The Spanish chivalric romance is a genre that has not received the attention it deserves from early modern scholars, in spite of the fact that romance was the dominant and most popular form of fiction among readers of its time. Daniel Gutiérrez Trápaga's monograph has begun to compensate for this neglect. He proposes that “the central concepts for the genesis and crafting of medieval romance survived and evolved as core elements of the genre” (10). He focuses on two cycles of sequels fostered by the Amadís de Gaula and the Espejo de príncipes y caballeros. Trápaga's book aims at understanding their intertextuality as a way of explaining the transformations of the genre of chivalric romance.
The book is structured in three chapters. Chapter 1 examines the medieval origins of the romance in French vernacular literature and developments in Castile that led to Amadís de Gaula. According to the author, one fundamental process for the transmission of literary elements (intertextuality) from a textual source would be a loose translation of the work into the new language. Today, this would perhaps be called interpretative translation, as opposed to literal or word-by-word translation (verbum pro verbo). This happened in phases over centuries in the transition from Latin into Old French. Fragments of old romances would be incorporated into the new, as seen, for example, in the works of Chrétien de Troyes and thirteenth-century Arthurian cycles. A similar process of intertextuality took place in the transition from French into Spanish romance, most notably Montalvo's Amadís.
In chapter 2, the author focuses on the sequels of the Amadís. Observing that the reception of Montalvo's romances happened differently for each sequel, he divides the resulting works of this process into two branches, which he calls the heterodox and the orthodox cycles. Páez de Ribera's Florisandro (1510) and Díaz's Lisuarte de Grecia (1526) are the romances examined in the first group. These represent a reaction against the idealistic paradigm of the Amadís: verisimilitude and didactics are prioritized, thus rejecting magic and favoring religious values. On the other hand, Feliciano de Silva's romances belong to the orthodox branch of the Amadís cycle. His works prioritized adventure, magic (the marvelous), and literary experimentation over morality by increasing the number and variety of characters and adventures.
Chapter 3 focuses on the cycle of Ortuñez de Calahorra's Espejo de príncipes y caballeros (1555), which represents a new paradigm of intertextuality, according to the author. The plot confirms the prioritization of adventures and entertainment over Christian values and moral didacticism. These priorities contributed to making Espejo the most successful chivalric romance of the second half of the sixteenth century. This final chapter complements Ortuñez's work with a study of the later products of this cycle in the continuations of Pedro de Sierra (Espejo II, 1580) and Marcos Martínez (Espejo III, 1587). Entertainment prevailed as the central guiding principle of Espejo II and its narrative, which preserved the appearance of a faithful continuation of the original Espejo I by continuing its plot lines. Love remains a central theme. Espejo III, which was the last chivalric romance printed in the seventeenth century, was a faithful sequel to the first two parts of the cycle. It continued the plot of Espejo II, thus paralleling the structural relationship between parts 1 and 2. Altogether, this cycle of romances enjoyed editorial success and exemplified the complexity of Spanish chivalric romance at the turn of the seventeenth century.
Scholars will welcome Gutiérrez Trápaga's study. He has set forth an interesting perspective/vision in terms of intertextuality and cyclical characteristics of a literary genre, using a significant number of romances, increasing our understanding of both writers and readers of sixteenth-century Peninsular literature. As he concludes, “the same could be done for other early modern works of genres such as the pastoral and picaresque novel.”
