The macabre banquet: anthropophagic laughter in the Gran Conquista de Ultramar
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Abstract
The aim of this paper is to analyse the way in which the Gran Conquista de Ultramar deals with the narration of the anthropophagic acts attributed to Christians during the Crusades. To this purpose, the textual tradition from which the chronicle draws its materials is briefly considered, and then we proceed to examine the particularities of the episode in the Castilian version, where the event is presented as a festive and joyous banquet celebrated by the Tafurs, the poorest among the crusaders. The macabre humour that pervades the episode stands out as its most notable feature, but not the only noteworthy one. The analysis makes it possible to highlight how a complex text, such as the GCU, articulates history and fictional procedures in its representation of past events, allowing us to place it in an intermediate and crucial position in the process of the emergence and early development of fictional prose in vernacular language.
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