The funny and gratuitous dispute over the authorship of <em>Historia Verdadera</em> of the unmistakable Bernal Díaz del Castillo

Abstract

I devote this article to the analysis of the language used in the Historia verdadera by Bernal Díaz del Castillo and in the Cartas y Relaciones by Hernán Cortés in order to determine if there exists a relationship between both texts –as the anthropologist Duverger conjectures– which would allow us to establish with an acceptable degree of probability that both texts came from the same hand. For that, I will use a quantitative analysis (stylometry) and a qualitative analysis (corpus linguistics) from both texts.