Narrating Desire: Moral Consolation and Sentimental Fiction in Fifteenth-Century Spain

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL

DEPARTMENT OF ROMANCE STUDIES

NORTH CAROLINA STUDIES

IN THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

Founder: URBAN TIGNER HOLMES

Editor: JUAN CARLOS GONZÁLEZ ESPITIA

Distributed by:

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL

North Carolina 27515-2288

U.S.A.

NORTH CAROLINA STUDIES IN THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

Number 317

NARRATING DESIRE:

MORAL CONSOLATION AND SENTIMENTAL FICTION IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN

NORTH CAROLINA SERIES ON ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE

Juan Carlos González Espitia, Editor-in-Chief

Frank A. Domínguez

Oswaldo Estrada

Irene Gómez Castellano

Rosa Perelmuter

Monica Rector

Heather Minchew, Managing Editor

EDITORIAL BOARDS

French

Francis Assaf

Janet Beizer

Kevin Brownlee

Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck

Linda Clemente

William F. Edmiston

Dominique Fisher

Perry Gethner

Stirling Haig

Nancy Lane

Peggy McCracken

Warren Motte

Marshall Olds

François Rigolot

Ruth Thomas

Ronald W. Tobin

Colette H. Winn

Luso-Brazilian

Severino Albuquerque

Paul Dixon

Earl E. Fitz

José Ornelas

Darlene Sadlier

Ronald W. Sousa

Jon M. Tolman

Spanish & Spanish-American

Debra Castillo

Sara Castro-Klaren

Cecelia J. Cavanaugh

Stuart A. Day

Malva E. Filer

Candelas Gala

E. Michael Gerli

David T. Gies

Roberto González Echevarría

Alejandro Mejías-López

Sylvia Molloy

Óscar Montero

Julio Ortega

José M. Regueiro

Óscar Rivera-Rodas

María Salgado

Margarita Zamora

Italian

Daniela Bini

Antonio Illiano

Ennio Rao

Rebecca West

NARRATING DESIRE:

MORAL CONSOLATION AND SENTIMENTAL FICTION IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN

BY

SOL MIGUEL-PRENDES

CHAPEL HILL

NORTH CAROLINA STUDIES IN THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

U.N.C. DEPARTMENT OF ROMANCE STUDIES

2019

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miguel-Prendes, Sol, author. | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Department of Romance Studies, issuing body.

Title: Narrating desire : moral consolation and sentimental fiction in fifteenth-century Spain / Sol Miguel-Prendes.

Other titles: North Carolina studies in the Romance languages and literatures ; no. 317.

Description: Chapel Hill : North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, U.N.C. Department of Romance Studies, 2019. | Series: North Carolina studies in the Romance languages and literatures; number 317 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019041115 | ISBN 9781469651958 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Spanish literature--To 1500--History and criticism. | Sentimentalism in literature.

Classification: LCC PQ6060 .M54 2019 | DDC 863/.209353--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041115

Cover design: Ana Cristina Juan Gómez

Cover image: Adaptation of Breviary. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Mss/9694, fol. 64v.

© 2019. Department of Romance Studies. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

ISBN 978-1-4696-5195-8

Layout and copyediting by CJV Publicidad y Edición de Libros claudialibros3@gmail.com, Cel.: (57) 3045698330

"Narrating Desire stands as one of the most, if not the most, wide-ranging and learned treatments of the materia de amore in the Iberian Peninsula in contemporary medieval studies. While other discussions on the topic remain somewhat anecdotal–mainly compilations of texts with brief observations–, this study brings everything together to argue for, and establish, a unified, coherent theory regarding the relationships between many texts in a very large corpus, while at the same time establishing their cultural foundations."

—E. MICHAEL GERLI, Commonwealth Professor of Spanish, University of Virginia.

Sol Miguel-Prendes offers us a tour-de-force study of the sentimental fiction genre. While mostly focusing on Spanish works (including the social contexts in which these works were written and received), the author includes detailed interpretations of a myriad of Latin, French, Italian and particularly Catalan dream visions. These visions offer us either a consolatory or a sentimental form. Worthy in and of themselves, and at the crossroads of medieval and early modern narrative ways, the relevance of these authors’ doleful introspective analyses of their pains of love heralds nothing else but the modern novel.

