Archipelagoes

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Archipelagoes
QW
Insul a r Fict ions from
Chivalr ic R omance
to the Novel

Simone Pinet

University of Minnesota Press

minne apolis • london
 The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance
provided for the publication of this book from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between
Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities and from the
Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University.

Portions of the Introduction and chapter 4 appeared previously as “On the Subject of Fiction:
Islands and the Emergence of the Novel,” in New Coordinates: Spatial Mappings, National Trajectories,
ed. Robert A. Davidson and Joan Ramon Resina, special issue of Diacritics 33, no. 3–4 (2003):
173–87; copyright 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Portions of chapter 3 appeared
previously as “El Amadís como arte de marear: La Insola No Fallada,” Medievalia (2000): 25–34.
Portions of chapter 4 appeared previously as “La traducción de lo visible: Un tapiz del Amadís
de Gaula,” in Los bienes cuando no son comunicados no son bienes, ed. Axayácatl Campos García Rojas,
Mariana Masera, and María Teresa Miaja, 107–17 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma
de México–Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana–El Colegio de México, 2006), and also as
“The Knight, the Kings, and the Tapestries: The Amadís Series,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios
Hispánicos 30, no. 3 (2006): 537–54.

Copyright 2011 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pinet, Simone.
Archipelagoes : insular fictions from chivalric romance to the novel / Simone Pinet.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-6671-3 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-6672-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Spanish fiction—Classical period, 1500–1700—History and criticism.
2. Romances, Spanish—History and criticism. 3. Islands in literature.
4. Geography in literature. 5. Cartography in literature. I. Title.
PQ6142.P56 2011
863´.30932—dc22
2010032609

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Bruno
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 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

introduction
Spatial Concepts, Medieval Context xi

1
f o r e st to i s l a n d
Sites of Adventure from Arthur to Amadís 1

2
islands and maps
A Very Short History 29

3
a dv e n t ur e a n d a r ch i p e l ag o
Amadís de Gaula and the Insular Turn 75

4
shor e s of f ict ion
The Insular Image in Amadís and Cervantes 109

conclusion
Archipelagic Possibilities 155

Notes 163
Bibliography 203
Index 223
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 Acknowledgments

In the process of writing this book I have benefited from institutions whose fac-
ulty and resources have made my work a challenge and a pleasure. This project
has its roots in a seminar with Francisco Márquez-Villanueva at Harvard Uni-
versity. At home south of the border, as I wrote a seminar paper on Amadís
over the summer, I wrote him a postcard mimicking chivalric prose, and he was
kind enough not to mention it but generously offered his encyclopedic advice.
Mary Gaylord prodigiously guided my scattered curiosity through the intrica-
cies of English academic prose and of Cervantine complexity, as she advised
me on my dissertation along with Tom Conley, who has since been a constant
source of intellectual support, a marvel to read and dine with, and the single
most generous academic mind I know. Funding from the Department of
Romance Languages and the Real Colegio Complutense allowed me to spend
months at the Biblioteca Nacional researching the first materials for my dis-
sertation. Some years later, at Yale, Roberto González Echevarría found time
to read a first version of the book, and María Rosa Menocal shared with me
her dynamism and vision for the humanities; from their books I have learned
humility, for I will never be able to write like them. At Cornell University, the
President’s Council of Cornell Women and the Humanities Council provided
funds for research at the Newberry Library, the Princeton Art Museum, and
Houghton Library. I have been fortunate enough to find friends in many col-
leagues, and I owe heaps of gratitude to Mitchell Greenberg, Jeannine Routier,
Timothy Murray, Tim Campbell, Michela Baraldi, Piero Pucci, Renate Ferro,
Richard Klein, Cynthia Robinson, Jonathan Culler, Marie-Claire Valois, Luz
Horne, Edmundo Paz-Soldán, Brett de Bary, Joan Ramon Resina, and most
recently David Cruz, Gerard Aching, and Miguel Balsa for their support.
Over the years I managed to collect accomplices with whom I shared in-
cipient ideas and confusing papers, and who patiently and incisively pointed

ix
x Acknowledgments

out gaps in argumentation and writing style, provided references or encour-

agement, and shared coffee or a beer after one of the many island movies I
have seen over these years. I am indebted to their astonishing minds and kind
advice: Elisabeth Hodges, Diane Brown, Maurice Samuels, Cristina Moreiras-
Menor, Oscar Martín, Lourdes Casas, and Gareth Williams. Readers of the
manuscript at different stages, both anonymous and well known, were gen-
erous with suggestions, and I am grateful to all; those whose names I know
are Ricardo Padrón and Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco. Graduate students asked
fundamental questions during seminar discussions; I particularly want to
thank Henry Berlin and Sarah Pearce for their curiosity and insight. Finally,
I would like to extend my gratitude to a discipline, Hispanomedievalism,
which across continents, north to south and east to west, is open to other
perspectives and to productive dialogue and is supportive of all of its mem-
bers; among them, I especially thank Sol-Miguel Prendes, Isidro Rivera, and
George Greenia. Across the Atlantic, I thank the brilliant Juan Manuel Cacho
Blecua; south of the border, I am indebted to Aurelio González, Axa Campos,
and, most recently, the members of the SENC. I thank my parents, Esmeralda
Peralta and Mauricio Pinet, and my wonderful grandmother, María Esther
Mendizábal, who instilled in me a taste for adventure and taught me how
to spend afternoons with books. None are responsible for any errors in this
book, which are all my own.
The staff of many libraries shared with me their treasures and expertise. I
owe special thanks to the staff in the reserve room of the Biblioteca Nacional
de España (which during renovations found me a computer spot at a table and
brought me my first Buondelmonti), at the Newberry Library, and at Houghton
Library. At the Princeton Art Museum, Maureen McCormick and Betsy Jean
Rosasco made a special visit to examine their tapestry possible and productive.
At Cornell, Cal Hile and Debra Kastenhuber have seen to it that I can print my
long drafts and finance my trips. Finally, I would like to thank Douglas Armato
and Richard Morrison at the University of Minnesota Press for believing in
this project and Adam Brunner for his help through the editorial process.
This book has benefited from Bruno Bosteels’s sharpness of mind and
clarity of voice. This book is dedicated to him, and to Lucas and Manu,
whom I isolated at times in writing it but never ceased to rely on as sources
for wonder.
 Introduction
Spatial Concepts, Medieval Context

