In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Creating Empty Spaces: Adventure, Yermo and Desert Islands in Amadís De Gaula and Sergas de Esplandián
  • Wendell P. Smith, Guest Editor

The idea that Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo responded to the discoveries of Christopher Columbus in his revision of Amadís de Gaula and creation of Sergas de Esplandián is not new. In Books of the Brave (1949), Irving Leonard argued that the description of the California of the Amazons in Las Sergas de Esplandián was inspired by Columbus’s voyages (39; see also Fogelquist 213–14). In 1956 María Rosa Lida de Malkiel asserted that the greater frequency and importance of islands in the geography of Book IV of Amadís “apunta[n] al influjo de los Descubrimientos” (413 n13). The scholars who have made this connection have noted a change in the text’s depiction of space in Book IV. In particular, the description of the Ínsola de la Torre Bermeja ruled by the giant Balán, described as “la más frutífera de todas las cosas, assí frutas de todas naturas como de todas las más preciadas y [End Page 259] estimadas especias del mundo”, led Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua to note in his 1991 edition of Amadís, “Nos encontramos ante un espacio diferente del de los primeros libros” (1651 n3). The task of this article will be to describe this new and different space of adventure that Rodríguez de Montalvo creates for the knights of Amadís and continues in Sergas, to propose a case for its sources in reception of fifteenth-century explorations, and to theorize a way in which the updating of Castilian chivalry in these texts responds to the intellectual debates created by the early phases of Castilian empire.

In connection with the spices of Balán’s island, Cacho Blecua observed in his introduction that Columbus’s letters are an important source for understanding space in Rodríguez de Montalvo’s fiction.1 The perspective of this study, however, will be limited to using Columbus’s writings to pry open the late fifteenth-century Iberian conception of geography in Amadís and Sergas. The shadow of Columbus hangs over my project, but it will not be its principal focus. Instead, we will examine a broader canvas of the processes of imperial expansion that had been unfolding for quite some time prior to 1492. A closer inspection of Lida de Malkiel’s article casts light on this focus: by “influencia de los Descubrimientos” she means that the description of space in Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Amadís responds to “los relatos geográficos medievales, actualizados por las navegaciones de portugueses y españoles” (412).2 Instead of looking for evidence in Amadís and Sergas for the moment when reception of “The Discovery” of 1492 occurred, we will propose another year as the epoch-making moment when the intellectual foundations of the space of Amadís and Sergas and Columbus’s project crystallized: 1435. In that year, Alfonso de Cartagena defended the right of the sovereigns of Castile to ownership of the Canary Islands at the Council of Basel. His Allegationes, identified by Robert Brian Tate as “el comienzo de [End Page 260] la empresa colonial castellana”, argued against Portuguese claims to the same archipelago (57). In it, Cartagena employed two justifications for Castilian territorial expansion that would, in later centuries, come to be identified as the neo-Gothic thesis and the res nullius argument. My contention is that, although there are many parallels to the writings of Columbus in Amadís and Sergas, these two arguments ultimately guide its conception of the chivalric space of adventure. We will examine the implications of 1435 in greater detail below.

The concept of space in Amadís has received critical attention recently. Simone Pinet’s Archipelagoes: Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel, touches on my project in ways too numerous to adequately cover in the space allowed here. Pinet’s elucidation of the many correspondences between the medieval and early Renaissance geographic genre of the island book, or isolario, and the spaces of knightly adventure in Amadís serves as a foundation...

pdf

Share