‘En este lugar se acaba esta rrazon’: Closing Down the Discourse in Performance and Script

Abstract

How, in oral performance, do we know that the end of the recitation or display has been reached? And how, too, in a manuscript context, can the end of a work be signalled to the reader? Such bringings-to-an-end were often loci of creativity, and I discuss the authorial ending (here termed ‘explicit’) and the scribal signing-off (here invoked as ‘colophon’), as well as scribal colonization of the authorial adieu; in all, an element which has often been dismissed as sterotyped, as fixed or as fossilized is shown to be in constant, often subversive, evolution. At the same time, I consider the typological information preserved in these end-ers (title, author, date, genre), their phylogeny (transmission of particular phrasing or style), and the implications for their use in a particular place and time—here, northern Spain, thirteenth–fifteenth centuries—and, as just one last thing, the manner in which they may transmit how scribes themselves considered the nature of the works they were copying.