F rom Antiquity onward, there exists an inaugural relation between

geography and history. Confirmed by the modern era’s most famous of
cartographers, Abraham Ortelius, or the travel writer Samuel Purchas, who
both made of geography the eye of history, however, this well-loved sister-
hood often obscures that other intimate relative of geography, literature.
Narrative, especially, was for the ancient geographer both a source and a
medium of representation, much in the manner that developed again in the
Renaissance in what we familiarly know as humanist geography, producing
new and surprising overlaps and hybrids. These geographic engagements
with literature have been studied extensively, often brilliantly.1 In relation
to Iberia, in particular, the literature of the age of discoveries has received
much attention, although until very recently, developments in the discourse
and study of the history of cartography had not been part of the discussion,
and even less in direct relation to literary genres, aside from the articulations
between history and fiction (whether in relation to politics, racism, colonial-
ism, etc.), which have provoked a continuous critical discussion, pointedly
in the genres of the chronicle and the relación.2
People in the Middle Ages were not unaware of these relations between
geography, history, and literature, and they elaborated the correlation between
these discourses through various established genres or by incorporating
them into new formulations. This book seeks to investigate these relations
through a particular geography, that of the island, by putting together two
specific and well-defined genres of the late medieval period, one pertaining
to literature and the other to cartography, in order to assess the import of
spatial configuration in narrative fiction of the period. The book of chivalry
and the isolario or book of islands are coeval: that is, they emerge, develop
and fade into history at almost exactly the same time, and crucially, they

xi
xii Introduction

cross over from manuscript into print culture, bridging and evincing the
technological challenges posed to a genre in order to accommodate new
media, exploit new features, and address new audiences all the while keep-
ing to a certain tradition and format that made them immensely popular.
These two genres, moreover, make a particular geography the focus of their
structure: the island.
Islands have a very specific and long tradition in both cartography and
literature. The period that I study here, however, is of special interest in this
regard because specific genres emerge centering on islands. If island fic-
tions have a continued and prolific tradition to our day, perhaps even more
specialized than the book of chivalry itself in the genre of robinsonnades,
for instance, or in fantastic literature, there is no comparable cartographic
genre that emerged to substitute or take up the specific project of the iso-
lario. Perhaps its only possible continuation may be traced within prose
fiction itself in the numerous maps of imaginary islands that accompany
literary works, from Thomas More’s Utopia to Jules Verne’s L’Île mysterieuse
to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and the myriad islet fictions
that one can associate with them. There, however, the archipelago is lost
from sight, and the emphasis on the single, often fantastic island is what pre-
vails. By contrast, it is this fictional openness, fiction’s very possibility but
also its theory, that is particularly linked to insularity and systematically
articulated in the late medieval period in the genres of the book of chivalry
and the isolario.
In placing the two disciplines of literature and cartography side by side, I
want to suggest that the overlaps are not mere coincidences, but historically
specific strategies that can be traced to structural concerns. Moreover, their
parallel study can be useful to distinguish solutions, problems, and theoriza-
tions common to both discourses that can lead to productive discussions
in either discipline. Another striking parallel between these two genres, the
book of chivalry and the isolario, is that they are the immediate forerunners
of what can be called the major modern genres of each discipline: the mod-
ern novel and the atlas. In the spectrum of possibilities explored, in the many
successful and failed attempts at structure or style that book of chivalry and
isolario present, one might also find, I contend, new perspectives on the
anchoring, lacks, and ambitions of both novel and atlas.
 Introduction xiii

This book is thus one that will dwell on geography, understood in a vast
sense, to inquire into how a period thought about a space through its
writerly elaborations thereof. Focused on the specific space of the island in
two parallel texts, the question on the geography of a genre, then, becomes
both literal and symbolic, asking about both a structure and a metaphor,
about genre and its dissolution. This is, ultimately, a study that aims to reveal
something about the culture that produced late medieval and early modern
Iberian prose fiction, so its conclusions will be mostly literary, but I hope
that whatever connections might be brought out can also be rewarding for
cartography.
If one is to consider the relation between islands and fiction, even though
historical context alone should suffice to suggest the differences in articula-
tion, one must address the Odyssey in some way, for there the entire reper-
toire for an insular fiction such as the book of chivalry is already present.
Narrative, a hero, adventure, marvels, a voyage, islands, and the surrounding
sea make up both book of chivalry and the Homeric epic. In the Odyssey,
however, there is another space of crucial importance that structures the
narrative from outside this seascape: the polis, whose historical specificity
points to how the different genres elaborate new forms for fiction at different
periods.
In the Odyssey, the sea implies a return because it is not the Mediter-
ranean but the polis that centralizes space through its spatialization of com-
munity. The medieval romance, from which the book of chivalry takes its
basic structure and fundamental content, articulates the notion of com-
munity and thus of the subject not through the polis but through the court
and the possibility of inaugurating new courtly spaces and their correspon-
ding codifications. Beyond the repertoire that romance and Homeric epic
(and a host of other ancient and medieval genres) share in the first instance,
there is in the Odyssey a poetics of fiction, an inaugural articulation of fiction
as a necessary and inevitable truth—even separately, through the siren’s
voices—that links this inaugural insular fiction to my investigations, which
have as their object texts and practices contemporary to the rereading and
retranslating of Homer in Western Europe and in Spain in particular.3 One
could say that the Odyssey, structured in a pendular movement between the
polis and the distancing from and eventual return to it, schematizes a basic
xiv Introduction

thread of all narration, and one might even argue that this movement
between community and the outside is the structure of fiction itself. What
lies beyond (or betwixt), however, are the specific itineraries between those
two spaces, marked by distinct historical, economic, and social changes that
give shape to a literary genre, a style, a particular work. The emphasis on the
space of community or on displacement from it in fact marks two extreme
possibilities within this play of spaces. Between them lies the literary text, or,
the possibility for fiction.
Texts are, obviously, a space in themselves, in their materiality: the space
of the scripted or printed word, the page, the volume itself. But texts also
articulate spaces through fabling, that is, in the manner they tell stories:
“stories organize places through the displacements they ‘describe,’” as in the
actual narration of a voyage or a wandering, or in the use of topoi—narrative
landscapes. They even do so within rhetoric itself, since metaphors, as
Michel de Certeau emphasizes, are a way of “transporting” or displacing
meaning.4 (Henri Lefebvre, the most complex of theorists of space, writ-
ing about metaphors and spatiality, proposes textual criticism as a way of
bridging the apparent disparity of levels between spaces within narration
and narration itself as spatiality.)5 Spatiality is organized by delimitation,
whether related to genre, content, or rhetoric. Stories, according to Certeau,
participate in the establishment and the rupture of such delimitations in
parallel and intersecting movements that can be represented by the figures
of the frontier and the bridge. This, a logic of aporia and overcoming, is
labeled by Certeau as “ambiguity” by making the terms reversible, which is
to say that the “frontier” can always become a “bridge” and vice versa. They
make each other possible in their very opposition; their establishment, in
a way, already contains their transgression.6 The story, then, relies on the
spatiality it produces in order to reflect upon itself, upon its own condition
of possibility. As such, even if narration has content, “it also belongs to the
art of making a coup. . . . Its discourse is characterized more by a way of exer-
cising itself than by the thing it indicates. And one must grasp a sense other
than what is said. It produces effects, not objects,” Certeau insists.7 This pro-
duction is what makes the story and allows it to think itself, to become its
own theory. It is also what will allow the close analysis of island fictions in
this book to move from the representation of insularity in these texts to a
 Introduction xv