—ANTONIO CORTIJO OCAÑA, University of California, Santa Barbara.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: THE CONSOLATION OF SCHOOLMEN

Teaching the Young

The Rhetoric of Rationality

Boethian Dream Visions and Literary Creation

The Late Iberian Boethius

Healing the Mind

The Montpellier Connection

Lay Readers and caballeros sçientes

Lay Authors

CHAPTER 2: RECANTING LOVE

The Consolation of Orpheus: Bernat Metge’s Lo somni

The Two Ages of the Poet: Santillana’s El sueño and Proemio e carta

The Violence of Conversion: Siervo libre de amor

Among Friends

Sailing in Good Company: Roís de Corella’s Parlament

Let the soul her slumbers break: Carrós Pardo de la Casta’s Regoneixença

Orpheus Gets Married: Romeu Llull’s Lo despropiament d’amor

Tiresias in Love: Francesc Moner’s L’Ánima d’Oliver and La noche

CHAPTER 3: ORPHEUS IN HELL: CONTRAFACTA AND NOVELNESS

Pedro de Portugal’s novelar desinteresado

The Rhetoric of the Margin

The Prayer-Book Mentality

Parody and Male Rites of Passage

Man’s Natural Inclination

In the Company of Ladies: Triste deleytaçión

A true and binding law to indulge a friend: Francesc Alegre’s Somni

Love Triangles

Fools and Martyrs: Diego de San Pedro’s Tractado de amores de Arnalte y Lucenda and Cárcel de Amor

Fiammetta’s Female Readers at Work: Juan de Flores’s Grimalte y Gradisa

CONVERTING DESIRE, NARRATING DESIRE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. La Virgen de la Leche with the Child between Saint Bernard of Claraval and Saint Benedict, Pere Lembrí, 1410–1415. Guilded, tempera on panel. © Museo Nacional del Prado.

Figure 2. Translation of the Aeneid, Enrique de Villena. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Mss/17975, fol. 157v.

Figure 3. Sátira de infelice e felice vida. Pedro, Constable of Portugal. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Mss/4023, fol. 5v.

Figure 4. Libro de horas de los retablos. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Vit. 25–3, fol. 38r.

Figure 5. Breviary. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Mss/9694, fol. 64v.

INTRODUCTION

¿SOYS novelero? the Dominican preacher Pedro de Covarrubias asked in his 1515 Memorial de pecados y aviso de la vida cristiana, copioso, muy complido e provechoso assí para los confessores como para los penitentes, addressed to the duchess of Frías.¹ This short but popular octavo handbook—a mere hundred pages reprinted at least seven times between 1515 and 1545—aimed to help both priest and penitent recall sins during the examination of conscience that precedes confession. It ranks novelero among the regular transgressions of courtiers, along with bribing, procuring, and gossiping.

In the Tesoro de la lengua castellana (Madrid, 1611), Sebastián de Covarrubias—no relation—applied the term novelero to rumor-mongers who spread nuevas or novelas (news),² yet the same entry defines novela as vn cuento bien compuesto, o patraña para entretener los oyentes, como las nouelas de Bocacio [a well-crafted tale, a tall story meant to entertain, like Boccaccio’s novellas]. This meaning is supported by Richard Percival’s translation of a novelero as teller of tales, fabulator in his Bibliothecae Hispanicae pars altera: Containing a Dictionarie in Spanish, English and Latine (1591). The Dominican preacher was most likely referring to the ugly vice of defamatory talk, but since the question comes shortly after the penitent is asked if he is often at leisure and how he occupies his time—¿Acostumbráys estar ocioso? ¿En qué os ocupáys? Does novelero imply the crafting of more sophisticated stories as a courtly pastime?

Diego de San Pedro’s introduction to his Tractado de amores de Arnalte y Lucenda (Treatise on the Love of Arnalte and Lucenda), first published in 1491 but most likely circulated previously in manuscript form, calls the work mis nuevas (Obras completas I. Tractado 88). The character el auctor, who narrates his later Cárcel de Amor [Prison of Love], the first best-selling romance produced by the new medium of the printing press, seems driven by the three sins the Memorial ascribes to courtiers—bribing, procuring, and gossiping. Was leisure time at court—the time for ocio—spent reading and writing and relishing those nuevas?

