to make their way into document collections.
These sources included public documents, letters, decrees, charters, codicils
and inscriptions.
The three codices are only loosely related. The first, Biblioteca Nacional de
España (BNE) ms. 894, once formed part of the library of Phillip V and contains
a lengthy prologue written by the humanist geographer and historian Luis
Tribaldos de Toledo (1558–1636). The prologue introduces an abbreviated
version of a factually suspect, dateless and unoriginal chronicle copied 70 years
earlier by a questionable historian, Gonzalo de Arredondo (d. ca. 1522). The
other two codices are document collections. The first, BNE ms. 6043, originally
belonged to the collection of the Spanish bibliographer Nicolás Antonio (1617–
1684) and the second, BNE ms. 1762, to a collection related to the reign of
Philip II, compiled by the poet and historian Juan Francisco Andrés de Uztárroz
(1606–1653).
I begin by analyzing how Tribaldos, Antonio and Uztárroz approached time.
At the end of the essay, I ask how modern intellectuals examine the temporal
palimpsests that these early modern codices configure. I base the discussion on
time in the three codices, which convey a positive perception of anachronism, or
the acceptance of the ‘layered’ multiple temporality of an old document among
other old documents; an acknowledgement that the meaning of a past object
is dependent on what users do with it in the present; and that individual
letters and autograph documents enable the present user to achieve a sense of
connection with the context of a given historical figure, rather than representing
a past moment of a person’s existence. I adapt the concept of layering from
Nagel and Woods’s Anachronic Renaissance, which addresses the multiplicity
of times in the Renaissance object (Nagel and Wood, 2010, 13–14). I aim to
show how this layered effect is a characteristic both of the pre-modern
collector’s perception of time and a modern user’s perception of the book’s
time.

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T h e C o n v e ni e nc e o f T ru t h

Luis Tribaldos de Toledo was known to be pompous, but his attitude likely came
from holding a variety of important positions. He was a professor of rhetoric at
the University of Alcala (1591) and became the Cronista Mayor de las Indias in
1625. He was also an important figure in the debates surrounding the authenti-
city of apocryphal lead books in Latin and Arabic found in caves outside Granada
at the beginning of the seventeenth century known as the Plomos of Sacromonte.
The Plomos contain an address by the Virgin Mary stating her love for the Arabs
of Granada and her role as guardian of Granada. The two points are now thought
to have been intended to promote the tolerance of the language, dress and
customs of Granada’s Moriscos, Muslims who were living under Christian rule
and forcibly converted to Christianity, before they were finally expelled between
1609 and 1614.
Sometime in the early 1620s, Tribaldos de Toledo brought to public attention a
questionable late-medieval chronicle by a historian known as Gonzalo de
Arredondo. The chronicle is centered on a Castilian hero whose feats inspired an
epic poem: Fernán González (d. 970), the first autonomous count of Castile
known for his defense of Castile against the Muslims. The Crónica de Fernán
González (Chronicle) thus had a worthy subject; however, it is generally agreed
that Arredondo treated it poorly, writing in a tedious style, without dates and
inventing several fantastic episodes in his retelling of history.
In an attempt to convince seventeenth-century readers of the Chronicle’s
worth, Tribaldos de Toledo lied and worked hard to find relevance and interest
in a work that offered little of either. To frame Arredondo’s chronicle as a worthy
work of historiography, Tribaldos refrained from praising Arredondo’s choice of
content and style to capitalize instead on one of the Chronicle’s shortcomings, by
discussing the difficulties of writing what he considers a true history. For Tribaldo,
true history tells the truth about past events, as in Aristotle’s well-known definition
of false and true: ‘To say of what is that it is not or of what is not that it is, is false,
while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true’ (Aristotle,
1984, IV, 7, 1011b25–6).1 Tribaldos subscribes to what Collingwood called a 1 All references to
‘scissors and paste’ version of historiography (Collingwood, 1999, 13–38). Aristotle’s works
are by book,
Tribaldos collates a series of theories on the difficulty of finding truth by authorities
section and line
beginning with Democritus (460–370 BC), while also showing the limitations of number.
this approach and critiquing what have become less than authoritative sources. He
draws from temporally and culturally diverse examples: the fall of Carthage in the
Punic Wars (265–146 BC), the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire (sixteenth
century), and Jacques-Auguste de Thou’s (1553–1617) failure to mention the
imprisonment of Francis I in his description of the Battle of Pavia, the great French
defeat in the Italian campaign of 1521–1526.
In a longer version of the Chronicle extant in another manuscript (BNE ms.
2788), including four sprawling books on Fernán González’s ancestors, Fernán

