Rewritings, Sequels, and Cycles in Sixteenth-Century Castilian Romances of Chivalry: ‘Aquella inacabable aventura’ by Daniel Gutiérrez Trápaga

Abstract

 Reviews cities and will no doubt be of value to scholars of the Eternal City within both urban and Italian studies. U  C D P Rewritings, Sequels, and Cycles in Sixteenth-Century Castilian Romances of Chivalry: ‘Aquella inacabable aventura’. By D G T. Woodbridge: Tamesis. .  pp. £. ISBN –––– In this timely monograph on the oen mentioned, but far less studied, libros de caballerías of sixteenth-century Spain, Daniel Gutiérrez Trápaga carries out an admirable examination of two of the major cycles of printed Castilian romances of chivalry: the initial development of the Amadís series (namely, the opening six books in the cycle) and the first three texts in the Espejo de príncipes y caballeros line. If we consider the immense success of books of chivalry in the Peninsula, especially in the first half of the s—the author states at the outset some of the astonishing publication statistics, which reveal the existence of  distinct titles between  and , of which fully  are extant, in more than  editions in Castilian alone—we can appreciate the necessity of restricting his exploration of the genre and its exploitation of cyclicality, sequels, and intertexuality, but this should not lead us to underestimate the still sizeable corpus which Gutiérrez Trápaga has chosen to analyse and which he handles with considerable dexterity. e subtitle of this study, ‘aquella inacabable aventura’, is taken from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in whose first chapter the eponymous protagonist delights in the open-endedness of Jerónimo Fernández’s Belianís de Grecia (III–IV) (), and the promise of continued and continuous adventuring it brought with it. Taking this as a spur, Gutiérrez Trápaga amply demonstrates, over the course of three long chapters, the assumptions surrounding ‘unfinishedness’ in the Castilian chivalric tradition, the varying techniques employed in such continuations, and the responsibilities that the authors working in a given cycle—of which there were at least sixteen, encompassing forty-nine romances—felt towards their subject matter and their forebears. Such intertextual practices were, Gutiérrez Trápaga affirms, ‘a defining element in the poetics of a genre that prioritised narrative amplitude over closure and the creation of cycles over individual works’, and ‘the intertextual traits of the libros de caballerías linked these works with medieval romance and yet allowed the genre to change and innovate with respect to them’ (p. ). It is with the medieval inheritance that the body of the monograph begins; little of the ground that the author has necessarily to cover here is new, from the French origins of Castilian literature of chivalry to the significance of the Libro del caballero Zifar, which, at the turn of the fourteenth century, heralded ‘the creation of a Castilian romance tradition outside the three conventional Matters of French chivalric romance, albeit strongly influenced by Arthurian narrative models’ (p. ), but, as well as furnishing vital background to the researches presented later in the monograph, Gutiérrez Trápaga in this first chapter introduces and defines with clarity the key terms which will inform his subsequent analysis of the Amadís and Espejo MLR, .,   de príncipes texts, from the classical notions of imitatio, enarratio, and compilatio, to the Genettian ideas of the hypotext and hypertext, and Zumthor’s mouvance, which Gutiérrez Trápaga adopts to frame the highly deliberate and multifaceted rewritings which each of the works subsequently discussed will perform. Aer concluding Chapter  with a solid examination of Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo’s foundational Amadís de Gaula (c. ), and the same author’s continuation in the Sergas de Esplandián (before ), Gutiérrez Trápaga provides in the second chapter an illuminating account of the two branches of the cycle that Montalvo had consciously inaugurated. e two writers who constitute the ‘heterodox’ current of the Amadís sequels, Ruy Páez de Ribera () and Juan Díaz (), strove to introduce greater verisimilitude into Montalvo’s cycle and to promote a more explicitly Christian didacticism, but, in commercial terms, they foundered, whereas the more successful, ‘orthodox’ continuations by Feliciano de Silva heightened the adventures of Amadís’s successors and enhanced the...