“False chronicles against history” is the title of the book published by teacher Manuel Barrios Aguilera, of the Department of Modern and American History, of the University of Granada. The volume, published in “Biblioteca de Bolsillo” by the University of Granada, has more than 200 pages, in which, according to the author, “this book is a new turn of the screw in the deconstruction of the Sacromonte plates´ set-up, from the findings at the end of the 16th century to the archaeological frauds in 1754 and their contemporary consequences”
This volume contains “a series of monographs I have published in different specialized media in the last years; the loans I have used from them, some of them even literal, are very evident, always according to a carefully defined and directed thesis”. At the same time, “False chronicles against history” is a look ahead of a major book in preparation, where subjects scarcely insinuated by teacher Barrios Aguilera will have a more extensive development.
Precedents
According to Manuel Barrios Aguilera, “the primary base –to a great extent of the Archive of the Sacromonte Abbey—is compared with the competent bibliography collected all through the last thirty years, which contains works by notable experts, whose specific contributions are included in the bibliographic selection at the end: J. Caro Baroja, D. Cabanelas, T. D. Kendrick, M. Sotomayor, C. Alonso, M. J. Hagerty, J. Martín Palma, I. Gómez de Liaño, G. Morocho, O. Rey Castelao, D. Rodríguez Ruiz, E Córdoba, L. R Bernabé…; always from the pioneer theory offered in 1868 by José Godoy Alcántara in his priceless Critic history of the false chronicles. The debt with all these authors is also obvious and I take pleasure in admitting it”.
Barrios Aguilera also asserts: “I would like to have taken more from the last studies, enormously reformist, which come out every day; a paradigm of them is the very recent dossier on «The lead books and their context», supervised by Mercedes García-Arenal for the journal of Arab studies Al-Qantara (XXIII2, 2002, and XXIV-2, 2003)”.
Barrios Aguilera quotes teacher Pierre Córdoba (1985), and he says that “after laying that what is called «false chronicles» is a heterogeneous whole of objects and text, he includes the lead books and the relics of the Sacromonte in Granada, this is, the series of inventions of the hill of Valparaíso, produced from 1595 to 1599, with the antecedent of the Tlurpiana Tower in 1588, although the term “false chronicles” is reserved, strictly speaking, for those created by the Jesuit Jerónimo Román de la Higuera and one or two imitator: fabricated texts, apocryphal, attributed to medieval scholars such as Dextro, Máximo, Eutrando, Luitprando, Julián…, to «authorize» ecclesiastic histories of Spain, the city of Toledo and his hometown that he himself was writing, and that he signed with his name although they were based on false documentation, also susceptible of being included under the epigraph of false chronicles”.
This way he underlines the idea of how false chronicles, although connecting with medieval chronicles, in the same way full of falsities, are quite different, because they respond to a historiographic, modern perversion, paradoxically born under the influence of Renaissance humanism, determined to renovate historiography, assessing the old sources.
. Reference: Teacher Manuel Barrios Aguilera
Department of Modern and American History. University of Granada
Phone number: 958 243653 / 243661 / 132881.
E-mail: barriosa@ugr.es
