11/09/2008
Vitoria-Gasteiz, 11th September 2008.- The
writer and historian José Luis Corral attributes the current success of
the historical novel to “the interest and desire of people to discover
history through literature”. Corral, who will be giving a talk this
evening at the Cathedral of Santa María, also claims that readers wish
to approach historical events from a perspective that has not been
“manipulated or distorted”.
José Luis Corral will be commencing a new season of “Encounters with
the Cathedral” this evening organised by the Santa María Cathedral
Foundation. The talk, entitled “The imagined Middle Ages. Gothic
cathedrals in the historical novel”, will start at 8 p.m. in the
portico. Free entry until full capacity reached. The author-historian
from Aragon is opening a programme that the Foundation aims to dedicate
to the historical novel.
Introduced by his colleague and friend Toti Martínez de Lezea, Corral
said he was “fortunate to be enjoying three privileges today: being in
Vitoria, being in the Cathedral of Santa María among friends, and being
able to tell people stories of Gothic cathedrals”. Two years after his
first visit to Vitoria’s Cathedral, he referred to the guided tour
programme as a “revolutionary project in Heritage Management” because
it “allows people to see the work being carried out beyond the fences”
and “see what is being done with everyone’s money”.
Corral, who is also a lecturer in medieval history and
director of the History Workshop at the University of Zaragoza, will
explain this afternoon what led men to build Gothic cathedrals in the
second half of the 12th Century; how intellectuals made the most of
their education to influence the world’s understanding through
buildings; and how historians and novelists explain to people what a
Cathedral is through a novel.
When asked about the boom of the historical novel in recent years in
Spain, with a multitude of books topping the bestsellers lists, Corral
said that many historians made the mistake of “turning their back on
good writing for a long time”. In his opinion, “some of them have taken
care to write well, but they’ve done so in a biased and manipulative
way; twisting and purposefully misleading the reader”. For this reason,
he added, people want to discover history through literature but
without being manipulated.