from Medieval Academy News

History and Fiction
by Bernard Reilly

My career as an scholar in the field of Spanish medieval history began in 1968 and continues down to the present. This work—the tracing of manuscript traditions, the analysis of the composition of this or that chronicle, or the reconstruction of the composition of royal governments and policies from their own documents—is the standard stuff of historical scholarship. This part of my professional activity has seen the light of day in a wide variety of scholarly articles and books. Academy members may not know that I have published three historical novels as well.

I began work on the first of them, an imaginative reformulation and enlargement of the ninth-century Iberian account of the fall of Visigothic Spain to the Muslims and the beginnings of a Christian resurgence under the semi-legendary Count Pelayo in eighth-century Asturias, while my wife and I were celebrating our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in Bermuda in 1963. My inexperience with the world of commercial publishing, personal vicissitudes, and more narrowly professional concerns intervened and the book was not published until 1994 under title of The Treasure of the Vanquished.

The modest success represented by the publication of that novel led me almost immediately to begin work on another. This time the topic drew upon the eleventh-century tales of the ninth-century discovery of the relics of Saint James the Great, Santiago el Mayor, in Galicia in north-western Spain. This event was also associated with the reign of King Alfonso II of Asturias (791–842). As The Secret of Santiago it appeared in print in 1996.

Finally, at least until now, I undertook a fictional representation of one of the great European phenomena of the eleventh century and beyond—the pilgrimage to venerate the relics of Saint James at Santiago de Compostela. The subsequent shrine-church, the town, the bishopric, and the eventual archbishopric created about those relics are the surviving testimonies to the power and the popularity of that sprawling European movement. My own imaginative reproduction of the human experiences inevitably bound up in such pilgrimages was published as Journey to Compostela in 2001.

Why and how I should have chosen such a peculiar course is a fair question. To address the first query, my very professional work obviously brought me into contact with a wide range of fascinating popular, Latin stories embodied in medieval Iberian literature with which I had to deal in that former capacity. But to one enamored, as I am, by the rhythms, the sonorities, and the subtleties of the English language, the temptation to recast these materials in some contemporary form and expression became powerful. Literary narrative illumines the humanity that it portrays and, just so, inherently challenges its student. To refashion the human truths of that narrative for a different milieu and audience is a temptation hardly to be resisted.

How one responds to that temptation has a logic and discipline of its own, of course. Historical narrative and literary narrative may share the same language, may demand the same lucidity and economy, and may depend upon the same felicity of nuance and precision of expression, but they are distinct endeavors nonetheless. For that reason, they are not congenial to that compartmentalization of thought that is essential to the methodology of both. Inevitably, one does one or the other separately and intermittently.

Moreover, the primary focus of the novel is the human person. That given sets it off from historical writing, prescinding from biography, as currently practiced. In addition, the rigor of contemporary historical method closes off some of the traditional space of narrative fiction. One may use known historical persons only to the extent that much is unknown about them. Modern sensibility properly rules out anachronisms and absolutely forbids attributing to fictional protagonists actions otherwise unlikely in terms of their characters or known careers.

The personae of the novel, then, are limited to the ordinary, or at least the lesser known, actors involved in the dramatic action who may be fleshed out with relative freedom. At the same time, these creatures gain stature and invite reflection by their association with the larger realms of human endeavor. By a curious sort of inversion, those larger realms are reduced to historical background for a drama in which these persons themselves, to the extent to which they are credible, mediate a truth to us that enlarges our conception of historical possibilities.

So, at least, I perceive it. Since I retain my fascination with history as narrative and with the narration of the historical, it may be that the tale is not done yet. Mortality and other editors permitting, I just might manage a bit more of both.