Guía del lector del Quijote, 6th ed. (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1967), p. 42.
As translated by Eduardo Juliá Martínez, El renacimiento español (Zaragoza: Ebro, 1944), p. 81. Actually, what Bell originally wrote, in RHi, 80 (1930), 296, was that «the peasants listened to the romances of chivalry», a statement obviously inspired by the Quijote. The slight mistranslation is itself revealing.
The examples can easily be multiplied: Irving Leonard, Books of the Brave (Cambridge: Harvard, 1949), pp. 13, 20; Ángel Valbuena Prat, Historia de la literatura española, 8th ed. (Barcelona: Gili, 1968) I, 489; Martín de Riquer, Aproximación al Quijote, 3rd ed. (Barcelona: Teide, 1970), p. 19, Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the Persiles (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p. 13; with salutary doubts, Jole Scudiere Ruggieri, «Per uno studio della tradizione cavalleresca nella vita e nella cultura spagnola medioevale (I)», in Studi di letteratura spagnola (1964), p. 59. Indeed with the lone exception of Menéndez Pelayo, Orígenes de la novela, 2nd edición nacional (Madrid: CSIC, 1962), I, 461, to find someone who rejects this view we must go back to Diego Clemencín (see p. 992 of the reprinting of his edition of the Quijote, 2nd edition [Madrid: Castilla, 1966], whose direct acquaintance with a large number of romances of chivalry enabled him to speak with an authority which on the whole remains unsurpassed. (See my article «Don Quijote y los libros de caballerías: necesidad de un reexamen», included in this volume).
Elsewhere (notes 33 and 34 to Chapter II) I have given references to those scholars (Thomas, Krauss, Bataillon, Riquer, and Glaser) who have collected these attacks. I have only one note to add here, a scrap of information found in a forgotten work of eighteenth-century criticism, Francesco Henrion's Istoria critica e ragionata. Sull'origine, incontro generale, successiva persecuzione costante, exterminio, e rarità singolare di tutte l'Istorie o Romanzi de Cavalleria e Magia dei Secoli XV e XVI, come quelle della Tavola Redonda, di Amadis di Gaula, ec. Con la Biblioteca Italiana di tutte le Istorie predette, di cui son mancanti al presente i bibliografi, e le biblioteche e collezioni più scelte. E perciò offerta alla repubblica letteraria da... (Florence, 1794). On p. 76, he says that the romances of chivalry, and specifically the Amadís, were denounced at the Diet of Worms by Cardinal Girolamo Aleandro il Vecchio, a papal representative, as a force contributing to the Reformation. Citing a «Commentarius de Lutheranismo, Tom. I, Lib. I, p. 149, Ediz. II» (Johannes Cochlaeus' Commentaria... de actis et scriptis Martini Lutheri?), he adds «che in Vittemberga, prima residenza de Lutero, si facessero andare in giro con tanto credito i romanzi di cavalleria, e segnatamente quello di Amadis di Gaula per eccitare colla lettura de essi i cristiana ad avere in ludibrio le cose sacre e gli ordini religiosi».
Three considerations cast suspicion on this statement: the romances did not in fact have anything to do with the Reformation, the later critics of them do not associate them with Protestantism, and it seems incredible that Hispanists who have studied the documents connected with this event, so important for Carlos V, would not have noticed such a comment. Nevertheless, were it true, it explains admirably the moralist writers' constant protests against them, which began only three years later, with the publication of Vives' De institutione faeminae christianae (1524). Also see, on this point, the fascinating note of Julius Schwering, «Luther and Amadis», Euphorion, 29 (1928), 618-19, Thomas, pp. 217-18, Rodríguez Marín's «nueva edición crítica» of the Quijote, IX, 174, and p. 61, n. 20 of the second edition of Américo Castro's El pensamiento de Cervantes (Barcelona: Noguer, 1972).
Similarly, Jerónimo de San Pedro says, in the «Epístola proemial» to Volume I of his Caballería celestial (Amberes, 1554): «para que después deste pasto, como suelen algunos padres recitar a sus hijos lax patrañas delos caballeros de burlas [= fiction], les cuenten y hagan leer lax maravillas de lox guerreros de veras». This is no doubt the point of Cervantes' criticism implicit in the words of Dorotea, who «había leído muchos libros de caballerías» (I, 29), but who still does not know such an elementary fact as the location of Osuna (I, 30).