theory of insularity in the late medieval and early modern periods, exercis-
ing that literary criticism that Lefebvre proposed.
But what is this space where metaphors as means of transposing meaning
move about? What use is there in affirming, “every story is a travel story—a
spatial practice”? Can this statement be inverted? Are all spatial practices
stories? How is one to differentiate among them? Is the analysis of space
always an analysis of a story?8
This is where a working distinction between space and place becomes
necessary for what will follow. “A place (lieu),” writes Certeau, “is the order
(of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in rela-
tionships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being
in the same location (place). . . . Place is thus an instantaneous configuration
of positions. It implies an indication of stability.” Space is something that
comes into existence “when one takes into consideration vectors of direc-
tion, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections
of mobile elements. . . . Space occurs as the effect produced by the opera-
tions that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function. . . . In
short, space is a practiced place.”9 For the moment, what I wish to retain
from Certeau’s analysis is that he sees space in an inevitable relationship
with a practice that one can take as a synonym for production: the pro-
duction of space.10 Such a practice Certeau reads as “rhetoric,” a sort of un-
raveling of the practices of everyday life, such as walking, cooking, narrating.
Narrations themselves, “stories,” as he calls them, are always a spatial prac-
tice by dint of their use of metaphor, a “transposition of meaning.”
The classic work on space, Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, gives a
much more detailed and complex historical account of the concept of space.
Lefebvre analyzes the expression that titles his book very closely in his sec-
ond chapter by reworking, from a Marxist perspective, concepts such as
labor, product, object, and subject in order to arrive at a definition of social
relations of production that sheds new light on the concept of space. He
does so by establishing, first, a dividing line between nature and society.
However, Lefebvre insists on the presence of “intermediate” spaces that
are, at the same time, natural and cultural, immediate and mediate, given
and artificial. All such spaces, having nature as a starting point, a “raw mate-
rial,” are produced by the activities that crisscross them, that effect them but
xvi Introduction

that also extend beyond those spaces into other realms, interconnecting
human activity—political, economic, technical—and or as the production
of space itself.11
A produced space, Lefebvre argues, connotes a task of signification, a
process that produces space and meaning concurrently, a meaning that must
be negotiated by the subjects or members of the particular society that move
in and through that space and denotation, and thus “comprehend” them.12
A critic’s task would then be to elucidate the appearance, role, and perma-
nence of spatial codes characteristic of particular practices produced along-
side the spaces that correspond to them. Thus, not only the history of space
should be studied, but also the history of the representations of space and
especially their interconnections, distortions, displacements, and relation
with the society or mode of production that gives place to them.
This book will move between these terms, not with an eye on studying
a particular verifiable group of islands of the Mediterranean, but so as to
assess how “real” insularity is perceived, transformed, and refigured in two
disciplines, in order to see how these representations in turn have an effect
on any discourse on insularity, whether in science, philosophy, or literature,
all the while remembering that spaces and the relations that produce them
are continuous and overlapping.
The theory of space, borrowed from Certeau and Lefebvre, provides us
with a set of terms and lines of discussion that will be developed in situ in
the following chapters. Thus, we shall consider that places, common to all
narratives, exist only as abstractions, uncharacterized and unindividualized
(or overcharacterized in their refusal to admit difference within them),
much like the “community” and the “outside” with which I began this intro-
duction. These places become spaces when they become individualized,
when they are practiced, when they are demarcated through history and
economy, when they become a genre, a style, a work of fiction. As such,
these spaces become essential to the story and how it constructs itself; that
is, these spaces are a privileged site for the study of a poetics. Finally, these
spaces function in constellations or clusters, in webs of relationships that are
both diachronic—as elaborated in literary histories—and synchronic, rela-
tions that become visible when one studies the spaces of the text in dialogue
with other disciplines or in relationship to itself, to its own constellation of
 Introduction xvii

spaces. Before embarking on an overview of the spaces that in romance and

cartography lead to the production of insularity in the book of chivalry and
the isolario, I shall sketch out the basic plot of relations that, for the medieval
period, link geography and fiction, thus establishing some general para-
digms for medieval space. Then, a swift review of the spatial typologies of
medieval fiction provides a diachronic analysis that will lay the ground for a
comparative study of insular space in cartography and in the Spanish book
of chivalry in ensuing chapters.

Here and There

Interrogating one of those changes that at a certain point mark a stage, Paul
Zumthor asks if the word “modern,” coined in 1100, can be in fact sutured
to the change or reduction of perspectives to horizontality.13 A slow dis-
placement of emphasis from the vertical to the horizontal had taken place
during the early Middle Ages. Not that this change canceled in any way the
vertical—nor had it existed by itself before—but that which structured
interpretation was, by the fifteenth century, a series of discourses that had
horizontality as their point of departure. From literature to cartography, alle-
gorical interpretations by the late Middle Ages became contested through
new, dialectical forms of interpretation.14
The discourse on space is perceived as one illustrating the move from
verticality to horizontality. To express the idea of space, Romance languages
took from Latin the word locus and its derivatives for words meaning the
emplacement of a determined object: lugar, lieu, luogho. Spatium, on the other
hand, made a late entry into Romanic languages, signifying a topographic or
chronologic interval between two determined points. Sebastián de Cobar-
ruvias arranged all of these ideas in his entry on espacio in his Tesoro de la
lengua castellana o española of 1611:

From the Latin name spatium, capedo, intervallum; that is, place. A lot of space,
little space. It also means interval of time and we say for the space of so many
hours, etc. Space, among musicians, is the interval between one line and
another where the figures are placed, some in line, others in space. For some-
thing to go slowly or fast. To walk slowly/spacedly. Talk slowly/spacedly, etc.
There is no space, there is no time.15
xviii Introduction

Space was, in fact, lived in unison with time: to convey the abstract notion
of a limit of time, Isidore of Seville illustrates it with a spatial limit: “Tem-
pora autem momentis, horis, diebus, mensibus, annis, lustris, saeculis, aetat-
ibus dividuntur. Momentum est minimum atque angustissimum tempus,
a motu siderum dictum. . . . Hora enim finis est temporis, sicut et ora sunt
finis maris, fluviorum, vestimentorum.”16 The emphasis, however, is on a
subordination of time to spatial formulations; that is, chronological con-
cepts often find expression in spatial terms. Even today, expressions such as
“forward” mean “future” (más adelante), “to leave behind” is to leave in the
past (dejar atrás), and in Spanish, the very word espacio translates a time (por
espacio de dos años . . .). To move despacio means to move “slowly,” to take
more space doing it: “Spacious, as movement, one who walks slowly. Spa-
cious time is time that takes long,” explains Cobarruvias (s.v. espacioso). It
was not until the thirteenth century, with the temps des marchands (time of
merchants), as Jacques Le Goff terms it, that time began to be unsutured
from space.17 These separations, however, took a long time to become per-
vasive or dominant. Sudden ruptures would not be the rule, perhaps not
even until the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, when the subject as indi-
vidual took her place as a center. Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605–
15), whose insular geography will be the focus of the last chapter, is a case in
point: of the seventy-two times the word espacio is used, only seven specifi-
cally denote a space. All other occurrences are meant to express a chronology.
Space is, then, in medieval times, an emptiness that must be filled, prac-
ticed, given meaning. As such, the concept contrasts with that of place
(lugar), which has the richness and stability of a historical given. The place
is a characteristic of the object or the one who occupies it. The opposi-
tion between space and place entails numerous differences in all aspects of
medieval culture, which can be articulated in parallel to the opposition of
the same terms argued by Certeau. While a varied mythology corresponded
to open spaces, places were so closed and rich in themselves that they could
support universal archetypal images, they are literally commonplaces. All of
these are ultimately, in one way or the other, related to movement, stopping
it or urging it on. In between these two possibilities is the idea of limits and
their transgression. The concept of the limit, however, is not continuous,
but rather reversible: frontier and bridge may designate one and the same
 Introduction xix

