In El “exemplum” antiguo: modelos de conducta y formas de sabiduría en la España medieval [The Antique “exemplum”: Models for Conduct and Forms of Wisdom in Medieval Spain], Hugo Bizzarri traces the development and usage of exemplary stories from Greco-Roman Antiquity in Castilian vernacular and Latin literature, adducing brief evaluations of the authorial intentions and historical exigencies of their appearance in varied genres from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. An introduction reviews select critical taxonomies and definitions of medieval exempla (Welter, Moos, Bremond et al., Lacarra, Tilliette) and also Roman (Cicero, Quintilian, Suetonius, Valerius Maximus) and Christian Latin authorities on their use (Tertullian, Jerome, John of Salisbury). Bizzarri highlights the persuasive function of exempla as a genre and the appropriation of the matter of Antiquity for Christian didactic and political purposes in Castilian literature. Although Bizzarri defines the antique exemplum as one about the matter of Antiquity, the book’s signal interest lies in exempla deriving from Roman history and more specifically from Valerius Maximus’sFacta et Dicta Memorabilia. Valerius’s text provides the models for an additional taxonomy of antique exempla offered by Bizzarri: type A) narrative (a story with a moral); type B) descriptive (the description of a custom, virtue or vice); and type C) evocative (the mention of a name) (183-84), which are the measures against which all instances of antiqueexempla are evaluated throughout this study.
The book’s four chapters are organized by century and divided into subsections on authors and the genres in which antique exempla thus broadly and narrowly defined appear. The chapter on the twelfth century is the very shortest (19-23). Here Bizzarri also notes the importance of the Iberian Peninsula for the transmission and translation of Arabic texts. Bizzarri does not find antique exempla per se in twelfth-century Castilian Latin sapiential literature, but rather idealized figures of the ancient philosophers as models for the ascetic life (23). The chapter on the thirteenth century is subtitled “los comienzos del influjo franciscano” [the beginnings of Franciscan Influence]. In the first subsection, Bizzarri shows how the Franciscan Gil de Zamora’sPreconis Hispaniae weaves antique, historical, and religious exempla into a mirror for princes, arguing that Zamora inaugurates the literary tradition in the Peninsula of looking to the Roman empire for models of noble behavior (31). The second turns to the translation of Brunetto Latini’s Livres dou Tresor into Castilian, which is important in Bizzarri’s history as a nexus between the Latin past and the future uses of the antique exemplum (35). The next section concerns compendia of the lives and sayings of Greek sages in Castilian sapiential literature translated from Arabic. Bizzarri notes that these portraits are not quite the same as the exempla that originate from Latin literature, calling them “una veta original del exemplum antiguo” [an original strain of the antique exemplum] and associating the preference for Greek models with the ideology of Alfonso X’s reign (43). Several pages are then dedicated to the inclusion of Roman history in Alfonso X’s Estoria de Espanna (43-47). In the final section on mirrors of princes, Bizzarri comments upon sapiential compendia like the Libro de los doze sabios where historic exempla predominate and other compendia notable for their lack of interest in the ancients (50). These texts are contrasted with the “erudite” Castigos de Sancho IV, which follows the compositional strategies found in Gil de Zamora, with its a balance of ancient, historical, and biblical exempla combining to make an ideal vision of princely power in medieval Castille (56).
Chapter three, “el redescubrimiento del exemplum antiguo” [the rediscovery of the antique exemplum], begins with remarks on the scarcity of antique exempla in the literature of the first half of the fourteenth century despite the influence of ancient rhetoric on vernacular literature and the expanded dissemination of the work of Valerius Maximus (57-60). Later in the century, however, two more mirrors of princes and their reception saw what Bizzarri deems the first glimmers of humanism in the Peninsula. Álvaro Pelayo’s Speculum Regnum, dedicated to Alfonso XI, which holds up Greek and Roman heroes as avatars of the ideal Christian crusaders needed for theReconquista (60-66) and the Castilian gloss on Giles of Rome’s De Regimine principum likewise found in the mos maiorum norms for noble behavior and society as a whole (66-75).
