Coins, Jewelry and Stone Inscriptions: Ambrosio de Morales and the Re-Writing of Spanish History

Abstract

COINS, JEWELRY AND STONE INSCRIPTIONS:AMBROSIO DE MORALES AND THE RE-WRITING OF SPANISH HISTORY by Lucia Binotti The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill THE life of Ambrosio de Morales (b. Cordoba 1513) occupied almost the entire sixteenth century, but the bulk of his work was circulated in manuscript and in print largely during its concluding quarter. The youngest of a lineage of cultivated scholars – his father a renowned medical doctor, his uncle, Fernán Pérez de Oliva, an exquisite Latin and vernacular humanist – Morales was appointed very young to the cátedra of Rhetoric at the recently founded University of Alcal á and, in 1563, Philip II also appointed him cronista real. In this new role Morales embarked on the project that earned him his fame, a continuation of a history of Spain begun by his predecessor, Florián Pérez de Ocampo, with the title Corónica general de España (Fig. 1). Ocampo had published the first five books in 1553. Morales’ own version of these and his seven-books continuation were published in 1574/1577, with the last five reprinted in 1586. This paper examines Morales’ approach to historiography in his refashioning and continuation of Ocampo’s Corónica. While committed to resuming the narrative where Ocampo had left it, Morales proposed to transform the way Spanish historians looked at the past by relying on his philological and antiquarian investigations on Roman Iberia and medieval Castile in an attempt to redefine the coordinates of evidence and authority in Spanish historical writing. Regrettably, Morales’ efforts to introduce a method based on objective criteria did not fall on fertile ground. If one is to establish a direct link between 5 the number and dates of his editions and his audience, it appears that Morales’ Corónica was buried among rarely read minor works shortly after its first appearance . One hundred and eighty years later, for a brief period of fifty years or so, his work was again read, praised, imitated and re-edited, by a handful of Ilustrados, who hailed it as the only serious work of historiography produced before their own time.1 His fame, however, was short-lived. Morales again mostly disappeared from the critical landscape until this year of 2009. There are no modern editions of his Corónica, and from the seventies until very recently , I have been able to collect only two essays dealing with his historiographical production (Alonso Cortés 1950, Capel Margarito 1983). Auspiciously, the work of Morales has lately attracted some attention from scholars like William Stenhouse, Sabine McCormack, and Katherine Elliot van Liere, who are interested in understanding “the process that brought the image of the Renaissance into being” (Findlen 1998: 83). Stenhouse devotes a few pages to Morales’ treatment of antiquity in his 2005 monograph Reading Inscriptions and Writing Ancient History. Historical Scholarship in the Late Renaissance, where he asserts that Morales’ work can be seen as “marking something of a transition in the use of epigraphical evidence: as well as citing many inscriptions,” and making “some theoretical reflections on their use, indicating both that inscriptions could be forged, and that they were not simply texts” (2005: 124). McCormack provides detailed examples of Morales’ discoveries and study of Roman inscriptions, coins and other archaeological remains , making him among the first scholars to search Spain for Roman antiquities and to become aware of the radical transformation in historical knowledge that would arise from an ever increasing treasure trove of numismatic and epigraphical evidence.2 She concludes, like Stenhouse, by observing that: Morales created a new narrative of Roman Spain that was mined for its details by subsequent historians, among them the Jesuit Juan de Mariana, whose History of Spain, published initially in Latin and then in the author’s own Spanish translation circulated as a standard work in updated editions until the nineteenth century. Through Mariana and his dependents, the influence of Morales was enormous (McCormack 2004: 125). Lastly, Kate Elliot van Liere gives the most focused, yet less favorable, assessment of Morales’ contribution in her study on the culture of humanist historical scholarship in sixteenth century Spain, where she cautions against excessive praise: Some modern observers...

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