Historiography and hagiography: exemplary lives and writing of history in the Nuevo Reino de Granada

Abstract

From the group of texts written between the 16th and 18th centuries, historians of the 19th and 20th centuries chose the chronicle as the only genre that belonged to the writing of history. This led to the exclusion of other genres, such as “exemplary lives”, which, by the time they were written, formed part of the corpus of history. They were invalidated by a positivistic reading that found a high dose of fiction in the “prodigious” facts that they narrated. Exemplary lives—genre of medieval origin revived by the baroque hagiography—were used in the New Kingdom of Granada to make those local colonial subjects stand out that were erected as role models either by institutions or by popular belief. By extent, these role models evolved in representations of models of behavior upon which the “ideal subject” had to be constructed discursively. These texts were written under the rules of the rhetorical writing of history. This article aims to reestablish the connection between these narrations and the horizon of their production, and, thus, to stress that hagiography belonged to the historiographical genre.