This book is about Cárcel de Amor and other love tales labeled sentimental fictions, sentimental romances, or even novelas sentimentales, a generic status fraught with controversy. Debating the pleasures and dangers of love, the materia de amore, was undeniably the most distinctive and persistent mode of literary creation in late medieval Spain (Cátedra, Poesía de Pasión 277), and in spite of their obvious formal differences, the texts critics classify as sentimental family are only increasing. I propose a different taxonomy and conceptual frame. I single out a group of Catalan and Castilian moral consolations whose interpretive and compositional practices sired the sentimental genre. I examine their distortions of the rhetoric of consolation and the moral therapy of conversion to stress the rhetorical energy of erotic appetite.

The materia de amore enjoyed widespread fame in Catalan and Castilian courts prior to their international diffusion in print in the sixteenth century, but their enthusiastic readers did not appear out of nowhere.³ A significant lay reading public emerged in the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula in the later Middle Ages. Round considers this development, closely analyzed by Lawrance, part of a general Europeanization of the region (Libro llamado Fedron 69). Readers were noble or bourgeois and interpreted the works in private, rather than debating them in public, as the schools did. Noble patronage supported both translation of the classics and the exhaustive vernacular apparatus, borrowed from the scholarly lectio—the reading and interpretation of juridical or theological texts—here intended for the entertainment and instruction of lay readers. Lawrance termed this complex cultural transformation vernacular humanism, also called prerrenacimiento (Lida de Malkiel, Maravall), atmósfera prehumanista (Di Camillo), and incipiente humanismo (Gascón Vera), to distinguish it from the Italian Renaissance.⁴ These formulations all underline traditional Castilian belatedness, but, in spite of certain parallels and overlaps with the Renaissance, the input of intellectual models and influences into the Castilian process was differently made up, as Round notes (Libro llamado Fedron 66). These distinctions may safely be extended to the Crown of Aragon, even after accounting for its sociocultural diferences with Castile.⁵

Gómez Moreno accepted the challenge implicit in Round’s statement. His extensive knowledge of Spanish archives allowed him to put the actual impact of Italian humanistic trends on Iberia in context. His 1994 España y la Italia de los humanistas: primeros ecos proves that fifteenth-century private libraries contained the same titles read by Francesco Petrarca (40). Their owners developed close friendships with prominent Italian humanists, and contacts among writers at the court of Alfons V, the Magnanimous, King of Aragon, who reigned in Naples from 1442–1458, and his son Ferrante (reigned 1458–1494) were even more frequent. The Spanish college at the University of Bologna, established in 1369, and the ecumenical councils celebrated in Pisa (1409), Constanza (1414–1418), and Basil (1431) provided further opportunities for interaction. In the past two decades, articles and monographs have completed the panorama outlined by Lawrance, Round, and Gómez Moreno; they are reviewed in two critical clusters published in La corónica: Salió buen latino: los ideales de la cultura medieval española tardomedieval y protorrenacentista, guest-edited by Cortijo Ocaña and Jiménez Calvente (2008), and "Ottavio di Camillo’s El humanismo castellano del siglo XV: Thirty-Five Years Later, guest-edited by Juan-Carlos Conde (2010). Cifuentes summarizes the role of translations and translators in the spread of lay literacy in the Crown of Aragon (Traduccions i traductors").

These studies note that the same circles cultivated both Latin and vernacular literatures. Butiñá points to the royal courts of Juan II, King of Castile (1406–1454), and Alfons V in Naples, where writers of similar sensibilities composed with equal ease in Castilian, Catalan, and Latin (El humanismo catalán 29). Iberian writers were also avid readers of the new classics coming from Italy. To name just a few, Antoni Canals’s Scipió e Aníbal, composed after 1395, is a partial translation of Petrarch’s Africa. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini’s Historia de duobus amantibus circulated both in Latin and Castilian. Dante’s Comedy was translated into Catalan by Andreu Febrer in 1429 and Castilian by Enrique de Villena between 1427 and 1434. Bernat Metge’s Història de Valter e Griselda (1388) rendered into Catalan Petrarch’s third letter in book XVII of Rerum senilium, addressed to Boccaccio, which included a Latin version of Griseldis, the last story in the Decameron.⁶ The full Decameron was translated into Catalan in 1429 as Novelas de Juan Bocacio and possibly into Castilian at around the same time.⁷ In Lo somni (1398), Metge avers that Griseldis’s subject was well known—old wives recite the tale to amuse themselves in winter evenings while spinning around the fire—clearly quoting Boccaccio’s defense of the lowest kind of fiction in the Genealogia deorum gentilium (book XIV, chap. IX–X).⁸ Petrarch echoes in many citations that omit his name—for example, Celestina—and Flors de remeys de cascuna Fortuna, a compendium of quotes from De remediis utriusque Fortuna circulated throughout the fifteenth century (Impey, "Contraria en la Triste deleytación 161).⁹ By 1438, Boccaccio’s popularity was so widespread that the Archpriest of Talavera blamed him for teaching women all there is to know about sex and complained that poems, love letters, and Boccaccio had replaced devotional works in respectable ladies’ libraries.¹⁰

