Gendering Action in Iberian Chivalric Romance

Abstract

edieval Iberian chivalric romances offer countless possibilities to construct gender in diverse guises. In these romances we repeatedly encounter heroines who, in spite of the restrictions imposed on them, textually perform, and thus exhibit to the reader, the ambiguity and problematic nature of the female speaking subject. As E. Jane Burns cogently argues in her analysis of Old French texts, “even the most misogynous of medieval literary texts, where a long-standing tradition figures woman’s body as the precondition for and guarantor of male intellectual, sexual, and chivalric prowess, can be seen to reveal repeatedly how women’s bodies and the voices issuing from them can resist the constructions that contain and define them.”1 Among the chivalric romances composed in the Iberian Peninsula there are two that very visibly epitomize this concept of “bodytalk” or resistant doubled discourse: Tirant lo Blanc, composed in Catalan (or Valencian) by Joanot Martorell between 1460 and 1464, although not printed until 1490;2 and the more obscure female-authored Cristalian de Espana,3 published in 1545 by Beatriz Bernal.4 We deem useful a comparison between these two romances because the first text might have inspired the latter. Beatriz Bernal most likely had read Tirant lo Blanc and effected a rewriting of some of Martorell’s episodes as well as a refashioning of the genre of the chivalric romance. Consequently, the progression from the model to the sequel can be productively scrutinized. In addition, Don Cristalian de Espana, since it is the only known femaleauthored Iberian chivalric romance,5 adds a unique and essential dynamic to the discussion of how action is gendered in the chivalric genre. According to “masculinist”6 paradigms explicitly or implicitly present in chivalric romances, the knight is the doer, the agent, or the acting partner while the lady is passive and, therefore, does not engage in any action. This gendered reading, however, does not apply to the M