We may safely assume that adult members of the lower classes would even less have had the idle time in which to read these lengthy books, in an age when reading speed was far lower than today, nor could they afford the cost of illuminating to read them by. (See Rodríguez Marín, Quijote, IX, 58 and 63, for two texts which mention the time necessarily spent on them).
The predominance of youthful readers has been seen as more striking than it is through comparison with other genres, in which dedication to a very young patron is more exceptional. I have not in every case been able to determine the age of the recipient of the dedication at the time of publication of the first edition of the work, but the following figures, if not exact, will give a reliable picture: Luis de Córdoba and Cristóbal de Guardiola were both addressed as sons of their fathers and referred to as being of «tiernos años», Felipe (II) was 18; Rodrigo Sarmiento, Martín Cortés, and María de Austria, 23; John III of Portugal, about 24; Juan de la Cerda, 25; Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 26; Luis Cristóbal Ponce de León and Íñigo López de Aragón, 29; Mencía de Mendoza, 32; Pero Álvarez Osorio was almost certainly in his 30's; Charles de Lannoy, 36; Pedro Fajardo, 39; Diego López Pacheco, 42; Jorge, Duke of Coimbra, 45; Juan Vázquez de Avila could hardly have been less than 50; Diego de Deza, 67; Diego Hurtado de Mendoza «el Grande», 69.
If the anecdotes referred to in the following note concerning Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, the poet, are true, he would have been in his early 20's.
The
question of the age of the authors of the romances is neither as
relevant nor as easy to settle as that of the patrons, since the
authors are generally more obscure than their patrons, and authors
of many periods have written, for financial gain or other reasons,
books which were tangential to their own literary tastes. I
summarize briefly those cases in which there is any indication of
the author's age: Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra excluded
himself from the «ancianos»,
but was at least in his 20's; Marcos Martínez, author of
Part II of the Espejo de príncipes, confessed
himself to be, although a licenciado, of «tiernos
años». Jerónimo
López, in the prologue to Clarián de
Landanís, Part II, says that «dos causas me
movieron [to write this book]. La
primera, fallarme de aquellos negocios familiares que la cargada
edad suele consigo traer tan desocupado que tuve por mejor en esta
ocupacion honesta ocuparme, que no seguir aquellos apetitos que la
floreciente juventud a los de mi hedad suelen
traer». Oviedo was 41 when
Claribalte was published in 1519. Antonio de Torquemada,
author of Olivante de Laura (1564), was perhaps born about
1510, conjectures J. H. Elsdon, On the Life and Work of the
Spanish Humanist Antonio de Torquemada, University of
California Publications in Modern Philology, No. 20 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1937) p. 128; according to Latassa,
Fernando Basurto, author of Florindo (1530), fought with
distinction in the conquest of Granada. Pedro de Luján,
usually accepted as author of Silves de la Selva (1546),
probably was rather young. Feliciano de Silva might have been born
in 1492, which would mean that he was still writing romances in his
50's (E. Cotarelo y Mori, «Nuevas noticias biográficas
de Feliciano de Silva», BRAE, 13 [1926], 137). Silva
comments on his age in the prologue to Part IV of Florisel de
Niquea (cf. the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares,
or the words of Don Quijote in the final chapter).
Francisco Delicado was probably in his 50's when he published his editions of the Amadís and the Primaleón.
