Isabel la Católica owned copies of Merlín, Demanda del Santo Grial, and Lanzarote (Diego Clemencín, «Ilustraciones sobre varios asuntos del reinado de Doña Isabel la Católica, que pueden servir de pruebas a su Elogio», Memorias de la Real Academia de la Historia, 6 [1821], 459). An anecdote, perhaps untrue, records Fernando el Católico as enjoying Amadís; see Francisco Rodríguez Marín, «Amadís de Gaula», in his «nueva edición crítica» of the Quijote, IX (Madrid: Atlas, 1949), 173.
Tirant lo Blanch, which is somewhat closer to the form the Castilian romances of chivalry were to take than is the Cifar, was published in Valencia in 1490, and reprinted in 1497, but it was not published in Castilian until 1511.
On the changing reading public leading to a demand for chivalric material, see «Who Read the Romances of Chivalry?» infra, and on the translations, Thomas, pp. 31-32. Bernhard König accepts the hypothesis of a lost, perhaps fifteenth-century princeps of the Amadís, but destroys Place's evidence for a 1496 edition in «Amadís and seine Bibliographen. Untersuchungen zu friühen Ausgaben des Amadís de Gaula», RJ, 14 (1963), 294-309, but Place dismisses his comments as «las animadversiones de cierto critico alemán», in the 2nd edition of Volume I of his edition (p. 357).
Thus see, for example, the dates of the editions of Oliveros de Castilla (cited by Simón Díaz, III, Volume II, pp. 499-500).
See on this point the learned work of J. J. Chaytor, From Script to Print (Cambridge, England: Heffer, 1945), and also Cedric E. Pickford, «Fiction and the Reading Public in the Fifteenth Century», Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 45 (1963), 423-38; the latter includes some comments on readers of romances of chivalry in France.
As I have already pointed out, those romances most censured by Juan de Valdés in the Diálogo de la lengua, those which are both «mentirosíssimos» and have the «estilo desbaratado», are translations. It should not be forgotten that a romantic or nostalgic interest in old works for their own sake scarcely antedated the nineteenth century. There was, to be sure, an interest in classic authors, and a curiosity about former times, but the information or literature was desired in a contemporary form -thus, old manuscripts, even if located with difficulty, were not conserved after they had been published (L[eighton] D. Reynolds and N[igel] G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars. A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974], p. 124). It was only an exceptional erudito in the sixteenth century who saw value in preserving, for their own sake, old manuscripts and editions.
María Rosa Lida, «Literatura artúrica», p. 141.
J. G. Hall, «Tablante de Ricamonte and other Castilian Versions of Arthurian Romances», RLC, 48 (1974), 177-89; despite my attempts, I have not been able to see Hall's B. Phil. thesis, «Arthurian Literature in Spain. An Examination of its Popularity and Influence, 1170-1535», Oxford, 1967.
Patricia Baker has begun an edition of Arderique as a doctoral dissertation at Florida State University.
See Edwin Place, «Montalvo's Outrageous Recantation», cited in note 75 to Chapter II.