thing, as discussed above via Certeau. On the topic of reversibility of limits,

Zumthor observes that twelfth- and thirteenth-century writers emphasize
such ambiguity through the frequent tracing of frontiers over unstable
mediums such as water, making of the risky element an isolating limit but
also the possibility of a passage.18
The first dividing line is the limit of the body. All grand images of the
Middle Ages—man as a microcosm, the mirror, the mystical body of the
Church, the social body, the idea itself of a corpus of images of the Middle
Ages—point us in the direction of an opposition between the soul—that
which escapes representation—and its material container, the ground for all
these images. The body was the primary reference for any idea of space. The
consciousness of self that makes I a microcosm of the world is the expanded
formulation of the hic et nunc, all the way to a phrase such as “to be beside
oneself,” estar fuera de sí, and others of the sort. The body is an instrument
for measuring, as Lefebvre reminded us: cubits, inches, feet; in Spanish pal-
mos, codos, brazadas, in common use to this day. The body is thus the source
of a language; externalizing the invisible and objectifying experience, it
becomes a model for conceptualizing space.19 Around it and in relation to
it, extension, measure, and distance are organized as a system, originating
oppositions that entail their own rules and taboos: inside/outside, leading
to metaphors of content and container; full/empty, the couple enter/exit,
which can also turn into the trio enter/traverse/exit; here/there, which rap-
idly transforms into close/far and which establishes distinctions going from
the private to the public; high/low, which engendered the couple ascent/
descent; and left/right. Antiquity preferred laterality, the high Middle Ages,
verticality: the high and the low, profundity, elevation. Modernity privileged
movement exemplified in behind/in front—a horizontality—a spatialized
progress that in the idea of development resutures space to time.20
The most valued spatial orientations for the Middle Ages, in particular
relation with the body, were the high and the inside, ascent and interioriza-
tion. With the high were associated life, love, euphoria, the superhuman—
the good; height semanticized the idea of rise and fall (Icarus, Babel).
Ascension was equated with a will to light, an aspiration of not only physical,
but also moral elevation related to sanctity and heroism. With the low were
associated demons, death, immorality (ha caído muy bajo [he has fallen to
xx Introduction

low depths]), evil emblematized in sexuality, defecation, and filthiness. Fall,

or descent, received its own name, original sin, and signified the temptation
of the putrid and the extremely painful.21 Even though the human body was
a measure of the world, it was an ambiguous one. Partially or fully naked, it
could trigger different symbolic meanings according to the circumstances.
Christianity would favor an emphasis on a negative sign of carnal pleasure,
giving a transcendental justification for this condemnation founded both in
theology and in the interpretations of Genesis and the first Fathers; and at
the same time providing the dominant classes with corresponding behav-
iors, and vocabulary, definitions that control the body and its signification.22
Different examples can be quoted to illustrate this distancing from the
body, particularly from the thirteenth century on; for example, variations on
dismemberment as criminal punishment, spiritual penance marked in the
obligation to perform an auricular confession at least once a year (imposed
after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215), the invention of the fork as a way
of distancing the body from the flesh it consumes, the equation between sin
and sickness, the use of nightgowns and robes, or the closing down of public
baths across Western Europe.23 This rejection of the flesh had its own spatial
consequences visible in the geographic search for purity, the grand symbolic
migration to the “desert” that comprehended many “victories” over the
body: sexual, nutritional, and so forth. Paradoxically, as we anticipated, the
body remained a privileged site for the contact between the spiritual and
the material world. Martyrs received the stigmata on their bodies, and saint-
hood became concrete in the smell of the body of the saint, the olor a santo.
Visions, though, whether demonic or mystical, would manifest themselves
in dreams: that is, in a curious absence of the body.
As a translation into Christian terms of Aristotelian categories explained
in the Politics, man also became, from the material reality of the body, a sym-
bolic reference. Metaphors of the body extended from figures of authority
to the idea of community, of collectivity, from the “body of the church” to
the “social body,” concepts dependent on the reciprocal necessity of their
members, on the idea of a publicity of behaviors viewed as performances,
and of the strict balance within the community making everyone responsi-
ble for all others. As such, the concept of the body is the place where the bio-
logical and the social, in fact, meet. This change, in turn, structured “social
 Introduction xxi

space,” articulating not only geography, but also morality, according to

which hierarchies were assigned. Crime would be conceived thus in terms of
social space, as a diversion or distortion of it (yerro, tort) and even law would
be referred to in similar terms, as in the French droit or Spanish derecho.
In a society that codified everything in the binomes here/there, high/low,
it was inevitable that a center/margin opposition would appear. Isidore, in
book 5 of his Etymologies, defines exilium, a form of punishment described
by law, as meaning extra solum for, indeed, exile is to live outside one’s “land,”
a geographic notion. He further emphasizes the notion of limit by writing
that “Vnde postliminium redeuntibus, hoc est de exilio reducendis, qui sunt
eiecti in iniuria, id est extra limen patriae” and by distinguishing between
deportation, relegation, and proscription.24 Already in Roman law, different
forms of banishment were pointed out, among them the prohibition to live
in a given territory, exile assigned in a specific place, or even deportation to
an island (insulae vinculum), legally ascribing the geography that will occupy
us throughout this book to the margins.25
Closer, at the limit or in the “margin” were outlaws, dissenters, and here-
tics. Different mesteres or tasks were also pushed to live there, such as those
specified by the Church Fathers (first of all usurers, then prostitutes and
entertainment professionals) or by canon law (performers, prostitutes, pro-
curers; all those having to do with blood, animal meat, or dead bodies;
sometimes enchanters, sorcerers, or trash collectors).26 This thrust to the
margins is revealed not only at the level of common practices of law, but in
the image itself of a Christian oikoumenē. The depiction of this oikoumenē, as
expressed in the cartography of the period, shows the “civilized or known
world” and, in its permeable, flexible margins, monsters, savages, pagans,
and infidels, often upon islands.
The space of everyday existence was lived as an intimate system of func-
tions and meanings. But the idea itself of the limit of the “near” or the “here”
was unclear: it separated the ego, the body, from the Others, but it served as
well as a way of communication with them, and community offers the only
idea of coherent identity for medieval culture. The effects of this contradic-
tion of the limit are a general and constant desire to leave or flee the commu-
nity and to communicate with and appropriate the Other, all in a society that,
after the great migrations, placed a high value on its sedentary character.
xxii Introduction

