The great success of sentimental fiction during the first half of the sixteenth century indicates that, although these kinds of works may have originally been addressed to an exclusive readership pre-eminently preoccupied with the cultivation of courtly ideals and behaviors, they quickly attracted a much more heterogeneous public. This community was composed not only of noblemen intent on discovering the emblems of a longed-for world which was swiftly waning, but also of a bourgeois audience that found in these texts the elements of a behavioral code that could improve their status. From this perspective, the editorial fortune of the translations of Diego de San Pedro's Cárcel de amor (1492) and Juan de Flores’ La historia de Grisel y Mirabella (1495?) epitomizes the processes of cultural appropriation that turned the printing press into an entrepreneurial industry that shaped Italian culture based on principles of profit and marketability. It could be said that when they first circulated in Italy, Carcer d'amore (1514) and L'Amorosa Historia di Aurelio e Isabella (1526), as Grisel y Mirabella was retitled, belonged to a particular genre.This genre was, in the Kressian sense, of “a particular social occasion that has a conventionalized structure”. It was the idealization of the values of courtly society, and these novelas sentimentales became utterances of a conventionalized discourse whose organization and purpose gave rise to the meaning of courtly life and set the basis for the ritualized social relationships within it.