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González himself, his successors and the Castilian kings from Ferdinand I to the
Catholic Kings, Arredondo writes that he began the Chronicle in 1513 and
finished it in 1514, writing this and other works on behalf of Charles V, Holy
Roman Emperor and King of Spain, Naples and Sicily. Despite the support of
Charles V, the Crónica de Fernán González was significantly abridged a century
later by Tribaldos, whose edition contains approximately half of the material
contained in the longer version. The four books mentioned above, their
preambles and the dedicatory epistle were eliminated and some changes were
made to the author’s prologue. Following a certification by Tribaldos that the
work contains no heretical content is a note that has since been crossed out. The
note states that the work had been edited and ‘some superfluous things removed,
taking only what is necessary’ (fol. 1r).
The strange organization and rambling effect of Tribaldos’s prologue could be
explained as an attempt to avoid praising a second-rate history or admitting that
it was not a history but something else entirely. On the first folio, Tribaldos
establishes truth as the essence of history by way of Democritus, affirming that
history should be a mirror of things. Immediately after, however, he ruminates at
length on the difficulty of locating the truth, a result of man’s fickle and
passionate nature. Critiquing a vice that he identifies in Greek historiography
with examples from Herodotus and Theopompus, Tribaldos writes that history is
not arguable but self-evident:
It is thus not only fleeing from writing feigned things, but not keeping silence
about something that actually happened out of fear or passion. Because it is
necessary to have more consideration for the pure and simple truth rather
than for human favor and respect, telling the event immediately, without
adding anything personal or concealing injustice, whether that of friends or
enemies, raising one’s feats with praises or, on the other hand, vituperating
against the errors of the enemy, and diminishing the greatness of their
illustrious deeds. This practice is more the job of the lawyer who defends his
case against opponents, rather than that of a legitimate historian … . But
this was a vice of the Greek nation, that by flaunting their genius and
eloquence, or by illustrating their accomplishments more than they should,
they lied in history with such willingness and freedom … . The difficultly of
writing history is that it is almost impossible to get to the truth and to
discover it. (fols. 2r-v)
Tribaldos works through an argument whose logical conclusion – which he does
not state because he must praise Arredondo’s Chronicle – is obvious today: truth
cannot be the point of history because wholly objective writing is impossible. It is
not that he excludes a normative definition of history. He defines both the
meaning of history – history as mirror – and a method for locating its center: the
historian ‘might deal with [truth], provided he was diligent enough to investigate
it’ (fol. 2r). From this perspective, where historiography is a mirror or

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representation of events, there should exist a mechanism that would allow for a
direct and true understanding of events no longer present. The most interesting
problem with Tribaldos’s definition – and a logical conclusion of his own analysis
– is that whereas this definition might encourage a hermeneutic method of inquiry
in evaluating historical documents, truth is anti-hermeneutic in that it ceases to
exist when ‘clarified philosophically,’ as Richard Rorty notes, and does no better
when re-defined as a fact or as reality (Rorty and Engel, 2007, 13).2 2 Rorty’s view on
Tribaldos demonstrates truth’s contingency with examples from history with- the contingency of
truth is explained
out questioning why it is contingent and without admitting that it is problematic
at length in
to hold truth as an absolute. By disparaging the passions and prejudices of man chapter one of
and then noting the differences in names, dates and divisions of epochs across Rorty (1989).
histories, Tribaldos begins to unravel, without actually analyzing it, the problem
of defining history. As a good pragmatic historian would, Tribaldos shows that
historiography can always be subjected to inquiry and critique, and therefore
does not have an absolute value. At the same time, he maintains that truth is at the
center of the critique he proposes. By refusing to explore the implications of any
logic that may qualify the concept of truth in his examples, Tribaldos is able
partially to side-step the related question of time. This side-stepping of time, in
turn, authorizes Arredondo’s history, despite its lack of dates and uncritical
handling of sources.
Tribaldos’s concern with time, in part expressed as a complaint about the
variation of dates across histories, is primarily ornamental and allows him to
make generalizations about long historiographical narratives. It is both unavoid-
able and natural that inconsistencies in dates occur:
What lately has taken on an incomprehensible certainty is the adjusted
computation of the days of years in the annals, chronicles, and histories of
whichever nation. Because not only do they have variations with respect to
one another as a result of deriving from different times, principles, or styles,
because some use the Hegira, others the Era, others the creation of the
world, and others the birth of Christ, but that among a single people of a
single law, there is typically a great difference of opinion that causes notable
confusion … . That is to say that in the course of a long narrative no one is
surprised to find at some point a small addition of the apocryphal, or
something that has the appearance of being untrue completely or in some
less considerable part, because naturally in all things of this world there is
something graceless and unpraiseworthy, but irremediable. (fol. 9v)
In addition to defining truth as the center of history, Tribaldos evokes the
notion that all things on earth are flawed and, in doing so, he is able to avoid
addressing Arredondo’s specific errors. Tribaldos also establishes a continuity of
errors throughout time without really addressing time. Although the epochs may
be distinct, and although the system of times within the histories may be of
different measure, they should all aim to tell the truth. The examples Tribaldos

