From the Annals de Ripoll to Notícia de Catalunya: Is There Continuity in Catalan Historical Literature?

This keynote lecture is part of the 19th International Colloquium of the North American Catalan Society which will be hosted this year by UMN. For more information including the conference program, please visit z.umn.edu/NACS-24

About the Lecture:

Historical literature in Catalonia, written in Latin as well as in Catalan and Spanish, is of admirable quality and originality. It is the only corpus, for example, that contains two autobiographies of medieval kings (Jaume el Conquistador and Pere el Ceremoniós), cultivates the most diverse historical genres (from Annales, genealogies, autobiographies, and chronicles in the Middle Ages to dietaris, monographs, and modern and contemporary historical essays), and also shows a significant capacity to reinforce a collective identity that grows with time. Faced with this variety of historical forms, however, it is worth asking what are the lines of continuity and discontinuity in this historiographical evolution, what are its fundamental turning points and whether it is possible to speak of a ‘canon’ of Catalan historiography.

About the Speaker: 

Jaume Aurell is Professor in the Department of History and at the University of Navarra, Spain, where he directs the Program PPE (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) and the Institute for Business and Humanism. He is member of the Research Group "Religion and Civil Society", at the ICS (University of Navarra) and co-editor with Montserrat Herrero of the Series "Medieval and Early Modern Political Theology" (Brepols). His publications include Theoretical Perspectives on Historians' Autobiographies. From Documentation to Intervention (New York: Routledge, 2015) ; Authoring the Past. History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2012) Genealogía de Occidente (Barcelona, Pensódromo, 2018). He also has edited the themed issues "Rethinking Historical Genres in the Twenty-First Century", in the journal Rethinking History 19.2 (2015).