Iberian Chivalric Romance

"This collection of original essays examines the publication and reception history of sixteenth-century Iberian books of chivalry in English translation and explores the impact of that literary corpus on Elizabethan culture as well as its connections with other contemporary genres such as native English fiction, chronicle, and epistolary writing. The essays focus mainly on Anthony Munday's work as the leading translator as well as the two main Spanish sixteenth-century cycles-Le., Amadis and Palmerin-from a variety of critical approaches, including cultural studies, book history and reception, material history, translation, post-colonial criticism, and early modern Qender studies."--

Giving translations of Iberian chivalric Romance a centrality they have never before received, this collection explores their impact on Elizabethan culture and influence on other contemporary genres.

First Published in 2005. This book provides a comprehensive review of a remarkable popular literary movement which began in the Spanish Peninsula about the turn of the fifteenth century, spread over western Europe, including England, and having flourished and exercised a considerable influence for some time, died out so completely as to be almost forgotten. Many of the romances created by the movement are now extremely rare and so they are presented here in one volume for the benefit of scholars and general readers alike.

Imagining Iberia in English and Castilian Medieval Romance offers a broad disciplinary, linguistic, and national focus by analyzing the literary depiction of Iberia in two European vernaculars that have rarely been studied together. Emily Houlik-Ritchey employs an innovative comparative methodology that integrates the understudied Castilian literary tradition with English literature. Intentionally departing from the standard “influence and transmission” approach, Imagining Iberia challenges that standard discourse with modes drawn from Neighbor Theory to reveal and navigate the relationships among three selected medieval romance traditions. This welcome volume uncovers an overemphasis in prior scholarship on the relevance of “crusading” agendas in medieval romance, and highlights the shared investments of Christians and Muslims in Iberia’s political, creedal, cultural, and mercantile networks in the Mediterranean world.

Drawing from medieval chivalric culture, the prose romance was a popular early modern genre featuring stories of courtship, combat, and travel. Flourishing at the same moment as the growing English trade with the Eastern Mediterranean, prose romances adopted both Eastern settings and new conceptions of masculinity – commercial rather than chivalric, erotic rather than militant. Knights in Arms moves beyond the best-known examples of the genre, such as Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, to consider the broad range of texts which featured the Eastern Mediterranean in this era. Goran Stanivukovic highlights how eroticism within prose romances, particularly homoerotic desire, facilitated commercial, cross-ethnic, and cross-cultural interactions, shaping European knowledge and conceptions of the Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire. Through his careful examination of these lesser known works, Stanivukovic sheds important light on early modern trade, Mediterranean politics, and the changing meaning of masculinity in an age of commercial expansion.

Excerpt from Spanish and Portuguese Romances of Chivalry: The Revival of the Romance, of Chivalry in the Spanish, Peninsula, and Its Extension, and Influence Abroad The following chapters represent, in an extended form, a course of six lectures on Spanish and Portuguese romances of chivalry delivered as the Norman MacColl lectures in the University of Cambridge during the Spring of 1917. Their chief object is to provide a comprehensive review of a remarkable popular literary movement which began in the Spanish Peninsula about the turn of the fifteenth century, spread over western Europe, including our own country, and having flourished and exercised a considerable influence for a time, died out so completely as to be well-nigh forgotten nowadays except by students. Various aspects of the movement, and a number of the problems connected with it, have been treated by different writers in modern times; their results have been taken into account, occasionally with corrections, in the following pages, and some new material has been contributed, especially in the later chapters. The early editions of these romances of chivalry, which are in most cases the only existing editions, are extremely rare; but the writer has had facilities for studying or examining the romances, either in Spanish libraries, or in the still richer collections, public or private, in England. The following sketch - the first to relate in connected form the fortunes of these romances in the various countries they invaded - is offered as some return for the advantages enjoyed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.