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cites at the beginning of his proem show errors present in testimonies from
antiquity to histories written in the seventeenth century. They are strung together
without transitions and regard for time, connected only by their common failure
to tell the truth, and by some of its repercussions:
From one chronicle to another, there is notable diversity of opinions on
many things. From which it can be concluded not that it is false that certain
people have actually lived in the world, but that the authors vacillate in their
accounts. Some neglect to tell things of a story that others tell faithfully, not
out of ignorance, but because of cunning and malice, like Livy, who
concealed Viriatus’s defeat of Claudius Unimanus …, honoring the con-
quered and not the victor. Others twist the truth out of envy, as happened in
the conquests of Peru. Rodrigo Orgoñez was challenged by Fernando
Pizarro, who told him that [Orgoñez] would recognize him and a friend in
a battle by a coat of orange-colored velvet they wore … . It so happened that
Orgoñez, fighting and seeing the attire, killed Pizarro’s friend, believing that
it was his declared enemy. Afterwards someone from the other side gave an
account saying that Pizarro dressed his servant with the emblem with which
he had said he’d go out that day … and thus it was disseminated throughout
all of Spain, reaching Peru, until the Royal Council of the Indies [put a stop
to it] when it was informed of the truth by Silvestre González. (fols. 3r-v)
Pointing out human failings and anachronism from the Greeks to the Romans
to the sixteenth century, Tribaldos establishes a continuity of omissions and false
attributions. Just as Ernst Bloch wrote of non-contemporaneity, the appearance
of outdated modes and values in the present, and the coexistence of different
historical times in what he called Jetzt, or the Now, Tribaldos engages in a
critique of progress, albeit with the specific goal of praising something perceived
by many as not in resonance with the present (Bloch, 1991). In order to attribute
relevance to a cultural object of little relevance, he creates a strategy that would
ensure total control of the text before him. He subverts the typical frame or
epistemology of time, replacing the adherence to chronological time and progress
with the unrealistic but still very powerful ideal of truth. If progress is never
complete and there are always elements of the old and what is to come in a given
object, then mediocrity, which Arredondo is believed to represent to an
exemplary degree, is the natural state of things.

Authenti city in First-hand Testimonies

The second codex I will discuss concerns two early modern scholars who were
also dedicated to the truth. Their aim was not, as in Tribaldos, to suspend
disbelief. Rather, they were in search of authenticity, primarily through first-hand

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or near-first-hand testimonies. When the scholar and member of the Real

Academia Española, Juan Antonio Fajardo, acquired a seventeenth-century
document collection, he took time to identify which works were copied by the
compilation’s initial compiler, the bibliographer Nicolás Antonio. The first of
these works was De bello Africo seu fragmentum historiae Caroli V (ff. 69–95),
by the Spanish humanist, philosopher, theologian and defender of the Spanish
Empire’s right of conquest and evangelization, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1489–
1573). The history was once thought to be a fragment of Sepúlveda’s chronicle of
Charles V, De rebus gestis Caroli V (1556), but it is now considered an
independent work on the Conquest of Tunis by Charles V against Barbarossa
and a source for De rebus gestis Caroli V. Antonio copied it directly from
Sepúlveda’s autograph held at the Jesuit College in Granada.
Fajardo’s interest in autograph texts was likely shared by Antonio, who copied
works that fit his idea of historiography, based on a direct relationship, whether
contentious or amicable, to literary, political, or historical figures. This was in
line with his distrust of uncritical histories and his outright denunciation of false
histories. Antonio’s rejection of inauthentic histories is most explicit in his
Censura de historias fabulosas, where he denounces the apocryphal Chroni-
cones (1594) discovered and copied in the sixteenth century by Jerónimo
Román de la Higuera. Higuera alleged that the Chronicones were authored by
fourth-century Lombard historians, contemporaries of Saint Jerome, and sixth-,
seventh-, tenth- and twelfth-century bishops of Cremora, Zaragoza and
Astorga. Antonio writes of the consequences of the circulation of these faulty
books, their purported origin only the beginning of the political and cultural
damage they inflict:
In order to reinforce lies that scandalize experts and knowledgeable men,
old manuscripts are produced and named, and brought to light today from
archives and bookstores where they are supposedly kept; these testimonies
being of equally little merit as are those who attribute value to them, authors
not worthy of the name Spanish and of a place among those who deserve
fame as a result of their integrity. Seeing how this political and religious
cancer spreads without any resistance is the second reason why I take up the
pen. (Antonio, 1742, 5)
The books disrupt historiography and elicit a potential for doubt about the
legitimacy of testimonies previously considered authoritative. Further, false
histories can inspire a loss of faith in the system of preserving knowledge and its
distribution (libraries and bookshops). The cancer to which Antonio refers thus
reaches not only specific temporal institutions but also basic principles of the
control of knowledge. As Gregorio Mayans y Siscar, the editor of Antonio’s
Censura, remarks, the Chronicones revealed several obstacles to determining a
text’s authenticity. Many overly passionate men or those lacking in learning
believed the Chronicones true. In other cases, good scholars were not available to

