Amadís de Gaula

Amadís de Gaula (in English Amadis of Gaul; Spanish: Amadís de Gaula, IPA: [amaˈðis de ˈɣawla]; Portuguese: Amadis de Gaula, IPA: [ɐmɐˈdiʒ ðɨ ˈɣawlɐ]) is a landmark chivalric romance first composed in Spain or Portugal. The narrative originates in the late post-Arthurian genre and was likely based on French sources. The earliest version(s) may have been written in an unidentified location on the Iberian Peninsula in the early 14th century as it was certainly known to the Castilian statesman, poet and chancellor Pero López de Ayala, as well as Castilian poet Pero Ferrús. The Amadís is mentioned by the Spanish priest and confessor to Maria of Portugal, Queen of Castile Juan García de Castrojeriz in a document dated between 1342 and 1348. The earliest surviving print edition of the text was compiled by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo and published in four volumes in Zaragoza, Spain, in 1508. It was written in Spanish. There were likely earlier printed editions, which are now lost. Fragments of a manuscript of Book III dating from the first quarter of the 15th century, discovered in a bookbinding (now in The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley) show that, in addition to making amendments, Montalvo also made an abbreviation to the older text. In the introduction to his publication, Montalvo explains that he edited the first three volumes from texts in circulation since the 14th century and added a fourth volume not previously published in book form. He later also published a sequel to the romance under the title Las sergas de Esplandián, which he claimed was discovered in a chest buried in Constantinople and transported to Spain by a Hungarian merchant (the famous motif of the found manuscript).

In the Portuguese Chronicle by Gomes Eanes de Zurara (1454), Amadis is attributed to the Portuguese writer Vasco de Lobeira (died in 1403). Other traditional sources claim that the work was first put into prose by a Portuguese troubadour João de Lobeira (c. 1233–1285). No printed principal version in Portuguese is known. A more recent source attributes Amadis to Henry of Castile on the basis of supposed links between his biography and certain events in Amadis. The inspiration for the romance may have been the forbidden marriage of Infanta Constanza of Aragon with Henry in 1260 (see Don Juan Manuel's Libro de las tres razones of 1335) which is mirrored in the plot line of the forbidden marriage between Oriana and Amadis. Many translations of Amadís de Gaula were produced already in the first century of its publication including into Hebrew, French, Italian, Dutch, German and English and remained for several centuries in Europe an important reference point in courtly, cultural, and social matters. It was the favorite book of the fictional titular character in Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.