ABSTRACT
Elogios de mujeres insignes del viejo testamento [In Praise of Illustrious Women of the Old Testament] was published in 1627 by Martín Carrillo whose credentials as rector of the University of Zaragoza, vicar general of Zaragoza, and abbot of the monastery of Montearagón well-established his authority as a historian worthy of the royal household. Dedicated to Margarita de la Cruz, daughter of the Empress María of Austria, Carrillo’s account of the lives of Old Testament women focuses on the causes, motives, and effects of female participation in pre-messianic Biblical history. Throughout the text’s course Carrillo elaborates at length upon the stories found in the original and the commentary these have elicited, predictably deploying an instructional rationale throughout.1 As such, the Elogios comfortably situates itself as a “history” at a time still in early modern Europe when the genre was not configured as a conduit for facts but rather as a competitor of fiction; more precisely, as a narrative form that recreates the past, mediates the past, makes the past intelligible, and as a result offers the reader an enhanced and fictionalized version of that past meant to persuade the audience of a truthful, if not absolute, worldview. Referring to this period in the development of history as a genre, Carlo Ginzburg has argued in his recently translated Threads and Traces that, “[T]ruth was considered above all a question of persuasion, linked only marginally to an objective weighing of the facts.”2