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contest the documents, and in others yet, scholars who thought the documents
false were not paid proper attention:
Nearly everybody believed what they read, some due to lack of letters,
others for excess of passion … . Dr. Benito Arias Montano, one of the most
learned men in genius, doctrine, and love for the truth that Spain has ever
known, did not live to see the Chronicones printed, because he died in 1598,
and they were published in Zaragoza in 1619. Pedro de Valencia, his
disciple, a man not well known, just like his distinguished Works in manu-
script, died in 1620, a year after the publication of the false Chronicones.
Benito Arias and Pedro de Valencia were not paid due attention when they
were consulted about the Laminas and the Lead Books of Granada
(wellsprings of execrable lies) … such silence and indifference towards their
assessment could be explained by the fact that those around them … did not
realize that the bad seed of a few lying Fragments [the Chronicones] could
grow so much such as to contaminate the Historia eclesiastica. (Mayans y
Siscar, 1742, Dedicatoria 3)
In an active effort to suppress existing spurious texts and to prevent the
circulation of new ones, Antonio, as well as the scribes and compilers of the
codex that came after him, sought to verify some of the texts and other material
objects, including inscriptions, through first-hand inspection. Although Antonio
produces a faithful copy of a third-century Roman inscription in the town of
Ronda in Andalucía based on a letter exchanged between two sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century antiquarians, in other cases he uses a hands-on approach,
making corrections based on a physical inspection of the inscription. A document
included in the codex, concerning inscriptions included in Marco Antonio Palau’s
(1543–1645) Antiguas memorias de los más notables sucesos de la ciudad de
Diana y de su famoso templo, appears to be in Antonio’s handwriting. The
inscriptions are found on the first century Temple of Diana in Mérida, Spain. At
times, Antonio uses marginal notes to signal errors in Palau’s transcription, while
in other places, he interferes directly in the body of the text. In one example,
Antonio notes that Palau has erred in his transcription of two proper names,
Galieno (Gallienus) and Dianensi, and thus abbreviates the erroneously tran-
scribed names in the body text (‘the author interprets Galieno badly, reading
Galenia, name of the tribe. / The author copies Dianensi, it is not this, but how I
put it’). In the ninth chapter and elsewhere, Antonio goes even further in his
attempt to legitimize his reading, explicitly noting that his correction of a
particular inscription is based on his direct examination of the rock:

I climbed to this place and saw the rock, a flint from this mountain, the
smoothest I could find there. I read it thus:
I
LVL. URBANUS

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PRINC UEXIL LEG VII:

GEM. P.F.H:::::
CUM SUIS::: CIS
NO: OS L · ATUSRO
::::::::::::
I do not discount that the penultimate line couldn’t be some other letters,
due to the wear on the rock. (fol. 21r)

