3 - Language and history in the Comentarios reales

Summary

Viktor Frankl has shown that historiography is characterized by changes in the concept of historical truth and its representation. Thus, during the chivalrous Middle Ages historical discourse was shaped by the desire to record and preserve the fame of great men and heroic deeds. Historical truth consisted in the representation of the exemplary. Renaissance historiography, inspired by the master historians of the classical age Herodotus and Pliny, Thucydides and Polybius, incorporated the testimony of the eyewitness into its representation of historical reality. This concept of historical truth acquired particular poignancy with the discovery of the New World and the subsequent encounter of European historical consciousness with a referent never before recorded. The ensuing conflict between the accounts of those who traveled to America and the speculations of the revered authors of antiquity brought the authority of the eyewitness into a particularly privileged historiographic position. Father José de Acosta's refutation of Lactantius' theory on the existence of antipodes is representative of the decline in the authority of the ancients in favor of a historiography based on actual experience. In short, the very novelty of each encounter with American realities rendered other types of historiographic accreditation increasingly irrelevant.

It should not be surprising, therefore, to find that New World historiography relied increasingly on the authority of the eyewitness during the decades that followed the discovery and conquest. In contrast to Herodotus, for example, who made particularly vivid use of the eyewitness in his history of the ancient world, as happy to draw on his own experiences, as on hearsay, common opinion and personal inquiry, many narrators of early American history scrupulously distinguished personal testimony from other sources.