We know of various noble figures who owned copies of romances, such as Isabel la Católica (though not the indigenous Castilian ones), the contents of whose library are itemized by Diego Clemencín in his Elogia de la reina Católica Doña Isabel, Memorias de la Real Academia de la Historia, 6 (Madrid, 1821), pp. 431-81, Diego de Colmenares, the historian of Segovia, who owned a copy of Primaleón, noteworthy at so late a date (apud E. García Dini, «Per una bibliografía dei romanzi di cavalleria: Edizioni del ciclo dei "Palmerines"», in Studi sul Palmerín de Olivia. III. Saggi e richerche. [Pisa: Istituto di Letteratura Spagnola e Ispano-americana dell'Università di Pisa, 1966], p. 31), and Pedro Guerrero, Archbishop of Granada, who owned a copy of Amadís (see Juan Martínez Ruiz, «La biblioteca de don Pedro Guerrero», in Actas del Tercer Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas [Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1970], p. 598), Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (Sir Henry Thomas, Spanish and Portuguese Romances of Chivalry [Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1920], p. 80), to whom are attributed two attacks on Feliciano de Silva, that in the «Carta del Bachiller de Arcadia», and the «Carta de D. Diego de Mendoza en nombre de Marco Aurelio, a Feliciano de Silva», both of which may be found in Paz y Melia's Sales españolas, 2nd ed. by Ramón Paz, BAE, 176 (Madrid: Atlas, 1964), pp. 35 and 85-86 (the authorship of these is questioned by R. Foulché-Delbosc, «Les oeuvres attribuées a Mendoza», RHi, 32 [1914], 13-15 and 20, whose opinions are copied without comment by A. González-Palencia and E. Mele, Vida y obras de Don..., III [Madrid, 1943], 205-06 and 223, among the surviving lists of whose books I find only a vague reference to a «Profecías de Merlín», ibid., III, 5 42), and the Duke and Duchess of Calabria, whose considerable library, including many romances of chivalry, was given to the monastery of San Miguel de los Reyes (Valencia); an inventory of this library was published in the RABM, 4 (1874), 7-10, 21-25, 38-41, 54-56, 67-69, 83-86, 99-101, 114-17, and 132-34. (For further information on the Duke of Calabria, see Claribalte in the Appendix).
One discussion of this topic can be found in the speech of Juan Menéndez Pidal upon his reception into the Real Academia (Madrid, 1915). A sizable bibliography of contemporary accounts of chivalric practices and festivities may be found in Jenaro Alenda y Mira, Relaciones de solemnidades y fiestas públicas (Madrid, 1903); some of these are accessible in recent reprintings.
Such as, for example, those of the second Lisuarte de Grecia (Amadís, Book VIII) or Felixmarte de Hircania.
See the discussions of Rodríguez Marín, Quijote, IX, 9-19, and Gracián, Criticón, ed. M. Romera-Navarro, III (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), 197-98 and notes. Dalmiro de la Válgoma y Díaz-Varela, in the introduction to his Mecenas de libros. Su heráldica y nobleza, I ([Burgos, the author?], 1966), is primarily concerned with dedications as biographical sources.
Theodore Beardsley, Jr. has pointed out, in his important bibliography of Hispano-Classical Translations Printed between 1482 and 1699 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 1970), p. 121, how the whole question of Golden Age patronage has hardly been explored. Yet for those who would dismiss these dedications as purely formal and not indicating anything about the tastes of their recipients, it is revealing to compare the list in the Appendix with the dedications recorded in Beardsley's study, which can be taken with, I believe, less cause for objection as indicating patrons of learning. There is surprisingly little overlap, which suggests that both the authors of romances of chivalry and the translators of classical works exercised at least a modest amount of care in choosing a patron.
A knotty problem is the question of the sex of the readers of the romances, or more specifically, whether or to what extent their readers were members of the fair sex. Besides the sources already referred to, there are in the moralist writers references to female readers; some romances are dedicated to women, and in other cases, such as Part III of the Espejo de príncipes, the author directs himself to them. There are also other contemporary references, usually derogatory ones, to women as readers of romances; Santa Teresa's comment on her mother, quoted by Menéndez Pelayo, Orígenes, I, 459, n. 1; Oviedo, Memorias, ed. cit., pp. 110, 234-35; Cervantes, El vizcaíno fingido, p. 530 of the edition of Francisco Ynduráin, BAE, 156 (Madrid: Atlas, 1962); Guzmán de Alfarache, II, iii, 3 (p. 787 of the edition of Francisco Rico in La novela picaresca española, I [Barcelona: Planeta, 1967]; for an earlier period, Hernán Mexía, in Menéndez Pelayo, Antología de poetas líricos, edición nacional, II (Madrid: CSIC, 1944), 335.
Without being able to resolve this question completely, two comments can be made: I have already noted elsewhere (n. 13 to the introduction of my edition of the Espejo de príncipes) that not all the romances of chivalry are identical, and that certain later ones, in which the love element is more pronounced, may have been directed to a female audience. Beyond this, however, it should be kept in mind that whatever influence women may have had in the field of contemporary secular literature was not restricted to the romances of chivalry alone, and that one should indeed go with leaden feet in qualifying the leadership of the romances as exceptionally feminine. In the «courts» with a literary orientation the women played a very active role, and we find such works as the Diana enamorada, the Selva de aventuras and the translation of Strapanarola dedicated to women. In this case, of course, the participation of women is even more obviously an upper-class phenomenon.