Women and War in the Colonial Spanish American Epic

Renaissance epic poetry was defined among other things by a profound interweaving of war and love, a product of the intertwining between epic and romance. The eminent propositio of Orlando furioso (1532) presented it as such: “Le donne, i cavallier, l’arme, gli amori, / le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto” (“Of ladies, cavaliers, of love and war / of courtesies and of brave deeds I sing” ¹ ) (Ariosto 1975, I, 1–2), subjects that, although they could be seen as fundamental oppositions between male and female, love and war, romance and epic, reveal a rather complementary relationship, as rightly observed by J. Chimène Bateman (2007). ²