Carmesina i el rei, de Ferran Soldevila. Edició i estudi

Abstract

One of the least known facets of the historian Ferran Soldevila (1894-1971) is his work on drama. From an early age he wrote several plays and, both before and after the war, managed to get some of them successfully enacted, namely Matilde d'Anglaterra (1923) and L'hostal de l'amor (1949). Written in the early 1960s and hitherto unpublished, Carmesina i el rei is a work in verse whose basic aim is to vindicate Peter II the Great (the prime focus of attention in recent years in his historiographical studies) as the most important medieval sovereign. Soldevila bases his text on a solid literary tradition, both national (Bernat Desclot, Ramon Muntaner, Curial e Güelfa) and international (Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, William Shakespeare) that contributed to mythologizing King Peter the Great. Therefore, with his work he popularized a symbolic figure and, at the same time, vindicated him from a historiographical and political perspective.