The “beyond” would eventually stop beckoning as the opposition be-

tween the here and there; for, between the fifteenth and the seventeenth
centuries, the polarity became one of near and far, highlighting the impact
of travel in the production of space. For centuries, however, the beyond was
the equivalent of the unknown, a neutral and pure space, undifferentiated, as
impermeable to meaning as to the eye. From the thirteenth century on and
well into the sixteenth, the beyond begins to be seen less as a static place
or time outside and more as the space where something might take place.
The vague idea of limit is crucial to this conceptual development, as the
path, the trail, the way is invested from then on with the meaning of a place
in itself. And once a beyond and a trail become existent, a voyage is possible.
Traveling becomes a fundamental activity.
The medieval traveler conceived the desire to travel, for the most part, as
a desire for knowledge. Tourism is not a word that describes any part of the
attitude of the medieval traveler, who saw the journey in terms of a destiny,
most of the time related to or aimed at a form of eternity. The concept of the
homo viator made anyone a potential if not always already a symbolic pilgrim
of life.27 Thus, travel was regarded as a form of the marvelous, responding to
an elaboration of the (changing) concept of curiosity.
Specific forms of travel developed after 900, when the large population
movements that characterized the first part of the Middle Ages under the
name of “barbaric invasions” ceased and pilgrims and crusaders came into
being. Similar to the pilgrim, the merchant was, by the thirteenth century, a
typical traveler. As images of travelers merged, the merchant’s activity was
equated by the fifteenth century with that of the conqueror, as in some ver-
sions of the figure of Marco Polo. Within pilgrimage, one of the new models
that emerged, inspired by Saint Columban, was that of the eternal pilgrim,
emulating the life of Jesus in his wandering. This was a pilgrimage inspired
by devotion; another kind of pilgrimage was that done for penance, usually
taking the pilgrim to the Holy Land, Rome, or Santiago de Compostela.
What this penance sought, even if secretly, was a miracle, an instance of the
marvelous—a revelation, a vision; but what it most often obtained was a
sort of “space therapy.”28 Monks turned pilgrimage into the image of Chris-
tian life, and through the complex cultural and religious practices that devel-
oped along these roads, space itself became produced in a way by the sacred.
 Introduction xxiii

“Christianity” itself would name a space, and not only a community or a

set of beliefs, as the expression “leaving Christianity” would denote a form
of traveling outside a certain limit, usually that of the Western sea, an image
inherited from the Greeks who marked the passage into the alien Ocean
with the Pillars or Columns of Hercules, their figuration for the twin rocks
that make up the Strait of Gibraltar.29 The idea of travel itself entailed a sort
of marginalization, or at least the risk of marginalization, as the traveler
abandoned the community to engage in a reality plagued with the new,
another word for the different. The traveler left that limit behind, initiating
a movement sutured to spatiality: “That is one of the meanings of errancy:
everything that happens has a spatial nature.”30 Those who engaged in travel
were suspicious, for they would willingly expose themselves to the dangers
inherent therein. Sea travel represented the worst of dangers, as neither the
security of a path nor that of a secure ground to walk on was possible. The
folklore made up of tales of terror at sea constitute a corpus in the Middle
Ages that finds cohesion in later genres such as the historias trágico-marítimas,
or shipwreck narratives, which were still being recast in eighteenth-century
Portugal.31 André Thevet and especially Jean de Léry in the late sixteenth
century record the experience of horror when faced with sea travel, even
when they had traveled the seas many times before. Such horror was a liter-
ary topos, for sure, but it was also a technical reality. Usually destined to
travel within the mare nostrum, technology, as is well known, was rudimen-
tary up to the fourteenth century and would not be adequate until the
fifteenth century for transatlantic navigation.
Travel had, of course, different signs across the periods, but a constant
impulse behind travelers was to encounter the extraordinary: places, beings,
phenomena recorded from Antiquity—that is, the traveler wished to find
what he in a way already knew about, making of discovery a secondary
or even unintentional effect. Among those to be found were all whom
medieval society had expelled or at least marginalized from social space, and
among the travelers were clerici vagi, troubadours, students, members of the
new orders, and travelers of all sorts, statuses, origins, and dreams; and all
of them produced narrations as individuals or in groups, from first-person
accounts to complex collections of stories; travels imaginary and real,
mostly both at the same time. For travelogues, in particular, reality remained
xxiv Introduction

a flexible term, producing thus a space for fiction paradoxically within and
outside the real, supplementing it to give it a meaning—truth—that by itself
it cannot provide: “the real has its soft zones, difficult to integrate; truth is
less a natural given than the product of discursive rules, in some measure
aleatory and subject to the irregularities of history. The discourse of the trav-
elogue is never corroborated—nor can it be—in an immediate way: this is
its unique trait, an undeniable kinship with fiction.”32 The travelogue would
gradually incorporate a “scientific” methodology, along with a stronger pres-
ence of the subject as guarantor of the veracity of its data, but fantasy would
keep a hold on the travelogue for all of the Middle Ages. As an example, John
Mandeville, for a long time believed to be a real traveler, signed in the begin-
ning of the fourteenth century his well-known imagined journey Voyage
d’outre-mer. Two centuries later, the anonymous Spanish Libro del conosci-
miento de todos los reinos incorporates enough verifiable data to have con-
founded many modern critics. And Marco Polo’s Milione was taken to be a
sack of hilarious lies, being, to modern eyes, the most “realistic” of the lot.
These connections between space and narration through a variety of
genres that seem to speak directly to fiction are also present in Arabic litera-
ture, which also established a link between the travelogue and the concept
of fiction. It identified, at least from the tenth century on, books of travel as
an independent genre related to romance: “The word rih.la refers to both a
journey and to its description. Such descriptions constitute a genre that
flourished more than any and served scholarship—geography and cartogra-
phy—as well as literature. It was capacious enough to include almanacs,
calendars, grammars, zodiacs, horoscopes, the occasional map, and all sorts
of accounts connected with peregrinations through the Mediterranean and
beyond.”33 The rih.la is both the journey and its narration, and it had, as did
its Christian parallels, a primary impulse in pilgrimage, and welcomed both
the everyday and the extraordinary, geography and history and marvels. The
medieval imagination would blend those two possibilities, spatiality and
literary composition, in a complex generic experimentation that led to vari-
ous forms of prose fiction. These hybrid genres bear out the varying degrees
of the suture of time to space, of history to geography, and to narration as
central to that articulation. Perhaps the most famous medieval texts to con-
vey such experimentation in their coupling of traveling and narrating are the
 Introduction xxv

fourteenth-century Rih.la by Ibn Bat.t. ūt. a and Polo’s Devisement du monde or

Milione, better known as the book of Marco Polo, which was translated by
Rusticiano de Pisa, compiler of the well-known chivalric romance Meliadus.
The supernatural, the miraculous, the magical, the verisimilar, the fabu-
lous, the boundless, the strange, and the imaginary that inhabit these narra-
tions coincide in the Middle Ages in one term that encompasses them all:
mirabilia. The Latin term, meaning “wondrous things or happenings,” comes
into Spanish as maraviella, as in French marveille, Old Provençal meravelha,
or Italian miraviglia, “through a—culturally justifiable—semi-learned chan-
nel, namely as the folk-religious term of early Christianity par excellence”;
however, notes Malkiel, some elements remain unaccounted for, such as
“the local products of MIRABILIA cut loose from the core of the MIRARI
family, as the meaning of the verb, i.e., of the entire family, drifted more and
more in the direction of ‘looking’ rather than ‘wondering,’” with paradig-
matic examples in Spanish maravilla and mirar (linked through admirar)
and French merveille versus miroir, a split that increased the distance be-
tween the miraculous (milagro, orig. miraglo) and the marvelous.34 That dis-
tance is emphasized in medieval peninsular texts, separating the Christian
supernatural from the magical pagan elements; both sharing procedures but
prescribing specific expectations and reactions that ultimately distinguish
them from each other.
The main differences between the marvel and the miracle can be said to
be differences of (1) origin, (2) hierarchy, and (3) flexibility. That is, mar-
velous things or happenings have a multiplicity of forces at their origin,
while miracles have only one author, God; while etymologically all miracles
are marvels, within Christian ideology miracles have a higher power than
marvels, which are, of course, subordinated to God—as we will see in the
Christianized marvels in Amadís.35 What these two extremes of the term
“marvelous” share, in their “irrationality,” is that they do not call for an inter-
rogation of their “reality,” but rather of their meaning. And, if the marvelous
is the literary representation of the supernatural, and the supernatural is
at the core of the medieval representation of the world, the interrogation of
the meaning of the marvelous constitutes both its reason for eluding Chris-
tianization and its necessary gradual absorption into ideology.36 Ultimately,
the Christianized marvelous became assimilated to the miraculous, and the
xxvi Introduction

