ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores if and how Golden Age prose interpretations of past events conformed to the principles laid down in the artes historicae. Her subsequent analysis of Mariana’s narrative of the fall of Spain will focus in particular on the historian’s use of three specific devices: Allegory, historiographical disclaimers and harangues. As the opening and closing of the General History’s account of the fall of Spain thus make evident, Mariana exploits allegory as an emplotment device which assembles historical events into a narrative with a morally conceived plot. Mariana’s use of allegory transforms history into a huge complex fable in a process which, in accordance with the continuity between the good and the beautiful in Platonic-Christian thinking, is simultaneously moralising and literarising. The history of historiography becomes a plethora of forms, of ever-changing approximations to the truth, a versatile ars.