Antonio’s intervention in Palau’s work on the Mérida temple includes a variety

of time crossings and categories of texts, from historical subject to contemporary
commentary subject to touchable monument. Antonio intervenes with a roughly
contemporary interpretation of the inscriptions of Mérida’s Temple of Diana
that, built in the second century AD, had already been reused in the sixteenth
century to build the palace of the count of Corbos.
When Tribaldos asks his readers to believe that Arredondo’s history is worth a
read, insisting that everything has its oddities and uncertainties (‘a small mix of
the apocryphal … some small appearance of the uncertain’) he substitutes for
chronological time, or the ordering of events according to when they supposedly
occurred, and critical treatment of sources, a non-interpretable measure of
quality: the adherence to truth. Relying on metaphysics, Tribaldos creates an
argument for the relevance of the Chronicle that his readers can surmise through
inference: the Chronicle’s true intent. He avoids the recent past and contemporary
reception of the Chronicle that might make it pale in comparison to more
successful ones, focusing on the reputable, even if also partially mythical,
greatness of Fernán González himself.
Antonio, in contrast, adopts a more material means in his attempt to establish
the relevance of old cultural productions to his own time. Without appealing to
belief, as Tribaldos does, or reconstructing the story of a particular text or object by
going in chronological order from its origin forward, Antonio implies that the
importance and the very meaning of a past thing is created in the present, primarily
through commentary. For example, Antonio’s codex includes, first, texts for which
he was able to access an autograph copy, such as Sepúlveda’s De bello Africo seu
fragmentum historiae Caroli V; second, those that included documentation of past
transmission and those that he himself could access (Fariñas’s work on the Arunda
transcriptions); and third, those that could be accessed by any able reader who could
ascend and read the rocks as he did. In these cases, Antonio sought control over the
past and meaning in the past by creating the object in the present. In his critique of
spurious books and other objects, the central problem is not the existence of the
apocryphal books, because if interpreted correctly as false, they might serve as
negative examples, much like what Tribaldos wrote about the stories in his
prologue. The issue for Antonio is that proper scholars such as Benito Arias
Montano and his disciple Pedro de Valencia were not available to interpret these
texts, or that their concerns about the texts were not duly acknowledged.

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What Makes a Year

Antonio sought to control the potential damage of false accounts by using a first-
hand approach and by considering works as both past and present phenomena.
The poet, historian and chronicler of King Philip IV, D. Juan Francisco Andrés de
Uztárroz, in addition to using some of Antonio’s strategies, seems to have
attempted to organize his compilation on the reign of King Philip II of Spain with
folios bearing dates, thereby creating divisions within the codex. The codex is
part of a compilation of letters and documents by and about the people associated
with the king. The first volume (BNM ms. 1761) covers the period from 1580 to
1589. The volume I want to discuss (ms. 1762) spans from roughly 1591 to 1596
and contains approximately 400 folios. The section breaks, some of which were
added after Uztárroz’s initial process of compilation, function as dividers
indicating sections of years.
What occurs within these divisions, however, strays from any kind of absolute
chronology, yielding to the interests of Uztárroz or to particularly notorious
events of Philip’s reign. In particular, there are two important events in the history
of the government of Aragon during a time where the king was busy with military
commitments toward the English and Dutch and concerned about an unstable
Portugal. The first is chaos in Ribagorza now (bordering the French département
of the Haute-Garonne to the north and Catalonia to the east), including a civil
war over the power of the Duke of Villahermosa, a member of one of Aragon’s
most powerful families, and the murder of an entire Morisco community in 1588
by the Duke of Villahermosa’s mercenary captain, Lupercio Latrás. The second
event concerns Antonio Pérez, Philip’s longtime advisor and secretary who was
accused of treason. Pérez betrayed the king, convincing him that Juan de
Escobedo, secretary of Don Juan of Austria (Philip’s half brother), who had
aroused his suspicions, was actually guilty of treason and should be killed. Pérez
subsequently had assassins kill Escobedo in 1578. Pérez was first imprisoned in
Madrid but escaped, seeking asylum in Zaragoza from the Aragonese law with
support from several important men, including the Duke of Villahermosa. He
was eventually imprisoned in the Jail of the Inquisition but managed to escape
from there with the help of his followers from Zaragoza, who lead a revolt. In
looking at the first 100 folios of the codex, it is evident that Uztárroz made a
significant effort to connect with particular individuals involved in these events,
copying documents and collecting original letters that yielded a history comprised
of portraits of individuals and the words of the king himself.
Uztárroz’s divisions, while bearing dates, primarily convey a time defined by
individuals and, whenever possible, their own words. Nearly all of the documents
contained in the codex are letters, both originals and copies, and whereas almost
all focus on the above events relating to Aragon, they are not bound to a
particular form of discourse or depersonalized. The documents interspersed with
political exchanges are personal notices of death and property, papal news, and

