Fernán Pérez de Guzmán

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Fernán (also Fernando ) Pérez de Guzmán (* around 1377, † around 1460) was a Spanish writer and historian. Pérez de Guzmán is considered one of the pioneers of Spanish historiography.

Life

Pérez de Guzmán came from a respected and influential family. His father was Pedro Suárez de Guzmán , a high Andalusian civil servant, his mother Doña Elvira de Alyala, the sister of Pedro López de Ayala , the chancellor at the court of King Juan II . Probably born between 1375 and 1380, he is first mentioned in the sources for the year 1421, when he was envoy of the Infante Enrique III. to whose mother Leonor of Aragón was sent. In 1431 he took part in the Battle of La Higueruela under Bishop Gutierre de Toledo , his cousin . He was then arrested along with his cousin, who was suspected of treason, but both were released shortly afterwards for lack of evidence. He then appears to have resigned from military service and retired to Batras . He enjoyed a great reputation as a poet. His friends included Alonso de Cartagena , humanist and bishop of Burgos , on whose death he wrote a lament, and the learned brothers Pablo and Alvar Garcia de Santa María .

His fame as a historian is based primarily on his work La mar de historias ("Sea of ​​Stories"), first printed in 1512 . The three-part work is based on the Mare historicum by Johannes de Columna , after which it is named. The first two parts deal with pre-Arab Spain. The third part, Generaciones y semblancas , contains 36 prose portraits of the most important personalities from Pérez's own time. Pérez de Guzmán mainly portrayed people from the courts of Juan II and Enrique III, whom he had known personally, with such precision and detail that he was sometimes declared a "Spanish Plutarch ". He also wrote several other prose works as well as some poems that were included in the Cancionero de Baena (the songbook of Juan Alfonso de Baena ). His most important poem is the panegyric Loores de los claros varones de España (“Praise of the great men of Spain”) in 409 eight-line stanzas. In it, Pérez sings about all the famous Spaniards from the mythical King Geryon to the Spanish Romans (e.g. Seneca and Trajan ) to Pope Benedict XIII. and the Spanish writers. The remaining poems can be divided into didactic-moral or religious poems on the one hand and love, casual and political poems on the other.

Works

  • Generaciones y semblanzas (1512)
  • Some Unpublished Poems of Fernán Pérez de Guzmán . Edited and introduced by Hugo A. Rennert. John Murphy & Co, Baltimore 1897 ( digitized in the Internet Archive ).
  • Pen portraits of illustrious Castilians . Translated, commented and introduced by Marie Gillette and Loretta Zehngut. The Catholic University of America Press, 2003.

literature

  • Carlos Alvar, José Manuel Lucía Megías (eds.): Diccionario filológico de literatura medieval española. Textos and transmisión . Madrid 2002, pp. 498-517.
  • JDM Ford:  Guzmán, Fernando Pérez de . In: Catholic Encyclopedia , Robert Appleton Company, New York 1913.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Cf. Hugo A. Rennert's introduction to the unpublished poems by Pérez de Guzmán, who justified himself against the earlier held view that Guzmán was born around 1400: Some Unpublished Poems of Fernán Pérez de Guzmán . Edited and introduced by Hugo A. Rennert. John Murphy & Co, Baltimore 1897, pp. 6-8.
  2. ↑ Fernán Gómez de Cibdareal reports on the battle and arrest in a letter: Gómez de Cibdareal, Centon epistolario , no.51 .
personal data
SURNAME Pérez de Guzmán, Fernán
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pérez de Guzmán, Fernándo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish writer
DATE OF BIRTH around 1377
DATE OF DEATH around 1460