Lawrance considered Spanish humanism less professional and scholarly than its Italian counterpart (On Fifteenth-Century 78) but acknowledged that the rise of lay literacy meant not only the triumph of the vernacular … but the beginnings of modern literature as whole (The Spread of Lay Literacy 80). If these amateurs threw together Italian innovations on medieval auctores and techniques with different degrees of understanding of the vast intellectual program implied in the studia humanitatis, their efforts still defined the horizon of expectations for much of fifteenth-century Iberian vernacular literary creation (Rico, Imágenes del Prerrenacimiento 15–16).¹¹

Butiñá maintains that the contact with Italian humanism invigorated the genres of dialogue, narrative, and poetry in Catalan literature (El humanismo catalán 31). While I hold a different view of the nature and evolution of these genres in the Crowns of Castile and Aragon, the vast vernacular production on love with a taste for allegory and the visio is undeniable; although its main topic and techniques were medieval, it was galvanized by the arrival of Italian innovations. The translations of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio sparked a widespread craze. In Tragèdia de Lançalot, a fragmentary work by Mossén Grass, a Catalan knight and perhaps the ambassador of Alfons the Magnanimous in Tunis, he abridged and adapted the French Mort Artu to cure la plaga that was wounding la enamorada generació (Riquer, Martín de "La Tragèdia de Lançalot" 131).¹² His version spurns glorious battles, knightly virtues, and the Arthurian legend’s spiritual background in favor of an analysis of love passion. One chapter’s truncated rubric summarizes the new content, now regrettably lost: an exclamació que fa lo actor on the dangers and misery that erotic desire inflicts on lovers.¹³ The Tragèdia de Lançalot resembled the sentimental literature that was all the rage more than it did the Arthurian tradition (Riquer, Martín de "La Tragèdia de Lançalot").

The early formation of this enamorada generació was strongly influenced by the literary preferences of Violante de Bar (1365–1431), niece of Charles V of France, who married the Duke of Girone in 1380 and became Queen of Aragon when he ascended to the throne as Joan I in 1387. Among the titles that entered the Aragonese court at her request were a Roman de la Rose sent by her uncle, the Duke of Berry; Ovidian works—the letres d’Ovidi en pla and a copy of the Ovidi mathamorphoseos moralisat; and Arthurian titles of the Grail cycle. Vice-chancellor Domenec Mascó or an unknown translator rendered Andreas Capellanus’s De arte honeste amandi into Catalan at the request of Na Canosa, wife of Antoni Vilaragut, King’s Chamberlain and translator of Seneca’s tragedies.¹⁴ Violante’s entourage imitated French literary courts d’amour in their refinement, literary tastes, and the creation of a cercle de senyors lletraferits i de dames al qual pertanyen, entre molt altres, Bernat Metge, Domenec Mascó, Antoni Vilaragut i Na Canosa de Vilaragut [a circle of lletraferits lords and ladies to which belongs, among others, Bernat Metge, Domenec Mascó, Antoni Vilaragut, and Lady Canosa de Vilaragut].¹⁵ No English translation conveys all the nuances of the Catalan lletraferit that Pagès, first modern editor of Mascó’s translation, applies to these aristocrats. The Gran diccionari de la llengua catalana defines the word, first documented in 1916, as amant de conrear les lletres, part bibliophile, part amateur writer, but the term’s linkage of lletra (letters) and ferit (wounded) implies a much deeper and emotional connection with literature that accurately defines these Catalan dilettantes. They experienced love’s wounds through literature and were enthralled by Ovid because, like them, he was an author in love, as Bernat Metge’s Ovidi enamorat attested.¹⁶

Readers and translators of the classics, old and new, lletraferits and letraheridos, wrote in astonishing numbers for courtly audiences from the mid-fourteenth century for the following 150 years. Hundreds of noblemen and the emerging class of courtly clerks produced thousands of poems. Gómez-Bravo’s important study focuses on the more than 7,000 extant poems that circulated in variant copies—more than all the poetry of France, Britain, and Germany combined, as Gerli proudly notes in his book review—to demonstrate poetry’s place of privilege as the ultimate mark of social legitimation and socio-economic inclusion (Textual Agencies 47). Following work initiated by Weiss (The Poet’s Art; ¿Qué demandamos?; What Every Noblewoman"), she illustrates how textual production was a key strategy of conscious self-generation in the context of courtly and urban socio-professional networks.