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what might be an autograph copy of the Spanish dramatist and poet Lupercio de
Argensola’s (1559–1613) sonnets.3 The first twelve letters of the codex, which 3 José Manuel
Uztárroz indicates he copied in September 1652, can serve as an introduction to Blecua has
collated and
nearly all of the content and characters that follow, save the added documents at
identified
the beginning and end of the codex. Lupercio de
The first letters, from 1590, are each from Philip and are addressed to Juan de Argensola’s
Gurrea, governor of Aragon. The letters appear without the king’s replies and autograph
sonnets, citing
concern the governance of the region. Some of these letters include proceedings to
those that appear
look for Martín de Lanuza, a letter regarding an inquiry of the Marqués de Almenara in BNM mss./
about Antonio Pérez, and conflicts concerning the officials of the town of Jaca from 4141 and 4104 as
February to July 1590. Uztárroz, in a move consistent with Antonio, ends the series autographs. The
of letters with an indication of the time and place in which they were copied from the copyist of the
sonnet in the
originals, and with a note found in the originals (‘Mr. Juan Francisco Andrés copied manuscript
these letters from the originals in Huesca, September 24, 1652’; fol. 5). studied here is
The meaning of the years 1590 and 1591 is multiple and can be found in the uncertain.
identification of individuals and related events relayed through letters sent by, to Lupercio wanted
all of his poetry
or about them. The individuals and conflicts that create 1590 are as follows: the burned upon his
death of Pope Urban VII, who died at the end of September 1590 (fols. 6 and 7); the death. In 1634, his
suffering of the Jesuit poet and clandestine missionary saint Sir Robert Southwell son Gabriel
(fol. 8, a late addition); correspondence from the Count of Chinchón to Pedro Latrás published 94 of
his poems, along
about his brother Lupercio’s trip to England and the answer of Lupercio’s servants with those of his
to the count; Pérez’s letter from jail to Martín Abarca de Bolea y Castro and the brother
latter’s answer; and a letter from Pedro Jayme, bishop of the Catalonian city of Vic. Bartolomé.
In a collection on the reign of Philip II, even those of dubious loyalty to the king and,
indeed, his declared enemies had a presence, including Pérez and his supporters and
the problematic, though occasionally useful, Lupercio Latrás (as a spy who also
acted in other clandestine capacities) and his brother Pedro. Although at the time he
copied the letters, Uztárroz complained that it was due time to write about the events
of the so-called ‘Altercations’ of Aragon – ‘sixty years has passed since the events in
1591, and it seems that one can write about them, since the anger that they
occasioned has now passed’ – he actually succeeds in not only creating a version of
these events, but also in suggesting something that can be even more informative for
the modern reader (786–787).
This more informative vision takes shape in a section within the year 1591 in
which Pedro Latrás, whose infamous, murderous brother Lupercio was already
dead by the time this letter was composed, is variously described as a valuable
helper in the cause of Philip, a potential detriment, and also as one to whom Pérez
appealed for help from jail. Wanting Pedro’s support and seeing him as a valuable
ally in the effort to recapture Pérez, the Bishop of Teruel (Aragón, Spain) implores
his assistance after Pérez escapes from the Jail of the Inquisition:

All of the consistories were in agreement that it would be advisable that the
Holy Office request Antonio Pérez and Majorin, his servant, and all of the

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 Bamford

necessary precautions were taken to impede any scandal … but Antonio

Pérez’s forces prevailed … and many of the King’s men have died and
removed Antonio Pérez from jail. I implore your grace to do all due
diligence so that they are detained. (Zaragoza, 24 September 1591, fol. 40)

Approximately five months before the composition of this letter (in February of
the same year, but appearing later in the codex) the same bishop had written to
Pedro to request his help in making peace in Atarés, Jaca. The tone is similar to
the September message, but in this earlier one, it is clearer that Pedro’s favor is
waning, despite any positive efforts on his part to curb the thieving and cruelties
of his brother, Lupercio, and his confederates some ten years earlier in the
mountains of the same region:
It is befitting both of your Royal service and for the benefit of these
Mountains to secure their peace and tranquility … . I refer here to what is
happening [among people] in Atares and in similar groups of people … . It
seems appropriate to alert you to it, such as to create a more tranquil and
less scandalous time, [and to ask] you to attempt [to make peace] with the
neighbors of that place; leaving things as is could lead to major incon-
veniences … . (Zaragoza, 25 February 1591, fol. 41)
Some two folios after the letter in which the bishop demands Pedro’s assistance
with Pérez, Pedro appears in a letter from Pérez himself. Having been accused
again of crimes against the king, Pérez wrote to Pedro requesting his support. The
similarities between the fate of Pedro’s brother and Pérez make the Pérez letter
particularly noteworthy. Both were prosecuted for rebellion and treason and
went abroad to England, among other places, arguing that they had fought for
the law and liberty of Aragon. Unlike Pérez, who states some of his complaints in
the letter to Pedro, Lupercio eventually earned back some of Philip’s favor by
agreeing to collect secrets on English affairs. Based on Pérez’s language, it seems
that Pedro did not necessarily intend to extend his assistance of rebels to Pérez, as
he had done in trying to help in the case of his brother. Pérez appeals to Pedro’s
sentiments and past kindness: ‘I struggle with my affronts … . I ask that you
decree in favor of my case, in your way, with the love that you have always shown
me and with the zeal for good’ (22 May 1591, fol. 44).
The version of history of the events in Aragon that emerges from this section is
not one where 1591 is a pre-interpreted object or, as Jesús Gascón Pérez has said
of some versions of these events, including the classic study by Pedro José Pidal
4 See, for example, (Marqués de Pidal), a univocal vision.4 On the contrary, although brief, the letters
Gascón Pérez that Uztárroz collected show a group of individuals in the process of making
(1999).
decisions and evaluating and reconfiguring their loyalties, whether those loyalties
are to the family, the king, a geographical area, or a particular cause similar in its
organization, or rather its chaos, to one of the past. Pérez’s letter
was written almost a week after he was moved from an Aragonese jail to an