The book culminates with its longest section, titled La aetas valeriana, on the fifteenth century, which provides a description of how, under the successive Trastámaran reigns, multiple translations of Valerius’s Facta et Dicta Memorabilia and other ancient works circulated, while citations and rewritings of antique exempla proliferated in the genres most favored by the practitioners of vernacular humanism. The chapter’s first section catalogs translations by Pero López de Alala, Alonso de Zamora, Hugo Urriés, and Diego Rodríguez de Alamela, highlighting Alamela’s propagandistic transformation of Valerius Maximus. The second section covers the addition of antique exempla to fifteenth-century versions of collections of philosophers’ sayings. From there, Bizzarri moves on to the presence of antique exempla, mainly evocative, in the fifteenth-century lyric production of Íñigo López de Mendoza, Gómez Manrique, and Juan de Mena, highlighting how the antique exempla had become the mark of political thought and praising Mena in particular for uniting the ancient and recent pasts like never before (129). The fourth section turns to political treatises and mirrors of princes, covering the use of antique exempla in the works of the Franciscan Fray Ínigo de Mendoza, Diego de Valera, Rodrígo Sánchez de Arévalo, Pedro Chinchilla, Fray Martin de Córdoba, singling out Valera for his dexterous and personal use of exempla (146) and concluding that by the late fifteenth century, it was simply impossible to write about politics without taking recourse to the matter of antiquity (159). Sections on preaching, epistles, and the Castilian translation of Gower’s Confessio Amantis follow.
The conclusions that Bizzarri draws from this series of literary-historical snippets are straightforward, if unsurprising. Firstly, the history of the antique exemplum is multifaceted, and unlike other European literary traditions, medieval Castilian literature drew upon two sources, the Latin rhetorical-historiographic tradition and the Greek biographical tradition, disseminated through Arabic (180-81). Bizzarri describes this second tradition as “una forma literaria a medio camino entre la sentencia y el exemplum” [a literary form in-between the proverb and the exemplum] (181). Secondly, use of antique exempla changed along with shifting concepts of history and wisdom and intensified as more antique material became available. Whilst in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the wisdom of the ancients was passed down from time immemorial, unchanging, making the distant past essentially the same as the present, in the later Middle Ages the ancients and the Romans in particular were seen as the models for virtue and chivalry needed in the present (182). Lastly, the history of the antique exemplum is essential to understanding the greater history of the reception of the Matter of Antiquity in the Middle Ages the rise of humanism in the fifteenth century (186).
El “exemplum” antiguo is a companion volume to Bizzarri’s La otra mirada, which is frequently referenced in the book reviewed here and which covers the same time span and many of the same texts and authors. [1] Both volumes focus on the fifteenth century as the culmination of the use of exempla by literati who inventively transformed a rhetorical tool into a mode of creative and personal expression and a reflection on recent and current events in the Iberian Peninsula. Despite the validity of the taxonomy distinguishing the two forms of exempla, they might have been quite productively studied together and thus provided more insightful readings of their deployments in the works of López de Ayala, Diego de Rivera, and Juan de Mena, among other fifteenth-century luminaries, given that they almost always appear together and both are testaments to how courtly culture imagined its relationships to the past.
In addition to addressing a reader familiar with the prior volume, El “exemplum” antiguo presents readers with multiple long block quotes in Latin without translations as well as untranslated shorter quotes in French and German, making for rather cumbersome reading. The author is also fond of generalizations such as “el hombre medieval” [medieval man], and categorical statements such as “Si Francia era el reino de letras, España lo era de las ciencias” [If France was the kingdom of literature, Spain was the kingdom of science] (18). Castilian and Latin are also the only languages of “la España medieval” worthy of inclusion in this study. The press does not seem to have copy-edited the book, which contains many typos and attributes the Rhetorica ad Herennium to Cicero (11), an infelicity that is not present in La otra mirada, where it is correctly called a pseudo-Ciceronian work (16).
In sum, El “exemplum” antiguo fulfills its own modest descriptive remit and provides an overview of the appearance of antique exempla in medieval Castilian literature. It will be useful as an initial reference for those interested in the topic.
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1. Bizzarri, Hugo O. La otra mirada: el “exemplum” histórico. Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2019.