Nuestro autor.

The current chapter I am writing started out about two manuscript fragments, two philologists, and a family who seems to be in love with a red tile with an erased verse probably from the Libro de Apolonio, a poem inspired in some version of the Poema de Fernán González, and a series of drawings and symbols, signed Philosopho. My latest assessment of some of the main ideas was:

Vitality in the philologies of Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Paul Zumthor
Perception of whole and part
What hole are the material books of the Middle Ages filling not in literary history, but in daily life? (Or does nobody seem to care?)
What do some philologists, owners of fragments, librarians, and novelists want from what they consider the Middle Ages?
Does anybody want anything from the material objects? What? When?
What sort of texts happen when the object is the research subject?

A text about a certain type of educated human seeking, totally ineffectually, contact with the past and themselves via nebulous categories like Middle Ages, while at the same time, conceiving of the thing they understand as Middle Ages as only a half-good non-thing to begin with, then giving up when these forms of supplement (typologies, the metaphors, nearby historical landmarks and figures) don’t work.

I finally received the other article written in the last decade on the Villamartín tile, “Hispano Diego García en la interpretación del ostrakon de Villamartín sobre el Poema de Fernán González.” Here the author, J. Hernando Pérez, chooses to fill the holes in the tile and its initial and current contexts with the character of Diego García de Campos and his Planeta (1218). Through a complex of symbolism and anagrams directly inspired in the Planeta, Pérez provides a possible author to some of the tile material, the meaning of all of it, and what he sees as the reason for its existance.

This article has proven useful not for the content and the interpretations, but for its repeating the unexceptional phrase of nuestro autor, as well as his sytematic supplement of the tile such that in his view, it makes sense and participates more effectively in fulfilling a determined place in literary history.

But whose literary history? And who and when is nuestro? Philologists? Farmers? Freelance authors? Novelists? Gradeschool kids?

These must be some of the questions. The reasons why the blanks are there and with what we think to fill them. What is ours to be had and what has the Medieval done for us lately?