Conclusion

Summary

The success and pan-European circulation of sixteenth-century Castilian romances of chivalry, the libros de caballerías, were greatly fostered by the printing press and the imprint format. However, these material factors do not explain the intrinsic traits of the genre, as they neglect its literary aspects. Let us not forget that, whilst the format and new means of reproduction made chivalric romances more readily available, ultimately the genre's popularity derives from its stories which captivated audiences and readerships. Rewriting, the making of sequels, and the development of cycles are essential qualities of a genre that fulfilled the audience's and printers’ demands for new romances. These traits also had an important function in the structure, narrative, and poetics of the genre. This book has shown that in order to study these features it is necessary to understand the history of the genre and its literary aspects, whilst providing a more nuanced perspective of the transition between manuscript culture and the era of the print.

The generic configuration, narrative traits, and intertextual practices of the libros de caballerías owe much to its original model: medieval chivalric romance. The genre originated in the translations of Latin historiographical works into French in the twelfth century. Therefore, from its inception the genre resulted from an intertextual practice, translation. The first romances were crafted following the rhetorical concept of imitatio, another intertextual activity that was used as a model for medieval translation. Imitatio, as a procedure to handle a hypotext, encouraged changes to a hypotext in order to adapt it to a new reception context. This is the origin of the constant practice of rewriting which produced and modified countless chivalric romances from the twelfth century onward. The existence of a hypotext legitimised the hypertext in the first romances, those of Antiquity, since imitatio was based on the existing Latin accounts and their auctoritates. Later romances obtained their validity by mimicking the system of auctoritas of the Latin hypotext in order to create a fiction of authority and authorship. Therefore, romance embraced its textual origins and, thus, obtained historical validity for itself, regardless of the degree of transformation of the original.