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Inquisition prison in the Aljafería Palace and moved back after a riot that caused
the death of the marquis of Almenara, a representative of the king and chief
justice. The letter demonstrates that the preoccupations of even the most central
figures in the events never ceased to operate at the level of personal relationships
or to play on sentiment.
Uztárroz’s collection posits that a given year is a collection of bodies that suffer,
succeed, lie and change their minds. Rather than the idea of non-contemporaneity
and the coexistence of outdated modes in the present and the threat of man’s
passions to objectivity that were so clear in Tribaldos’s treatment of Arredondo’s
history, for Uztárroz, time is people and their movement from the past, present
and future that eventually ends in death. The documents from Uztárroz’s codex
signal the difference between the effect of autograph and other sorts of first-hand
pieces, such as letters, as opposed to third-person accounts – one of these last
accounts was added at the end of the codex and appropriately titled ‘History
hidden in the last quire of the most secret actions of the life of King Philip II.’ Just
as Antonio’s autograph documents and inscriptions enable old things to make
sense in his present, Uztárroz’s codex makes each document a direct voice because
of its uniqueness, even if it is a copy. Each piece, perhaps especially because it
might contradict the next, voices an opinion, position or claim of the people
involved, thereby giving the people themselves a presence.

Presently O ld

This dissemination of early modern bibliographers’ and compilers’ approaches to

time has shown that the anachronistic prejudice that Bouza observed in the
methods of nineteenth-century historians might also be a characteristic of early
modern methods for dealing with time. Tribaldos promotes anachronism as an
essential characteristic of people and things, as well as the notion that historical
writing, as Bloch said of progress, is not a continuous line of improvements.
Antonio and Uztárroz draw on letters, autograph documents and inscriptions
that enable them to make the person or thing encompassed in the content a
meaningful element in understanding that content. They also allow for a certain
year or historical event to be identified by personal accounts and influences rather
than by their chronological sequence.
Hands-on work with early modern codices involves at least two intertwined
temporalities, one old and the other present, that combine to form a sort of
‘presently old’ methodology. In the case of the codices studied in this essay, the
old is difficult to conceptualize and multiply, but the time conveyed by a
physically present old book is perhaps even more confusing. In critiquing the
ambiguity with which critics working with notions of ‘presence’ treat time, where
presence refers to a persistence or survival of the past (Eelco Runia and Ewa

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 Bamford

Domanska) or the effects of present people or things on bodies and consciousness

(Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht), Berber Bevernage posits that the presence of the past is
ontologically similar to Derrida’s ‘spectrality,’ which Derrida describes as part of
his hauntology that includes specters, spirits and the messianic (Derrida, 1994,
5 For the 101; Bevernage, 2008).5 Derrida’s spectral moment is effectively out of time,
discussions of something that shakes the present awake. Or, as Walter Benjamin said in his sixth
presence that
thesis on history, ‘To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it
Bevernage
critiques, see the really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of
forum on danger’ (Benjamin, 2007, 255).
‘Presence’ edited Although Derrida’s spectrality is out of time and despite his critique of
by Eelco Runia
Edmund Husserl’s notion of the living present and his privileging of the present,
and Elizabeth J.
Brouwer in the non-contemporaneity in Derrida’s spectrality appears in some form in Husserl’s
History and formulation of time consciousness (Bevernage, 2008, 163). Husserl’s living present
Theory 45 is at once thick in that it includes phases other than the now, in particular, what
(October 2006)
Husserl calls ‘protention,’ the anticipation of the approaching future, and ‘reten-
with articles by
Runia,
tion,’ the memory of the recent past, but it is also the present that one is
Gumbrecht, experiencing right now (Brough quoted in Husserl, 1991). In a similar vein to
Ankersmit, Derrida’s critique, Deleuze remarked on Bergson’s critique of Husserl’s theory of
Domanska, time-consciousness, where traditional accounts of time, such as Augustine’s notion
Bentley and
Peters.
that all experience of time derives from present experience, have led people to
believe that the past is caught between two presents, ‘the old present that it once
was and the actual present in relation to which it is now past’ (Deleuze, 1988, 58).
This misconception has led people to believe that ‘the past as such is only
constituted after having been present and that it is in some way reconstituted by
the new present whose past it now is’ (Deleuze, 1988, 58).
Dealing with the past is, thus, intensely personal – maybe even too personal
and perhaps too present – and inseparable from our own pasts and our own now.
Turning directly to Bergson, in Matter and Memory, he writes of the way one
recovers a recollection, a formulation that resonates with Runia’s, mentioned
above, on the way in which a presence of one’s past wells up and forces us to
rewrite our stories about ourselves:

Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of

our history, we become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach
ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first, in the past in
general, then, in a certain region of the past – a work of adjustment,
something like focusing a camera. (Bergson, 1988, 133–134)

So like a scattering of flying Dutchmen, presence floats through the here and
now, manifesting itself – at convenient and not so convenient moments – in
the form of Sehnsucht, in the form of Srebrenica historians reproducing
their object, and in countless other forms. Floating through the here and
now, this presence of the past also makes me feel things, think things and do

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 Presently old

things that are at odds with who I think I am – and so forces me to rewrite
my story about myself. (Runia, 2006, 316)

But do these theories about personal pasts apply to the presently old book? How
much past is in the presently old when the past is that with which one has had no
immediate encounter? In the process of trying to connect with the historical
moment of the letters in Uztárroz’s codex about and by the Latrás brothers
and Pérez, one can create context by comparing the codex letters with others of
the same period, as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts of the
Altercations of Aragón. Part of this contextualizing, however, usually involves a
fragmentation of the codex, as well as a move away from it – a transcription of
pieces of interest so that they can be more easily studied.
Returning to the Bergson and Runia previously cited, there is a point at which
the pieces of interest cease to be the only object of attention for an observer
because they focus some of their attention on imagining, first, a past in general
and then a more specific region of the past that would tell them something more
specific about the fragment. This division of attention, that actually constitutes a
turning away from the present thing, occurs because the pasts sought are
derived from a combination of phenomena, some of which are not very old:
educational and other cultural preparation (other books, classes and experi-
ences with similar codices) or habitus; the physical appearance of the codex,
including characteristics of the hands, paper and binding; and a belief that
abates any sense of anachronism or the missing parts that must be filled in or
ignored because they do not make sense. To form a past, the observer can only
partly pay attention to the present book. The affective and intellectual move-
ments that occur in front of a presently old book, including the reaction to
physical characteristics, interaction with parts of one’s habitus, a move to
imagine a past in general, a move to a more specific region to the past, and
philological practices that remove the text from the present book, all make it
difficult to stay with the physically present book. The disappearing act of the
presently old book is something that Jean-Luc Nancy has said is a characteristic
of presence in general: whereas a thing is its ‘birth to presence,’ its birth literally
withdraws the reality of the res from the thing (Nancy, 2004). In sum, presence
‘withdraws the thingness from the thing’ (Nancy, 2004, 52).
The time of a piece of early modern codex depends not on the observer’s ability
to resist throwing it back or ‘retrojecting’ it into the past, because that past,
formed on the basis of the present object, is in the making, but rather on their
ability to perceive it as a thing that, at one time, had a self-evident quality about it
that somebody wrote, exchanged and filed in that codex (Meillassoux, 2008, 16).
Talking about the time of the entire codex instead of just a fragment of it as it
manifests in the present would seem to be an even more difficult job because of
the multiple temporalities, genres and writing hands that it contains. At the same
time, this theory does not seem to have been a problem for Uztárroz or Antonio,

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 Bamford

and it was even advantageous for Tribaldos in his framing of anachronism as a

universal imperfection. In the presence of the whole codex, it is, in some way,
easier to locate the self-evidence of the book. Sitting among its many past times, it
is clear that chronology or origin was never the only system of order, even in the
codex’s initial assembly. The confluence of different temporalities in the codex
mimics our reception of the time of the present -but- old book.

A b o ut th e A u t ho r

Heather Bamford is Assistant Professor of Spanish at The George Washington

University. Her research interests include cultural exchange between medieval
and early modern Christians, Muslims and Jews; manuscript studies; early
Iberian and colonial print culture; and critical theory. She is writing a book that
reconceptualizes medieval and early modern Iberian manuscript culture by way
of the fragment (E-mail: heatherbamford@gmail.com).

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permission.