Most of these poems survive in songbooks or collections of lyrics (Castilian cancioneros; Catalan cançoners), chapbooks, and printed anthologies; some are included in short prose narratives.¹⁷ They address a broad range of topics in different genres, yet cancioneros are generally identified as love poetry, perhaps because, as Weiss argues ("La Affección Poetal; ¿Qué demandamos?), woman—her virtues, flaws, and effect on men as an index of Fortune’s unpredictability—was reified as a component in a peculiarly aristocratic cultural field, and as a means of demonstrating their intellectual mastering of new learned forms of writing (¿Qué demandamos?" 250). Originally influenced by French and Provençal traditions, cancionero courtly poetry, like narrative, progressively incorporated Italian forms and themes.¹⁸

Along with lyric poetry, Catalan and Castilian songbooks included long narrative poems, a distinct Iberian phenomenon alien to the French and Provençal manuscript tradition (Cabré and Martí 175). In La transmissió manuscrita, Pellisa Prades demonstrates that, in the Catalan tradition, the short prose narratives known as sentimental fictions also circulated in this form, with few exceptions. Martín de Riquer labeled Catalan narrative poems poemes cortesans amorosos i allegòrics (Història 1: 332–48).¹⁹ Composed between the second half of the fourteenth and the first years of the fifteenth centuries, they dramatize the themes, abstractions, and metaphors of lyric poetry, which may explain their inclusion in cançoners (Història 2: 42–43). Some of them, such as the anonymous Requesta que féu un frare a una monja and Stòria de l’amat Frondino e de Brisona, were composed in epistolary form. Others, like the French lais that inspire them, set wondrous episodes in courtly milieux; the protagonist is sometimes transported from a magical garden to a fabulous, allegorical realm. Two examples cited by Martín de Riquer, the anonymous Salut d’amor and Una ventura by Vicenç Comes, who belonged to Metge’s circle, exhibit the visionary setting and manipulation of French and Italian sources that will become the trademark of the sentimental materia. Salut d’amor, based on a troubadour genre of the same name, aims to convince a lady to accept a lover’s request. He argues his case using two examples, the second of which is a love allegory based partly on Boccaccio’s tale of Nastagio degli Onesti and an episode from Andreas Capellanus’s De amore (Història 2: 54–59). In Vicenç Comes’s Una ventura, the author, anguished by love, lounges by a garden fountain in the early morning, engaging in a long planctus, until he sees two richly clad ladies who turn out to be Hope and Mercy; they advise and console him (64–65). Santillana’s narrative dezires, particularly the Infierno, Triumphete de amor, and El sueño, are distinct examples of Castilian love allegories that combine French and Italian sources with an imitation of Bernat Metge.

Deyermond (El hombre salvaje, On the Frontier) and Cortijo Ocaña (La evolución genérica) place these amorous narrative poems on the frontier of the literary genre called sentimental fiction. Since Menéndez Pelayo (1905–1915) defined it as a uniquely Spanish genre that conflates chivalresque adventures and solipsistic eroticism, a combination of Amadís and Fiammetta (482), critics have been unable to agree on its name, the number of works that constitute it, its defining features, and even whether it is a literary genre at all or just a modern fabrication from Castilian samples (Pellisa Prades La ficció sentimental 15)²⁰ by patriarchal critics (Weissberger, The Gendered Taxonomy). As a consequence, an impressive critical bibliography has grown over the last sixty years. Helpful reviews of generic questions appear in Aybar Ramírez (La ficción sentimental), Deyermond (Estudio de la ficción), and Cortijo Ocaña (La evolución genérica). The latter’s introduction to the 2000 critical cluster that he guest-edited for La corónica, La ficción sentimental: ¿un género imposible?, is particularly relevant. It generated a lively debate that he cleverly anticipated in his bellicose title. If the sentimental genre were dead, as some in the cluster maintained, its champions were alive and ready to fight. Rohland de Langbehn gallantly led the charge in 2002 with Una lanza por el género sentimental … ¿ficción o novela?, which provoked a forum the following year. The latest review appears in Pellisa Prades’s remarkable dissertation on La ficció sentimental catalana de la segona meitad del s. XV (2013), where she demonstrates the vitality of Catalan fiction supported by a substantial bibliography.

