On the Frontier of Sentimental Romance: The Dream-Allegories of James I and Santillana

ON THE FRONTIER OF SENTIMENTAL ROMANCE: THE DREAM-ALLEGORIES OF JAMES I AND SANTILLANA Alan Deyermond Queen Mary, University of London 1 The Linguistic Frontier: A Castilian or an Iberian genre? Some critics have, in recent years, doubted whether sentimental romance exists as a distinct and identifiable genre. Joseph J. Gwara, for example, refers to "the demise of the sentimental genre" and asserts that "a unified sentimental genre is a chimera" (1997: vii) . I do not share these doubts. Sentimental romance is, of course -like almost all genres- fuzzy at the edges: works that appear in one scholar's list are absent from another's, and the canon established in Keith Whinnom's influential bibliography includes, as Whinnom acknowledges (1983), a couple of works whose position in the genre is, at best, marginal.1 Yet fifteen or more of the romances included by Whinnom form a coherent and conscious generic grouping, as Regula Rohland de Langbehn's new book brilliandy and cogently demonstrates (1999). To say that is not to deny the need for redefinition of this or any other genre as new information and new ideas emerge. Indeed, Rohland de Langbehn's research has, 1 Whinnom says that "there have been numerous attempts to define the genre, but they have consistendy run into the kind of difficulties which perforce attend the definition of any similar phenomenon: on the one hand a brief listing of essential characteristics [...] will fail to exclude works which are not sentimental romances, while on the other hand, ifthe list ofbasic common features is any longer, there will always be one exception to falsify the generalization..." (1983: 5). La corónica 29.1 (Fall, 2000): 89-112 90Alan DeyermondLa corónica 29.1 , 2000 although she does not use the term "redefinition", been central to that process. The critical tradition has not gone astray in studying sentimental romance as a genre, but it has encouraged one major and widespread error: the belief that this genre is an exclusively Castilian phenomenon. It is easy to see how this belief arose: when a Galician (Juan Rodriguez del Padrón), a Portuguese (Dom Pedro), or a Catalan (the mysterious FAdC) wrote sentimental romance, they did so in Castilian (though the first version of Pedro's Sátira de infelice e felice vida, long since lost, was written in Portuguese, probably between 1445 and 1449). Arseni Pacheco's anthology ofCatalan sentimental fiction, published thirty years ago (1970) , did not receive the attention that it deserved (it was not, for instance, reviewed in either the Bulletin ofHispanic Studies ox Hispanic Review), and Whinnom's brief commendation (1983: 18) did not succeed in overcoming this neglect. It is true that not all of the five texts in Pacheco's anthology merit the term "sentimental romance", but two of them clearly do: the early and anonymous Historia de l'amatFrondino e de Brisona (e. 1400?) and Romeu Llull's Lo despropriament d'Amor (mid-fifteenth century?). Now that both of them are available in major scholarly editions (Annichiarico 1990 and Turró 1989), it is impossible to ignore their claims to attention (Turró's edition includes a long and important essay, "Context: l'autobiografia sentimental literaria", 1989: 9-90). The contemporary Valencian setting ofa third, much shorter text, Joan Rois de Corella's Tragèdia de Caldesa (probably 1458) , makes it an uncomfortable member of this generic family, but its other featuresjustify us in classifying it as a sentimental romance (Rico 1984, Badia 1989, and Cantavella 1997 and 1999) .2 To these three romances we should add the Catalan translation of Boccaccio's Elegia di madonna Fiammetta (Annichiarico 1983-87). Though there is no consensus on its dating (Annichiarico does not mention the question) , or on that ofthe Castilian translation, the Libro de Fiameta (Mendia Vozzo 1983), it is assumed that the Catalan version is substantially older. It may date from the first third of the fifteenth century (or even the last years of the fourteenth) ; if this is so, it (like Frondino e Brisona) belongs to the first stirrings of sentimental romance in the Peninsula. The Castilian translation, on the other hand, is more likely to have been made (independendy of the 2...