Portraying Authorship

This book investigates how a noted fourteenth-century Castilian writer developed and disseminated a concept of individual authorship.

Savo Anita :

Anita Savo is an assistant professor of Spanish at Boston University.

Laurence De Looze, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Western Ontario:
“Anita Savo leverages – rather ingeniously – the thirteenth-century Bonaventure’s typology of writerly functions to map out Juan Manuel’s treatment across his corpus of the writer’s relationship to his writing. She analyses the works with sensitivity and judiciousness and sees a progression to Juan Manuel’s later works in which, without ever calling himself an ‘author,’ he nevertheless presents ‘his own words’ as having authorial status. This gracefully written study will surely find favour with scholars of Juan Manuel.”

María Jesús Lacarra, Professor of Spanish Literature, University of Zaragoza :
“Anita Savo, with philological rigour and the support of an exhaustive bibliography, traces in this book the genesis of Juan Manuel’s ideas on authorship, contextualizing them in medieval culture, and their expression in his preserved works. A close reading of the manuscripts and Argote’s edition allows him to show how his individuality is received by copyists and readers until it reaches nineteenth-century criticism.”

Leonardo Funes, Professor of Medieval Spanish Literature, University of Buenos Aires:
“Anita Savo undertakes detailed research on the authorial roles of Juan Manuel, an outstanding political figure and writer of fourteenth-century Castile. To do so, she proceeds through the four writerly roles of scriptor, compilator, commentator, and auctor (drawing from Bonaventure’s famous typology). This method allows her to encompass all dimensions of writing from the material practice to the ideological strategies of authorization. Brilliantly written, Portraying Authorship contributes significantly to our comprehension of Juan Manuel as an author and, beyond this particular case, to our knowledge of the emergence of the authorial figure in late medieval manuscript culture.”