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Jan Machielsen, Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain, by Katrina B. Olds, The English Historical Review, Volume 132, Issue 558, October 2017, Pages 1324–1326, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cex233
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Extract
This is one of the most eagerly awaited books on early modern Catholic culture of the past decade. The Iberian peninsula has long had a reputation for invented traditions and forged texts. Within this well-established tradition, Katrina Olds carves out a prominent position for the chronicles fabricated by the Toledo Jesuit Jerónimo Román de la Higuera (1537/8–1611), which provided Spanish scholars and antiquarians with evidence for an early Christian past that had been destroyed by the Muslim invasions of the eighth century. They gave textual support for local traditions and beliefs that were attacked both by Reformers and in Rome (and, in turn, they sparked further forgeries). Olds’s study of Higuera’s chronicles and their reception provides a fascinating case-study of the diverse and changing Catholic attitudes towards the past, well worth reading by anyone interested in early modern Catholic cultural and intellectual history.
Higuera claimed to have uncovered, with the help of an old student in Germany, the manuscript chronicles of four late classical and medieval Spanish authors in the ancient monastic library of Fulda: Dexter, Maximus, Liutprand (or Liudprand) of Cremona and Julián Pérez. Only the last was a complete invention; the others do have some basis in fact. Dexter, supposedly the earliest, had indeed written a lost universal history, which he dedicated to Jerome (though even the Church Father admitted that he had not yet read it). The combined impact of these chronicles on Spanish Catholicism was profound and, as Olds shows, can be felt to this day because Higuera’s aims had been both big and small. The chronicles provided support for Saint James’s (Santiago’s) mission to Spain, which even included the ordination of bishops, thus providing Spanish Christianity with truly apostolic credentials. (In addition, Higuera provided letters from the ancient Jews of Toledo protesting the Crucifixion and asking for religious instruction.) Yet Higuera also bestowed early saints and martyrs on Spain’s many localities. Though Olds does not go so far as to say this, the (often miraculous) discovery of their ancient relics seemed in turn to confirm the validity of the chronicles. With the chronicles now widely discredited, Spanish local historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been scrambling to find new sources to support the traditions to which the chronicles gave rise.
