Loading...
Antonio de Fuenmayor’s life of pius V: A pope in early modern Spanish historiography
Pattenden, Miles
Pattenden, Miles
Author
Abstract
Antonio de Fuenmayor's Vida y Hechos de Pío V (1595) is one of the earliest hagiographic texts written about Pius V, the most famous of Counter‐Reformation popes and the victor of the Battle of Lepanto (1571). But, because Fuenmayor wrote in Spanish rather than Italian, his text has never received much attention. This article presents it in its context for the first time and argues that Fuenmayor highlights an important problem in the developing genre of early modern Spanish historiography: how to incorporate the pope in the national histories promoted by Philip II, III, and IV? Contemporary Spaniards praised Fuenmayor's text highly, a fact which may have had as much to do with its highly political role as a critical rebuke of Clement VIII and, later, of Urban VIII as it did with the text's literary qualities. The fact that Fuenmayor's depiction of Pius V is just as carefully constructed as better‐known Italian examples underlines how Italians, though they staffed most of the papacy's offices at this time, held no monopoly over how the pope's image was defined. Other Catholics, in this case the Spanish Monarchy, put forward rival visions which better served their own interests, even when those visions were at odds with those projected from Rome in order to further their own political interests.
Keywords
Papacy, Historiography, Spain
Date
2018
Type
Journal article
Journal
Renaissance Studies
Book
Volume
32
Issue
2
Page Range
183-200
Article Number
ACU Department
Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry
Faculty of Theology and Philosophy
Faculty of Theology and Philosophy
Collections
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
License
File Access
Controlled
Notes
An error occurred retrieving the object's statistics