The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Volume 3 William Hickling Prescott 9781530222193 Books
Download As PDF : The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Volume 3 William Hickling Prescott 9781530222193 Books
William Hickling Prescott was an American historian and Hispanist, who is widely recognized by historiographers to have been the first American scientific historian.
The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Volume 3 William Hickling Prescott 9781530222193 Books
This is the first book that Prescott wrote before the books on the conquests of Mexico and Peru.If you have read those books you will find that the voice is recognizably Prescott's, including his Americanisms ( "cooped up") and verbal tics ("agreeably to his last wishes" "and this, whether we consider" "and this, notwithstanding that... ) The style is maybe less soaring, a bit stiffer perhaps than in those books , but this is narrative writing of a very high order indeed - of considerable clarity, exactness, polish and momentum .
Note though his project is different than in the books about Mexico and Peru. The book is not as tightly organized because he is writing a history not of a conquest but of a reign. He has to account for everything of importance that happened while they reigned, terminating with their deaths. Also Ferdinand survived Isabella by more than ten years so he has to do w/o his central heroine for the last half of Volume Three. Indeed it has a kind of sprawl to it redolent of an age when people had much more time to read. Isabella and Ferdinand don't get born until the middle of Volume One , and there are long sections on the literature of the period that consist of careful assessments of writers untranslated and largely unknown in the Anglophone world. For every battle of every war( the "War of the Succession" the war of reconquest against the Grenadine Moors , the wars with France for the control of the Kingdom of Naples, et al.)you get to find out how many foot soldiers and how many cavalry each side had and how each opposing side deployed their forces in the middle left and right.
His idolization of Isabella becomes a bit mawkish at times but he seems to have needed a central figure around which to organize his narrative. The section on the wars in Italy make somewhat more compelling reading than the ones on the Moorish war because he had such a figure in the former in Gonsalvo de Cordoba. Much of the third and last volume is taken up by accounts of the deaths and post -mortem appraisals of his principal figures - Isabella, Columbus, Gonsalvo, Ferdinand and Ximenes. Though distinctly characterized, you can't really say of any of them that they come across as living breathing human beings - imagine them instead as they might appear on a mural in a public building, and then reanimated and silently pantomiming the actions that brought them fame in life.
He exerts himself considerably to get Isabella "off the hook" so to speak for having lent her support to the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Spanish Jews. Indeed a kind of standing tension that runs throughout the book is between his desire to make heroes of the five aforementioned figures while trying to reconcile their moral psychology with contemporary standards. As you read you can sense of how keenly he would have liked to have been relieved of such embarrassments - e.g. Isabella's support for the Inquisition, Ximenes' double dealing with the post- Reconquista Grenadine Moors, etc.
The book was written in the 1830s and one is from time to time brought up against the fact that the implied readership is much more narrow than it would be for a similar book published today -i.e., Protestant - the Reformation is "the glorious morn of the Reformation" and Anglo-Saxon - much is made in the opening chapters of the Teutonic roots of the Spanish nobility who initiated the first stages of the Reconquista.
While it is silly to treat someone or some book as a paradigmatic this or that ( just e.g., think of all the myriad ways Prescott differs from his contemporary Macaulay ) still from the fact that a)the book enjoyed tremendous popular and critical success when it was first published and b)that it has really fallen off the radar screen and has been out of print for well over a century, it can be allowed that a cover to cover reading (not an abridgement ) is tantamount to an initiation into the ways that writing and reading history - the expectations that readers brought to books of history , the expectations of readers that historians had at the back of their minds as they wrote- differed in Prescott's time from those of our own. And in the meantime you will have gained a handle on the main persons and events of one of the most seminal reigns in European history.
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The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Volume 3 William Hickling Prescott 9781530222193 Books Reviews
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The book itself is brilliant. More information than you would expect could read like an adventure movie, and much more readable than something written so long ago usually is. Someone really should have mentioned, though, that the book is in 8 point type, and the footnotes are smaller.
I read these volumes and his histories of the conquest of Mexico and Peru as part of a pre-travel reading effort. During our recent sojourn in Spain, I found that my experience there was enriched by the background that I gained from these works by Prescott who published them during the mid-19th century.
This is the first book that Prescott wrote before the books on the conquests of Mexico and Peru.
If you have read those books you will find that the voice is recognizably Prescott's, including his Americanisms ( "cooped up") and verbal tics ("agreeably to his last wishes" "and this, whether we consider" "and this, notwithstanding that... ) The style is maybe less soaring, a bit stiffer perhaps than in those books , but this is narrative writing of a very high order indeed - of considerable clarity, exactness, polish and momentum .
Note though his project is different than in the books about Mexico and Peru. The book is not as tightly organized because he is writing a history not of a conquest but of a reign. He has to account for everything of importance that happened while they reigned, terminating with their deaths. Also Ferdinand survived Isabella by more than ten years so he has to do w/o his central heroine for the last half of Volume Three. Indeed it has a kind of sprawl to it redolent of an age when people had much more time to read. Isabella and Ferdinand don't get born until the middle of Volume One , and there are long sections on the literature of the period that consist of careful assessments of writers untranslated and largely unknown in the Anglophone world. For every battle of every war( the "War of the Succession" the war of reconquest against the Grenadine Moors , the wars with France for the control of the Kingdom of Naples, et al.)you get to find out how many foot soldiers and how many cavalry each side had and how each opposing side deployed their forces in the middle left and right.
His idolization of Isabella becomes a bit mawkish at times but he seems to have needed a central figure around which to organize his narrative. The section on the wars in Italy make somewhat more compelling reading than the ones on the Moorish war because he had such a figure in the former in Gonsalvo de Cordoba. Much of the third and last volume is taken up by accounts of the deaths and post -mortem appraisals of his principal figures - Isabella, Columbus, Gonsalvo, Ferdinand and Ximenes. Though distinctly characterized, you can't really say of any of them that they come across as living breathing human beings - imagine them instead as they might appear on a mural in a public building, and then reanimated and silently pantomiming the actions that brought them fame in life.
He exerts himself considerably to get Isabella "off the hook" so to speak for having lent her support to the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Spanish Jews. Indeed a kind of standing tension that runs throughout the book is between his desire to make heroes of the five aforementioned figures while trying to reconcile their moral psychology with contemporary standards. As you read you can sense of how keenly he would have liked to have been relieved of such embarrassments - e.g. Isabella's support for the Inquisition, Ximenes' double dealing with the post- Reconquista Grenadine Moors, etc.
The book was written in the 1830s and one is from time to time brought up against the fact that the implied readership is much more narrow than it would be for a similar book published today -i.e., Protestant - the Reformation is "the glorious morn of the Reformation" and Anglo-Saxon - much is made in the opening chapters of the Teutonic roots of the Spanish nobility who initiated the first stages of the Reconquista.
While it is silly to treat someone or some book as a paradigmatic this or that ( just e.g., think of all the myriad ways Prescott differs from his contemporary Macaulay ) still from the fact that a)the book enjoyed tremendous popular and critical success when it was first published and b)that it has really fallen off the radar screen and has been out of print for well over a century, it can be allowed that a cover to cover reading (not an abridgement ) is tantamount to an initiation into the ways that writing and reading history - the expectations that readers brought to books of history , the expectations of readers that historians had at the back of their minds as they wrote- differed in Prescott's time from those of our own. And in the meantime you will have gained a handle on the main persons and events of one of the most seminal reigns in European history.
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