While all sentimental works scrutinize the emotional aspects of love affairs, their formal disparity is such that Deyermond struggled to define them as short pieces on love with an unhappy ending (La ficción sentimental xxix). The solution to this impasse has been to highlight formal ambiguity and experimentation as the genre’s main features. Gerli, for instance, claims that the genre is best defined by mood and interest rather than by form (Metafiction 475), and Gómez speaks of a certain ideological mood in the mixed Ovidian genre called artes de amores (Las ‘artes de amores’ 13). Pellisa Prades casts aside the idea of genre as sterile, proposing instead an all-encompassing sentimental vogue or taste, a moda o gust literari, that she considers a supra-generic entity [una entitat supragenèrica].²¹ She acknowledges in La transmissió manuscrita that her goal is not so much defining a genre as compiling all the possible Catalan works that engage the materia de amore. Including narrative poems, letters, and translations, her methodology has the advantage of generating a substantial list of Catalan samples where earlier critics found few.

Other scholars, like Sharrer (La fusión) and Brandenberger (La muerte) highlight the chivalresque stories included in some sentimental narratives and the later amalgamation of sentimental works into chivalry novels. In that tendency, however, Weissberger sees the death of an ersatz genre based on patriarchal ideas that oppose masculine chivalry to the sentimental and feminine (The Gendered Taxonomy).

The genre’s temporal, linguistic, and geographical boundaries appear to expand or contract, depending on the critic’s approach. Deyermond accepts the undeniable influence of Ovid’s Heroides and Boccaccio’s Fiammetta that earlier scholars detected but suspects the indirect influence of Augustine’s Confessions, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and the correspondence of Abelard and Heloise (La ficción sentimental xi–xv).²² Sentimental production, he concludes, was an Iberian phenomenon with notable similarities to works like The Kingis Quair, a poem in 197 stanzas attributed to James I of Scotland composed around 1423–1437 (La ficción sentimental xiv; On the Frontier). Cortijo Ocaña studied the genre’s Catalan origins in the last two decades of the fourteenth century at the court of Violante de Bar and included among its precedents the Portuguese prose version of Gower’s Confessio amantis and its subsequent translation into Castilian (La evolución genérica). Like Brandenberger, he places the last instances of the sentimental genre in mid-sixteenth century Portugal, also noticing some cross-pollination of the sentimental and Byzantine trends.

After more than sixty years of spirited debate, another attempt to resolve the generic impasse may seem futile and perhaps unproductive because, as Casas Rigall points out, methodology is destiny (la perspectiva metodológica cambia la percepción del objeto de estudio. ‘Género literario’ 246). Early on, Michael illustrated some of the problems and dangers in imposing modern generic divisions on medieval literature; while convenient for the critic, they can be misleading (Epic to Romance to Novel). On the other hand, genre enables a comparative literary analysis (Blay Manzanera, La conciencia genérica) that comprehends a work’s worldview and discursive environment (Brownlee, Genre, History).

What to name these works raises other significant methodological questions. Menéndez Pelayo first applied the term novela to works he found stylistically similar to Boccaccio’s Fiammetta, perhaps motivated by Santillana’s use of novella in his Comedieta de Ponza as work being listened to by royal ladies in a garden (Michael, Epic to Romance to Novel 519). In Rodríguez del Padrón’s Siervo libre de amor, the term describes just one section, a short fiction like one of Boccaccio’s tales.²³ However, although staunchly defended by critics like Rohland de Langbehn (La unidad genérica; Una lanza), Walde Moheno (La novela sentimental), and Brownlee (Genre, History), the term novela was unknown to medieval artes poetriae. Medieval writers of sentimental works called them tractado, oración, or fábula.²⁴ Hence, Krause proposed tractado to indicate that sentimental narratives were not novels but expository tracts with a didactic intent (El ‘tractado’). Unfortunately, Whinnom demonstrated that for medieval authors, tractado was a polysemic word that might indicate a treatise, in the sense of a written exposition, or a fiction, as a synonym of estoria, but not a genre ("Autor and Tratado). Dagenais confirmed this conclusion (Juan Rodríguez").