A premonition of pastoral inAmadís de Gaula

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: AMADÍS DE GAULA [G. ORDÓÑEZ DE or RODRÍGUEZ DE MONTALVO]CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, MIGUEL DE (1547–1616) DON QUIJOTEMONTALVO, GARCI ORDÓÑEZ DE or RODRÍGUEZ DE (c.1440–before 1505?)PASTORAL/PASTORAL NOVELROMANCES/NOVELS OF CHIVALRYSPAIN — LITERATURE — MEDIEVAL PERIOD — PROSE Notes 1. Thus in the earlier standard histories of the Spanish pastoral romance by J. B. Avalle-Arce and F. López Estrada, and most recently by A. Solé-Leris, The Spanish Pastoral Novel (Boston 1980), 26. Of course, as a literary phenomenon which spanned the Ancient world, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, pastoral had other forms and phases, of great richness and complexity. I am not concerned here with mediaeval bergerie, but with the Arcadian version, the ‘abstracted love-melancholy, played out in a pastoral world of the imagination’, as Helen Cooper puts it in Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (Ipswich and Totowa, N.J. 1977), 100. Sannazaro's Arcadia was the model. Love, ‘almost invariably rejected, miserable and self-regarding’, is the primary characteristic of Renaissance Arcadian pastoral (105). She remarks in her Introduction (note 4 on p. 214) that ‘apart from a couple of works by Boccaccio that contain very little true pastoral material nothing resembling the pastoral romance was written during the Middle Ages’. 2. See Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (London 1953), 195ff. 3. All quotations are from Amadís de Gaula, ed. E.B. Place, II (Madrid 1962). Roman figures refer to the chapter, Arabic ones to the page. 4. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (New York 1965), 352. 5. One of the best accounts of this ‘escapist’ aspect is in Peter V. Marinelli, Pastoral (London 1971), 57ff. 6. In Part II, Chapter 67. Where Don Quixote's imitation of the Peña Pobre episode is concerned, it goes briefly pastoral after the final decision to imitate Amadís rather than Roland (Pt. I, Ch. 26). His writing verses to his lady on trees is more of a bucolic than a chivalric habit. Cf. Garcilaso, Eclogue III, sts. 30–31.