and beauty, and this becomes notoriously the case, as we shall see in the next section, when the historian discusses the literary qualities of the Galician language. However, there is a further function to the use of a gendered rhetoric here, beyond its use as a marker of the historian’s unstable authorial status as a writer of regionalist history. Using gendered images in historical writing was also a question of codification, a discursive strategy with which to allure and unite a male elite of practitioners, who in turn formed the prospective readership of history books. As the work of Michèle Le Doeuff has analysed at length (2002, 2003), the discursive codification of Western knowledge has been historically cut across by the use of gender metaphors, serving as much a generative as a communal function. While these gendered ‘forms of the learned imagination’ (2002: 171) drive the intellectual enterprise forward by helping the author lighten the darkness of abstract thought, they also play a part in the strengthening of bonds between the philosopher and his desired readership, thus contributing to the carving out of an enclosed imaginary, a ‘psychotheoretical situation’ (2002: 14), that is both attuned and responsive to a readership of male peers. Similarly, as Le Doeuff has explained, references to assiduous research and painstaking processes of historical verification served to ease practitioners’ passage into the increasingly professionalized worlds of sociology, medicine or history; and it was through strategic recourse to a gender rhetoric that new practitioners could ‘work a seduction’ (2002: 12) on this new erudite elite, while simultaneously displaying their methodological prowess. For aspiring historians such as the young González Besada, working in the still precarious field of Galician historiography, the stakes were doubly high, as historical practices put in the service of Spain’s emerging regionalisms were constantly under attack by centralist Spanish positions (see my discussion of the polemic between Antonio Sánchez Moguel and Manuel Murguía in the Introduction). Constant references to neutrality and methodological rigour therefore fulfilled a self-protective and preventative function for a new generation of regionalist historians in Galicia, whilst they simultaneously enforced what could be termed a ‘reactively hyper-masculine’ structure for historical practice in a subaltern context that manifested itself, as we shall see in the next section, in the use of tantalizing references to the female body and in overt protestations of scientific method. Let us examine, for example, González Besada’s own admission of this deeply felt methodological anxiety when writing Galician literary history:
Hasta ahora caminé de broma ni más ni menos que rapazuelo alegre en día de suelta, pero ahora preciso presentarme grave como un teólogo profundo, y sério como dómine de aldea. Bien sabe Dios que los siento, pero las circunstancias me obligan, y por mi honor, que sólo en pensar lo que me espera, tiemblo como estudiante en víspera de exámenes. Depongo pues mi estilo llano y corriente para elevarme á las serenas regiones de la discusión, que por mi vida tengo de habérmelas con graves y muy sesudos varones. (1887: 120)
(So far I have proceeded in jocular vein, just like the carefree child given a day’s break, but I now need to present myself as grave as a profound theologian, and as serious as a village schoolmaster. God knows I am sorry for this, but the circumstances oblige me. And I swear by my honour that just thinking about what awaits me makes me tremble like a student on the eve of his exams. Thus, I abandon my plain, casual style, and elevate myself to the serene levels of argument, for, by Jove, I shall have to face up to some very serious and brainy men.)
That the literary historian should purport to worry about the methodological robustness of his work and give vent to this anxiety almost in chivalric terms is explicated by the raised stakes of historical practice in turn-of-the-century Spain, when the rise of peripheral regionalisms had brought debates on historical methodology to centre stage. With economic and politic modernization timidly under way, the professionalization of cultural writing practices and academic disciplines developed apace by way of setting standards of quality and procedures that served to demarcate professional boundaries. Disciplines such as Geography, Psychology or Economy started to acquire autonomous status in academic institutions across Europe, while fields such as Sociology were attracting the kind of proto-systematic attention (mainly in the works of eclectic theorists such as Émile Durkheim, Max Weber or Georg Simmel) that would result in its gradual institutionalization throughout the twentieth century. In her study of the gendering of historical practice in late nineteenth-century Europe, Bonnie G. Smith explains how writing historical works went from being the recreation of jurists, theologians and bureaucrats whose ‘practices and impulses were expressed in a variety of ways that had not been reduced to a formal method’ (Smith, 1998: 19), to becoming an increasingly apt way of legitimizing one of the most commanding concepts to come out of nineteenth-century conceptual revolutions: the nation-state. To practise History therefore was to participate in the politically relevant process of sanctioning an increasingly powerful structure. The emergence of neo-positivist methodologies for historical practice, which usually rested on the notion that no deserving historical understanding could be achieved without laborious empirical research, needs to be understood, therefore, as a regulatory phenomenon. In this context, the new definition of History as science, and the use of neo-positivist methodologies as an admission requirement into an elite of validated practitioners, bore the significance of a power-apportioning exercise. As Bonnie G. Smith has argued, nowhere as in the field of history were these definitional procedures more acute, as the growing division between a trade of ‘scientific’ historians and a host of amateur practitioners gradually acquired the significance of a vital differentiation between the professional and the menial, as two distinctly gendered spheres. In the interactive context of Galician–Spanish relations, charges of unprofessionalism, partisanship and lack of method in historical practice often came in the form of accusations coloured by a gendered rhetoric. Only a year after the publication of González Besada’s Historia crítica, for example, Antonio Sánchez Moguel delivered his public tirade against the ‘vanidad regionalista’ (regionalist vanity) of the ‘nuevos historiadores de Galicia’ (new Galician historians) (Sánchez Moguel, 1888: 35, 37), as opposed to the ‘fortaleza, la valentía’ of the ‘gloriosos defensores de la verdad histórica’ (the strength and valour of the glorious defenders of historical truth) (9).
González Besada’s claim to elevate himself to ‘the serene levels of argument’ in order to be able to deal with ‘some very serious and brainy men’ can therefore be read as a protective gesture against this gendered framework for historiographical practice during the early stages of Galician regionalism. Foremost among the ways in which González Besada tried to shield himself from attacks, such as those by Sánchez Moguel above, is his anxiety at every turn to give evidence of archival research. When discussing competing historical accounts, for example, he will meticulously use them to validate his own, while seldom missing the chance to mention the high degree of self-discipline that knowledge of different sources demands of the committed historian. Aware of the possibility that he may be refused entry into the increasingly prestigious circle of historical scientificism, González Besada makes a series of explicit nods to historical practices such as source criticism, which had been spearheaded by historians such as Leopold von Ranke in the first third of the nineteenth century. The following is one example:
Monumento probable del siglo XII es el canto de Gonzalo Hormiguez, y aun más que probable pudiéramos decir, seguro; y si comparamos ambos documentos, no sale ciertamente muy medrada la pretensión de antigüedad. Mas, no se diga que abuso de mis opiniones y renuncio desde luego al cotejo de ambos textos para apelar á otro de fecha indudable. (1887: 165)
(Gonzalo Hormiguez’s piece most probably dates back to the twelfth century; and rather than ‘probably’ we could well say ‘certainly’; and if we compare both documents, any pretensions to antiquity are not precisely strengthened. But let it not be said that I overstate my opinions, so I now leave aside the comparison of the two texts in order to turn to another one, the date of which is beyond doubt.)
Performing erudition was of capital importance for any historian wishing to distance himself from historical practices that were fast becoming substandard. At stake was the historian’s access to, as Bonnie G. Smith writes, ‘a brotherhood, a republic, a peer group’ (Smith, 1998: 103). For a writer of Galician history in the late nineteenth century, entering this