miraculous was not—except in doubt of the power of God—to pro-

voke wonder: it is proof, visible proof of God’s power. In other words, God’s
manifestations of power were meant to be admirable but not marvels in
themselves.
Such ambiguity or reversibility of meaning was not limited to content,
but could also be seen as an effect of the development of new genres and the
production of novel textual spaces in the movements between the oral and
the written. In written texts—to which the different materials considered in
this study belong historically—the space of writing slowly encroaches on
that of the voice, and illumination that of performance or gesture. However,
“voice” would be kept in the way of performance, as not only epics but also
romances were read out loud in small groups and then discussed.37 The
codex, as opposed to the scroll (papyrus), generates an order, to which the
text of the prose romance of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries refers
constantly through adverbs of place: plus, avant, delante, atrás; and the space
surrounding the text becomes more and more abstract as it becomes more
independent of a performer, a reader, or an interpreter. In this process,
Zumthor distinguishes two new kinds of stories not destined to be sung.
The first generally produces a moral meaning and is constructed on an
action progressing in a linear fashion, according to a predictable causality,
sometimes even making the whole story depend on the last link in a narra-
tive concatenation. In the second variety, meaning is above all historical.
Here action is developed from within, sometimes in bifurcations and alter-
nations that contrast with the linearity of language. A sense of ambiguity is
present, and the unpredictable dominates. This structural chance, this haz-
ard that is built into narration produces the space of the marvelous in chival-
ric romance that will, in Spain, produce a geography of its own: the island.
In these brief reflections, the insular has come up in the context of
margins, of limits, of cartography and juridical discourse, as a space pro-
duced in reality and in fiction. The location of islands at these limits of the
imagination or representation makes them especially prone to links with
the marvelous as a specific development in the medieval period, as will
be detailed in later chapters. It is time to define precisely, though, what we
mean here by “island.” In his Etymologies, Isidore confirms the commonly
accepted suggestion of Latin authors, who “suggested that insula evolved
 Introduction xxvii

from the preposition in- plus ‘salt,’ as if it referred to the sea water,” even if
river islands were commonly accepted as following this denomination as
well. In Latin, moreover, insula “was used, according to Paulus Festus, to
indicate a ‘block,’ a group of buildings, given the similarity between this and
those lands quae in fluminibus ac mari eminent suntque in salo.”38 We know
that in late Antiquity the Latin insula could also be used to designate the
“temple,” underlining the architectural element along with a religious or at
least ritual one.39 The Diccionario de la Real Academia Española defines
island in purely geographical terms as a “portion of land surrounded by
water on all sides.” The recurrent problem of the size of that portion of land
is, however, not resolved. While I study here only literary geographical
islands, in reading the primary texts I consider all of the connotations given
to insula in Latin, that is, a fragment of land surrounded by water, the idea of
architecture implied in insula as a block of buildings, and the connection to
a religious practice or to a divinity in the meaning of insula as temple.40

Medieval and Modern

In the preceding introductory remarks I have argued for the study of space
as produced space, closely following Lefebvre’s seminal study and ground-
ing it specifically in a series of practices in late medieval and early modern lit-
erature. Lefebvre’s theory undergirds this book, complemented by Certeau’s
concept of practiced or lived space, and especially by his insights into the
spatial poetics of movement, of the relations between linguistic operations
and the traversing of space as it is produced. Thus, Lefebvre and Certeau
offer the medievalist complementary concepts to analyze discursive prac-
tices of space. This conceptual articulation structures my argument, with
the important addition of Zumthor, whose notions of medieval poetics are
historicized in spatial terms in La Mesure du monde. This conceptual frame
is necessary to understand the particular focus of the book. This book
means to study space by itself, as separate from a temporality that often
occludes it through concepts such as Bertrand Russell’s chronogeography
or the much hailed Bakhtinian chronotope, concepts that curiously impose
a temporal component to the topos, a traditional spatial concept in poetics,
and, more insidiously, invest the temporal with a hierarchy through notions
of progress or development. While their functionality may be out of the
xxviii Introduction

question for other types of analysis, this book, in part, seeks to turn on their
heads the many assessments and conclusions that are derived from such
subordinations of space to time. That is why the book will return to ques-
tions of the relation between space and time, but space will be shown to be
the determining feature of the different genres that will be discussed here, in
the terms that have been presented: space as produced and practiced, there-
fore specific to a society or community, and open to historicization in its
transformation. As the book argues for a close link between the production
of insularity in literary and cartographic discourses, and in turn between
these and the development of a new way of interrogating the real through
fiction, this study is also a reflection on the cultural relations between fiction
and space.
Taking as a starting point Jacques Lacan’s statement that “fiction presents
itself in/as a structure of truth,”41 this book ultimately seeks to present these
late medieval and early modern texts to the reader as uncommonly “mod-
ern.” That is, the texts studied here will be analyzed to show how their fic-
tive qualities—especially through the spatiality they articulate—produce
meaning or truth at the level of politics, ethics, poetics, and so forth. This
function of fiction, theorized in a way in Amadís through its archipelago, is
not exclusive to books of chivalry, but sits at the origins of Castilian prose
fiction itself, intimately tied to translation (in a sense, translation as political
practice, as exercised by Alfonso X), and to the developments of histori-
ography. These often coincide, as in the rewriting of Trojan materials, but
techniques and contents also originate in works that deal with changing
mentalities, such as the crusading idea emphasized in the court of Sancho
IV. Such transformations are visible in texts that evolve through the expecta-
tions of different periods, monarchs, and courts, as the compilation known
as Gran Conquista de Ultramar (a pilgrimage account), whose last textual
evolution, following the death of Sancho IV, focused on the section called
the Estoria del Cavallero del Çisne, highlighting chivalric fiction.
Fiction, defined simply by Fernando Gómez Redondo as the process
of invention and construction of reality in a way that is similar to that of
the receptor, bears the mark of the particular courtly setting that produced
it and its evolving goals; it thus is similar to the way Barbara Fuchs defines
romance as strategy in Romance. Medieval literature has many terms to
 Introduction xxix

