FERNÁN PÉREZ DE GUZMÁN (1447)

Poet, moralist and historian, author of the first important work on history and historiography in Spanish whose historical portraits of his contemporaries have earned him the title of the Spanish Plutarch.

A member of a distinguished family, a nephew of the poet and historian Pedro López de Ayala and the uncle of the poet the Marqués de Santillana he devoted himself to letters after being imprisoned by Alvaro de Luna, a counsellor to King John II of Castilla.

Although his poetry went through many editions it is not as a poet that he is chiefly remembered. His fame rests on his Mar de historias (1512, Sea of history), a collection of biographies of emperors, philosophers and saints, and primarily on the third part of this collection which contains historical portraits of 33 prominent men (and one woman) from the reigns of Henry III to John II (the period 1390 to 1454). He knew many of the people he described and although the portraits are based on rhetorical models, the prose is clear, economical and precise, capturing a man´s personality in a few pages.

Equally important is the preface to the third part of the Mar in which Pérez de Guzmán does for history what his nephew Santillana did for poetry by providing the first examination in Spanish of the theory of history and the responsibility of the historian, concerning himself with the problems of historical accuracy, the proper prose for a historian and with the problem of fame as a moral force in history.