1 - From Arthur to Amadís: Medieval Romance Cycles and the Foundation of the libros de caballerías

Summary

Sixteenth-century Castilian chivalric romances have their origins in medieval vernacular literature. Chivalric romance bloomed in French during the twelfth century. Soon, chivalric romance transcended its geographical and linguistic constraints, developing into one of the central cultural manifestations of vernacular literature in all of Western Europe. A multiplicity of texts and versions of romances were produced and copied during the Middle Ages and beyond this period. To this day, the influence of chivalric romance remains central to a variety of fictional and narrative genres and media, such as novels, films, comic books, and videogames, to name the most evident.

This chapter explores the French origins of medieval chivalric romance and its development in Castile, all the way to the printed sixteenth-century romances of chivalry, started by Amadís de Gaula. Castilian romances of chivalry owe much to Old French Arthurian romance (Alvar 2002). This exploration of medieval romance is not a detailed account of French or medieval romance. Instead, it focuses selectively on those Arthurian romances that allow us to trace the reshaping of the genre. In particular, it emphasises the influence of those romances and cycles in the development of the Castilian romance medieval tradition that eventually led to Amadís. This romance became the first libro de caballerías. It had unprecedented success in its late fifteenth-century version by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, which encouraged the creation of new romances throughout the sixteenth century. As I will show, Montalvo's Amadís shares many similarities with French Arthurian romances and this work is the result of rewriting aimed at creating a sequel and establishing a cycle, in imitation of the Arthurian cycles. This chapter will provide a point of reference and comparison in the medieval tradition in order to understand the development of intertextual notions, mouvance and practices of rewriting, continuations, and cycles in sixteenth-century Castilian romances of chivalry beyond Montalvo's works.

Medieval French romance and Arthurian romances

The term ‘romance’ derives from the Old French phrase ‘mettre en romanz’, which describes the translation of Latin works, especially heroic accounts, into vernacular languages for the amusement of the nobility (Parkes 1991; Rubio Tovar 1997: 238). Translations of this variety surged in the twelfth century, particularly in French-speaking kingdoms and later all over Western Europe (Wright 1997).