address fiction of various lengths and structures—cuento, fabliella, exemplo,

fazaña, estoria, and, of course, romance, which can denominate both prose
and verse texts of diverse content, as well as the ballad. Literary historians
and critics have more or less generally of late coincided in adopting, with
some caution, the term “romance” as a classificatory label, both due to its
medieval self-referentiality and its general connotation of fiction. Chivalric
fiction thus encompasses a variety of genres, particularly short fiction,
Arthurian romances and their relatives, and books of chivalry. Amadís, as
the first book of chivalry—which is the term the genre was known by—is
also a “romance,” even if the term “book of chivalry” will be used in this
book to denote Spanish chivalric prose fiction specifically.42 Fiction, as a
general marker of medieval Spanish literature—widely used in hispano-
medievalism, especially to refer to sentimental and chivalric texts—will, in
a sense, be used here in the same transgeneric way that Barbara Fuchs uses
romance.43
Prose fiction in general, however, is further linked to the construction of
certain behaviors, apt for particular social situations. For Gómez Redondo,
this is the reason why the translations of the Kalila, the Sendebar, or the
Escala de Mahoma were necessary; that is, they were key to the forma-
tion of a courtly ideology while constituting at the same time the origins of
Castilian prose fiction. Gómez Redondo in fact argues that the translation
of these texts “under the guise of fiction” allowed Alfonso X to disseminate
knowledge about Islamic culture, knowledge used as political instrument.44
As a working definition of the book of chivalry in this book, I would like
to bring together Fuchs’s definition of romance as strategy, that is, a defini-
tion that comes from a structure related to narrative delay and digression
as form, and so forth, with Gómez Redondo’s emphasis on prose fiction as
the construction of behaviors, where the links with politics and ethics are
visible.45 Thus, the implications of finding a theory of fiction in the produc-
tion of archipelagoes seem clearer.
While the arguments for opposing fiction, and especially chivalric fiction,
to truth are contemporary to the book of chivalry, this book will seek to dis-
place this often-repeated opposition by working with the truth of the book
of chivalry itself. In a way, the “modernity” of the book of chivalry that will
be argued here will not be one based on content, but one that will suggest
xxx Introduction

that the insular structure of Amadís offers a theory of fiction in relation to

truth that can be paralleled to contemporary thought. Reconsiderations of
fiction in relation to truth are not openly stated for the most part in contem-
porary thought, though in theory, of course, someone from the position of
psychoanalysis will always consider fiction in relation to truth, in the form
of fantasy at least. As fantasy, fiction is not only a way of having access to
the real (as in the analytical process), but also a way of living or dealing
with, as a means of protecting, or of harboring, oneself from the onslaught
of the real. Slavoj Žižek, in The Plague of Fantasies, wavers between these two
positions: a commonplace negative one and a glittering positive one, pre-
senting fiction as a condition for the real that, however, almost inevitably
retreats to the idea of fantasy as a shelter from the truth, thus once again
opposing the two terms.
Lacan’s phrase, cited above, can serve as paradigm of such alternating
positions. His phrase is ambiguous, supporting at least two immediate inter-
pretations. The first is the popular pejorative connotation of fiction. Alain
Badiou, in his Peut-on penser la politique? discusses fiction, in terms of poli-
tics, as something that constitutes a sort of frame in which truth makes a
hole. Fiction here, following Lacan, is for Badiou a fixed object, with clear
delimitations and a consistency that allows one to see where fiction is and
where it has ceased to be. Badiou plays with the term fixion to mean not only
fiction but also its rigidity, and one can further read into the word game an
allusion to fiction as fixation, to its obsessive traits. In terms of politics, his
immediate interest in that book, Badiou terms the social as that fiction in
which politics irrupts, literally breaking the fiction of the social bond.46
Later in his work, in pivotal arguments on truth in L’Etre et l’événement,
Badiou will revise his stance on the relation between fiction and truth. Here
he presents two variations: hypothetical reasoning and reasoning through
the absurd. The first of these operations works as follows: one can “make the
hypothesis” from a statement A, which could very well be false, in order to
draw a conclusion B and then conclude on the truth of the implication A—
B (which does not, nonetheless, confirm in any way the hypothetical truth
of A). Badiou will call this a “fictive” or “fictional” situation. It is on the pas-
sage through non-being, across an assertion that could very well be false,
that truth is found.47
 Introduction xxxi

The second variation, reasoning through the absurd, follows apparently

the same steps, but here, reason does not know where it wants to go, it does
not know B. It is a stake, a leap that does not know where it will fall, or how
the situation might be changed. Here, fiction works as a supplement that acts
as mediation to truth. To refer to fiction, the vocabulary Badiou employs
is that of spatiality.48 Fiction is characterized as a space that allows move-
ment: “One of the most powerful resources of ontological fidelity is found
thus to be the capacity to move in adjacent fictive situations, obtained
through axiomatic supplementation.” This movement into the fictional is
described as particularly attractive because of its adventurous character, its
freedom, and its uncertainty.49 Central to Badiou’s argument here are not
only the invocation of the absurd, which I will suggest is related to Alonso
López Pinciano’s characterization of the chivalric as nonsense (disparates) in
chapter 3, along with Félix Lope de Vega’s characterization of cartographic
imagination in El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón, but also
the emphasis on the portrayal of fiction as a space. The relations between
contemporary theory’s elaborations on fiction also coincide with the book
of chivalry’s nuancing of the movement into fiction as being something tied
to adventure and to chance. The production of truths, then, in the thought
of Badiou, is tied to a space of fiction that has adventure and uncertainty at
its core, much as the book of chivalry’s structural production of insularity.
Further developing this idea of fiction as a supplementary space allowing
for hypotheses from which to draw conclusions on truth, Badiou contrasts
this type of reasoning (both hypothetical and reasoning through the absurd),
which he calls apagogic reasoning, to constructive reasoning. While con-
structive reasoning goes from statement to statement toward another state-
ment it has deemed its objective to establish, without retreating from the law
of presentation, apagogic reasoning

installs from the start the fiction of a situation, which it supposes incoherent,
just to the point that such incoherence is manifest, in the hazard of a state-
ment that contradicts an already established result. This difference is less
close to the employment of a double negation than to a strategic quality made
up on one side of assurance and internal wisdom to the order, and on the
other of adventurous peregrination into disorder. . . . This combination of
xxxii Introduction

zealous fidelity and of the hazardousness of the encounter, of the precision of

the rule and the consciousness of the nullity of its place of exercise is the most
striking trait of the procedure. Reasoning through the absurd is that which is
most militant in the conceptual strategies of the science of being as being.50

As truth is something that always completely transforms the situation, this

truth exists outside of the initial situation in its entirety, thus seeming
absurd. Reasoning through the absurd requires considering this fiction as if
it were already part of the situation. Badiou calls this a generic extension of the
situation, which goes against the historical as the objectively given. Truth is
that which is supernumerary with respect to the situation, which exceeds
it. That excess, that outside space, such absurdity is, clearly, the realm of fic-
tion. A generic extension of the situation is the consideration of such space,
that of fiction (or the indiscernible), as already a part of the situation, as
internal to it. Badiou is aware that he is calling here for a language to name
the unnamable, a language that shall name without doing so; suggest some-
thing’s existence without stating what it is.51 In considering this fiction as
intrinsic to the situation, thus in fact changing the situation, truth will be
forced onto it in a procedure that Badiou calls torsion, or forçage, transform-
ing the knowledge itself of that situation.
This type of reasoning, whether in its hypothetical or in its version as
a reasoning through the absurd, is present at the core itself of chivalric
romance in the conjugation between insularity and the chivalric concept of
adventure. In fact, I believe it is precisely this philosophical (and conversely
political and obviously literary) element that Miguel de Cervantes points
to in his metaphorization of the space of the chivalric island in the Ínsula
Barataria episode. Insularity, I claim, functions as a hinge between these two
variations of reasoning, hypothesis and the absurd as elaborated by Badiou
in his thought on the event, that enable truths.
The analysis of the spatialization of adventure, forged in the romances of
Chrétien de Troyes and refunctionalized in the Spanish book of chivalry as
insularity, conveys a series of elements that overlap with apagogic reason-
ing as explained by Badiou. In both, the element of uncertainty is key, and
notions such as peregrination, an implied militancy, the incorporation of a
“beyond” into the situation as if it were already part of it, play a fundamental
 Introduction xxxiii

