Chivalry, Reading, and Women's Culture in Early Modern Spain: From Amadís de Gaula to Don Quixote by Stacey Triplette

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 204-208
Author(s):  
Simón Andrés Villegas
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Women's Culture

Cervantes

Kinesic Humor ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 132-152
Author(s):  
Guillemette Bolens
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Single Action ◽  
La Mancha ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Limpieza De Sangre

Dynamic shifts in tonicity and tempo are numerous in Don Quixote. This chapter focuses, however, on a single action: Montesinos explains how he cleaned blood from Durandarte’s heart with a handkerchief. This narrated movement requires an analysis that takes into account the historical context in which Cervantes was writing, and the threat of censorship in early modern Spain. The text conveys a type of humor that overflows readers’ reception with sensorimotor over-specifications, thereby triggering perceptual simulations that implicitly debunk the validity of key social metaphors. Two such metaphors call for attention. The first is la limpieza de sangre, the name of an ideology relative to blood purity; the second is the metaphor of the stain, la mancha, prominent in the same ideology. A close analysis of reiterated lexical choices suggests that Cervantes was reclaiming in his work the pluricultural reality of the Spain in which he was living.

scholarly journals Chivalry, Reading, and Women's Culture in Early Modern Spain

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacey Triplette
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
Women's Culture ◽  
Chivalric Romance ◽  
Women As Readers

The Iberian chivalric romance has long been thought of as an archaic, masculine genre and its popularity as an aberration in European literary history. Chivalry, Reading, and Women’s Culture in Early Modern Spain contests this view, arguing that the surprisingly egalitarian gender politics of Spain’s most famous romance of chivalry has guaranteed it a long afterlife. Amadís de Gaula had a notorious appeal for female audiences, and the early modern authors who borrowed from it varied in their reactions to its large cast of literate female characters. Don Quixote and other works that situate women as readers carry the influence of Amadís forward into the modern novel. When early modern authors read chivalric romance, they also read gender, harnessing the female characters of the source text to a variety of political and aesthetic purposes.

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