Neoplatonic Love Logic in Feliciano de Silva’s Amadís de Grecia (1530)

Toward the beginning of Don Quijote’s opening chapter, Cervantes’s narrator emphasizes that the protagonist’s favorite chivalric romances are those written by “el famoso Feliciano de Silva” (the famous Feliciano de Silva), due to “la claridad de su prosa y aquellas entricadas razones suyas” (the clarity of their prose and their intricate narrative logic) (34).¹ To extend this tongue-in-cheek claim by the narrator, Cervantes playfully imitates Silva’s prose style in a manner that mimics rhetorical and conceptual density in Silva’s late works, particularly regarding the Spanish words and themes “razón” and “sinrazón.”² Amid Don Quijote’s famous mock-Inquisition episode in the protagonist’s personal library, his friends the village priest Pero Pérez and the barber Nicolás condemn to flames all of Silva’s chivalric romances, collectively, while sparing one of those works’ templates for creative imitation, Amadís de Gaula (Amadís of Gaul) (71–72). Here they name only one work by Silva: Amadís de Grecia (Amadís of Greece). In the priest’s mind, it stands for the whole and deserves condemnation for the same criterion that makes this book and Silva’s other works so commendable to their owner: “las endiabladas y revueltas razones de su autor” (their author’s devilish and convoluted narrative logic) (72). With a devilish wit of his own, Cervantes makes this priest character familiar with the ingenuity of Silva’s chivalric romances (including Amadís de Grecia) and ready to condemn them as heretical for that quality by which they delight aesthetically.

Less than a decade before Don Quijote’s appearance in print, the literary critic Alonso López Pinciano evaluates the Spanish chivalric-romance genre with a different eye to Silva’s Amadís de Grecia. Within Pinciano’s treatise in dialogue, Philosophia Antigua Poética (1596), the character Fadrique grants that such works provide serious aspects of characterization (“son graues en quanto a las personas”) (3:177). Yet, he criticizes them generally for a lack of verisimilitude, moral doctrine, and serious style (Pinciano 3:177–78; Sarmati 90–101, cf. 163–65). Amid this critique, Fadrique excuses only a few works of the genre, naming only two of them specifically: Amadís de Gaula (as with Cervantes’s village-priest character) and Silva’s Amadís de Grecia (3:178). The character “Pinciano” does not contest these claims. According to the criterion of verisimilitude, both of Pinciano’s exceptions (via Fadrique) seem rather surprising, since Amadís de Gaula and Amadís de Grecia each include highly fantastical elements. Indeed, that characteristic has precluded serious attention to Silva’s chivalric romances within critical surveys of developments in sixteenth-century fiction that look to Cervantes and the origins of the modern novel. Yet, the works themselves give us reason to take seriously the Cervantine claims for ingenious narrative logic in Silva’s chivalric romances, as well as Pinciano’s nod toward their strength in characterization.

This essay brings to light an implicitly philosophical dimension of the central love story in Silva’s Amadís de Grecia. Silva deploys the Neoplatonic ladder-of-love concept as a premise for narrative poetics: that is, affective reader engagement through interlaced plotlines and individual characterization with cumulative ideological implication. Silva’s innovation and its implications emerge only when we situate Amadís de Grecia within the intricate intertextual web of stories emanating from Amadís de Gaula (the work most celebrated by Don Quijote and spared from critique by both Cervantes’s priest and Pinciano). The sixteenth-century Spanish genre of chivalric romances in prose was defined by a network of imitation—within the texts themselves (Cuesta Torre 56–68) and in their material history as an editorial genre (Lucía Megías)—with Amadís de Gaula remaining the genre’s foundational touchstone in both regards. The direct sequels to Amadís de Gaula, known collectively as the Amadís cycle, were written largely by Silva, whose early works react to other early sequels. Works within the Amadís cycle...