Description

Every Spanish town of any age accumulated chroniclers, and Jerez de la Frontera more than most: the Moorish frontier, the reconquest, the wine trade all invited narrative, and narrative invited invention. Manuel de Bertemati y Troncoso goes through them one by one — who copied whom, which charters were forged, which foundation legends were manufactured to flatter a family or a monastery. It is a small book with a large method, the kind of source criticism that nineteenth-century local history usually lacked. For anyone working on Andalusian towns it clears the ground; for anyone interested in how a place decides what its past was, it is unexpectedly modern.