The text, first published in 1920, provides a comprehensive review of Spanish and Portuguese romances of chivalry, with information on their origins in the Iberian Peninsula around the turn of the fifteenth century and how they went on to spread across Western Europe. Detailed notes, appendices and a bibliography are also included.

Excerpt from Spanish and Portuguese Romances of Chivalry: The Revival of the Romance, of Chivalry in the Spanish, Peninsula, and Its Extension, and Influence Abroad The following chapters represent, in an extended form, a course of six lectures on Spanish and Portuguese romances of chivalry delivered as the Norman MacColl lectures in the University of Cambridge during the Spring of 1917. Their chief object is to provide a comprehensive review of a remarkable popular literary movement which began in the Spanish Peninsula about the turn of the fifteenth century, spread over western Europe, including our own country, and having flourished and exercised a considerable influence for a time, died out so completely as to be well-nigh forgotten nowadays except by students. Various aspects of the movement, and a number of the problems connected with it, have been treated by different writers in modern times; their results have been taken into account, occasionally with corrections, in the following pages, and some new material has been contributed, especially in the later chapters. The early editions of these romances of chivalry, which are in most cases the only existing editions, are extremely rare; but the writer has had facilities for studying or examining the romances, either in Spanish libraries, or in the still richer collections, public or private, in England. The following sketch - the first to relate in connected form the fortunes of these romances in the various countries they invaded - is offered as some return for the advantages enjoyed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Did Spanish explorers really discover the sunken city of Atlantis or one of the lost tribes of Israel in the site of Aztec Mexico? Did classical writers foretell the discovery of America? Was Baja California really an island or a peninsula—and did romances of chivalry contain the answer? Were Amazon women hiding in Guiana and where was the location of the fabled golden city, El Dorado? Who was more powerful, Apollo or Diana, and which claimant nation, Spain or England, would win the game of empire? These were some of the questions English writers, historians and polemicists asked through their engagement with Spanish romance. By exploring England’s fanatical consumption of so-called books of the brave conquistadors, this book shows how the idea of the English empire took root in and through literature.

Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the Middle Ages,