ABSTRACT
By the time Miguel de Cervantes evoked Amadís of Gaul as his hero’s primary target for imitation in Don Quixote Part I (1605), the romance of chivalry had lost much of its cultural cachet in Spain. 1 Beatriz Bernal’s Cristalián was among the last group of new romances to emerge in print, and what little chivalric publication continued during the reign of Felipe II was largely confined to editions of already known romances. 2 In Cervantes’s context, it was perhaps not possible to view books of chivalry as sacred objects capable of sustaining narrative authority, as Bernal does in her proemio. For Cervantes, chivalric romance is indeed a relic, but not an authoritative one. The reading of chivalry, transgressive in Bernal, becomes risible in Cervantes. Indeed, if one considered only Don Quixote’s too-literal reading practices, it would be logical to conclude that Cervantes expresses a categorical denouncement of chivalric romance in his novel. The mad knight, however, is not the only reader of chivalric fiction in Don Quixote, nor is he the final arbiter of what romance tropes mean or how they can be used.
