Glosses on the English reception of the Hispanic books of chivalry: imitations, annotated chronology and two notes

Abstract

This article complements a previous one published in this journal which attempted to outline, as an introduction to the study of The Essex Champion (c. 1694), an overview of the English reception of Peninsular romances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For this purpose, it revises the chronology of reproductive reception or translations provided there in the light of some very recently published studies on the topic; it adds to the chronology some titles of productive reception, that is, original English works which imitate or rework Hispanic chivalric literature, particularly a group of parodies inspired by Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which have not been paid attention so far; and it ends with two notes on such specific reception issues as the narrative ordering of the English Amadis series and the hypothetical existence of an unknown English translation which is mentioned in The Essex Champion.