From Arthur to Amadís: The Knightly Romance Series

From the early Middle Ages to the late Renaissance, the knight tales - rooted in the sacred and mythological origins of the Celtic epic and evolving into narratives crafted for the audience’s enjoyment - offered a privileged space for experimenting with serial narrative techniques. With their recursive structures of episodes, characters, and tropes, these stories continuously reshaped imaginaries of love, power, mimetic desire, and other disquieting figures. As early as the twelfth century, through the courtly romance cyclical genres, and culminating in the sixteenth-century bestseller Amadís de Gaula, a broad readership became involved in a vast combinatorial game, full of metaphorical meanings for individual and social life. Meanwhile, epochal transformations reshaped the voice role, the versification techniques, the spectacular performances with music and song, the uses of writing, and the practices of reading aloud in castles, palaces, inns, and artisan or peasant homes. Later came the art of printing, the book trade, a wave of translations, and much more.