Spanish romances of chivalry and history. Another look at a dialogue from the prologues of Montalvo and Feliciano de Silva

Abstract

The condition of the books of chivalry with respect to historical truth was formally raised from the prologue of the inaugural work of the genre in the printed tradition. Subsequently, it was one of the axes of the subsequent debate, in a moral key. And from there it prevailed in a long critical tradition, leaving another aspect in the dark, on which this article focuses: that of the problems raised by the need to establish an acceptable poetics for an extensive story in Romance prose. From this perspective, a review of the relationships established by the books of chivalry with the different modalities of historiography is proposed, at a time when the historical genre is also in a process of renewal since the initial decades of the 16th century.