Archipelagoes: Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel

4. Shores of Fiction: The Insular Image in Amadís and Cervantes

109 Buondelmonti’s account of his travels in the Aegean can be seen as the first of a genre, since explored in many different ways and cultivated well into the twentieth century. It confirms a model of modern travel writing inaugurated by Petrarch that is related to “the emergence of a subject that writes and records and memorializes the self,” in Cachey’s words, summarizing in a way the West’s response to the Aegean, constituting one of the first cultural inscriptions of subjectivity articulated through writing and geography .1 That coincidence between internal and external geographies is made possible by the inscription of the traveling and writing subject. In the Liber insularum archipelagi, this inscribed subjectivity gives the genre its shape, in the sense that it is the body of the traveler-compiler-cartographer that guarantees the text’s continuity, between island descriptions, and between texts and illustrations, maps and legends. The connection between geography and the writing of fiction through the mediation of a traveling subject in the isolario and the book of chivalry was manifest in many genres before, but in the fifteenth century a particular relation between chivalric fiction and cartography became evident. Historians of cartography and literature have noted as an oddity that the first mentions of the rediscovery of Ptolemy in the late medieval world would appear within chivalric romance. The cultural atmosphere from the beginning of the fifteenth century and continuing throughout the seventeenth century 4 QW shores of fiction The Insular Image in Amadís and Cervantes A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. —jean-françois lyotard, The Postmodern Condition 110 Shores of Fiction favored a relationship between chivalric fiction and its emphasis on geography and the discourse of cartography. “At the end of the fourteenth and in the first few decades of the fifteenth century,” writes Gautier Dalché, “the people of Florence could hear the works of poets writing in local idiom recited and declaimed on the banks of the Arno.”2 An established singer of chansons de geste and compiler of chivalric prose romances, Andrea da Barberino has recently been labeled the “missing link between the early Italian reworking of the chanson de geste and the Renaissance epic masterpieces.”3 Especially interesting to us is Barberino’s Il Guerrin Meschino, a chivalric prose romance composed at the end of the 1410s and the beginning of the 1420s, for scholars have pointed out Barberino’s wide use of Ptolemaic toponymy in it (though whether it has been taken from the text or from the maps remains undecidable). The Guerrin tells the story of a knight whose adventures take him to Constantinople; unfit to become a serious suitor to the emperor’s daughter because of his unknown identity, following a pattern closely related to both Byzantine and chivalric romance, he decides to travel the world. Chivalry, travel, and the interest in the East, represented by Constantinople, are, again, elements that bind the book of chivalry and cartography together. More interestingly, the connection reveals in Barberino, and in consequence, in Amadís and Buondelmonti, the popularity and permeability of cartographic discourse via chivalric fiction. The Guerrin links Italy and Spain early on, as it was translated and published in Seville in 1527 as Guarino Mezquino and thus entered the canon of books of chivalry, if linked to the Carolingian and not the Arthurian tradition, as is Amadís.4 As Karla Amozurrutia Nava notes, the identifiable itinerary of Guarino—which distances the book from the ambiguous, isolated spaces of other books of chivalry—is traced, however, according not just to mere geography, but to an interest in going through places notable for their religious or literary relevance, such as Santiago de Compostela and the Purgatory of Saint Patrick; places related to the Carolingian tradition in Italy, such as the cave of the Sybil; and places related to other cultures and the marvelous, such as the Mosque and Arch of Mohammed or Alexander’s Tree of the Sun and the Moon, directed always to the East.5 The coexistence of these symbolic and fictional places alongside a verifiable itinerary make the text more akin to the structure of the portolan in its perplexing mix of medieval and Renaissance Shores of Fiction 111 elements, of symbolic and real geographies...