ABSTRACT
Amadís de Gaula (1508) appealed to sixteenth-century Castilian readers, including women, because it re-interpreted the Arthurian world in ways uniquely suited to early modern Spain. Amadís has always been marked by cross-cultural borrowings and influences. The work tells the story of Amadís, a prince of Gaul, and Oriana, the daughter-heir to the throne of Britain, who work together to overcome obstacles to their marriage and unite their kingdoms under a joint rule. The legend first arose in Castile around 1350 in response to French Arthurian romances, especially the prose Lancelot?. 1 Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, a fifteenth-century nobleman from Medina del Campo, combined one or more medieval or ‘primitive’ versions of the legend with new material. 2 The work utilizes diction and narratological structures that recall medieval romances and chronicles, but its concept of the self, the state, and the roles of men and women points toward the modern. 3 Daniel Eisenberg characterizes Amadís as ‘a link between the medieval and the Renaissance periods’, and indeed, Montalvo’s Amadís contains courtly language typical of the late fifteenth century and encomia to the Catholic Kings. 4
