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 various 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 temporality 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.
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Notes
All references to Aristotle’s works are by book, section and line number.
Rorty’s view on the contingency of truth is explained at length in chapter one of Rorty (1989).
José Manuel Blecua has collated and identified Lupercio de Argensola’s autograph sonnets, citing those that appear in BNM mss./4141 and 4104 as autographs. The copyist of the sonnet in the manuscript studied here is uncertain. Lupercio wanted all of his poetry burned upon his death. In 1634, his son Gabriel published 94 of his poems, along with those of his brother Bartolomé.
See, for example, Gascón Pérez (1999).
For the discussions of presence that Bevernage critiques, see the forum on ‘Presence’ edited by Eelco Runia and Elizabeth J. Brouwer in History and Theory 45 (October 2006) with articles by Runia, Gumbrecht, Ankersmit, Domanska, Bentley and Peters.
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Bamford, H. Presently old: Time according to three early modern codices. Postmedieval 4, 335–351 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2013.12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2013.12