role.52 Even the idea of a future past of the event, conjugated into the etymol-
ogy of adventure seems to mirror Badiou’s concept of generic extension.
As concept and as structure, adventure builds itself in its own action, its
“happening,” in its projecting itself not only in a future past but also onto a
space and a conscience, ordered to the beat of what Zumthor in his Essai de
poétique médiévale calls “lieux rythmiques” (“rhythmic places”). These
places, which are crucial to the development of the Spanish book of chivalry,
were islands. In the diatribe against the genre, islands summed up the ele-
ments of the marvelous adventure and came to signify fiction itself. As fic-
tion, in its philosophical connotations as elaborated in the philosophy of
Badiou, a study of insular episodes puts into perspective not only the literary
solutions that work out the distancing between fiction and reality, but the
political implications of spatiality in literature.
Through the increasing process of metaphorization, Cervantes, I will
argue in the last chapter, seeks to emphasize not (or not merely) geography,
not even politics, perhaps not the story itself. What is underscored, from the
separation of protagonists to Sancho’s arguable failure to govern, is precisely
the subject that has been in the works: Sancho himself. In the reformulation
of the insular model, provided by Amadís de Gaula, Barataria is the place for
a change in linguistic register as a characterizing trait of Sancho. It is his lan-
guage, his capacity for naming that stands out. Such language, in Badiou’s
terms, is what allows a subject to approach truth by making hypotheses on
it that, in the end, are hypotheses on the subject itself:

that which makes use of names to hypothesize on truth. But, as the subject
itself is a finished configuration of the generic procedure from which results
a truth, we can well say that a subject makes use of name to make hypotheses
on itself, “itself ” meaning the infinite where it is the end [fini]. Language is
here the fixed order where a finitude turns to suppose, under the condition of
the infinite it effects, a referent to come. It is the being itself of truth, in the
combination of finished inquiries and the future past of a generic infinity.53

Within the Cervantine text itself this ínsula is already a metaphor; it has
already been displaced from geography to a space in discourse, a function.
As both a thematic island and an “island of style,” the island serves as a figure
xxxiv Introduction

for a new kind of structure, and for a complex kind of amplificatio that sug-
gests a new form for the novel. In the displacement, what is revealed is the
subject making hypotheses on truth, which are hypotheses on the subject
itself: Sancho has been forced to consider himself.
This book will thus assess the production of insularity in two disciplines
that are closely related and that share operations that illuminate the ways
each other works, and how a specific period sought through the production
of insular spaces to solve different problems of poetics and politics, of ethics
and the articulation of fiction and truth. These two disciplines are cartogra-
phy and chivalric romance, which from the second half of the thirteenth
century undergo tremendous changes and a continued process of recre-
ation. Islands figure in both disciplines as particularly malleable, but by
the fifteenth century they will acquire specific meanings and thus configure
specific genres in both disciplines in what I call an “insular turn,” isolarii in
cartography and books of chivalry in romance. The life of these genres is
also parallel, as they come to a peak in the sixteenth century only to dwindle
by the seventeenth century and disappear as a new genre takes center stage.
The emergence of these new genres, the atlas and the novel, is intimately
tied to the production of insularity in the isolario and the book of chivalry,
for it is precisely the poetic extension of such an “insular turn” that makes
these new totalizing mirror genres, atlas and novel, possible.
The conceptual framework anticipated here is used throughout the book
to analyze space to first survey the production of insular spaces in medieval
literature, progressively focusing on romance and specifically on Spanish
medieval literature. The second chapter of the book is devoted to islands
in medieval cartography and the emergence of the genre of the isolario. A
series of theses on islands follow a close analysis of Christophoro Buondel-
monti’s text, which draws parallels with developments in narrative and
shows how useful a comparable discipline such as cartography might be for
the study of literature. Following the case study of Buondelmonti’s isolario,
the third chapter exercises close readings of three insular cases in the Amadís
de Gaula, the first and most important of books of chivalry, where archi-
pelagic narrative structure is presented as a model for Iberian prose fiction.
The episodic structure of the archipelago in Amadís is studied in the last
chapter through visual representations of the book’s insularity, both through
 Introduction xxxv

woodcuts and engravings and tapestries, showing how the concept of in-
sularity is transformed, and metaphorized. This process, reworked by Cer-
vantes in the Ínsula Barataria episode in the second part of the Quixote, is the
focus of the last part of this chapter, looking at how the space of the island,
a topos of the book of chivalry, is driven in Don Quixote back again into lan-
guage from geography in a doubling of its commonplace status, parading
self-consciousness, the independence of linguistic creation, and voiding the
archipelagic structure of the book of chivalry from any geography to keep
only its skeleton, its framing capabilities, laying bare fiction’s thrust to truth.
The conclusions go back to the potential of the archipelagic in Amadís
to emphasize the theoretical possibilities that the insular provides and that
can perhaps be recovered through literary criticism. Badiou’s reflections on
fiction are here recalled to elicit and exemplify at the same time the produc-
tive notions of truth and fiction that can be drawn out of the insular model
in the book of chivalry.
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 1
QW
f or e st to i s l a n d
Sites of Adventure from Arthur to Amadís
It also occurred to him that the generations of men, throughout
recorded time, have always told and retold two stories—that of
a lost ship which searches the Mediterranean seas for a dearly
loved island, and that of a god who is crucified on Golgotha.
—jorge luis borge s, The Gospel According to Mark

M edieval romance stems out from the articulation of two traditions,

that of chanson de geste and that of historiography, the latter not at all
new, as its origins are much more ancient and scholarly, but which gained
renewed importance due to the series of developments that characterize the
confluence of phenomena we have come to know as the Renaissance of
the twelfth century.1 The coexistence of epic and romance established a dif-
ference between the genres based on the social function they represented:
collective versus individual; a complex set of situations versus the singular
event; society versus one man.2 Both participated in truth but for different
reasons: epic drew its truth from the collective memory it articulated, while
romance drew it from fiction to codify present behaviors and relations, for
no romance dating before the fifteenth century was built on “lived experi-
ence,” its threads derived from poetry itself and were anchored in tradition,
even in the composition of historical subjects.
“Types” or styles of romance, those narrating themes from Antiquity
(roman d’Antiquité) and Arthurian romance, shared a confrontation with
epic. Within romance itself, the matter of Britain developed a prestige and
popularity that came to dominate the roman d’Antiquité until the novel came
into being. Arthurian romance managed to do this because it fulfilled three
tasks: in relation to history, it anchored the meaning of a past and made an

1
2 forest to island

allegorical interpretation possible; it created narrative unity by designating

a place of origin and destiny, allowing for the development of stories accord-
ing to the structure of the voyage or the quest; and it created the frame
not only for Arthurian romance but for virtually every romance that came
after it. The story was not built on a traditional formula or a character but
was due, as Erich Auerbach pointed out, to a “dynamic syntax,” in the pro-
jection into the future of a present in order to contrast, to compare, and,
thus, to extract meaning from this overlap.3 This projection bears the name
of adventure.
Adventure takes us back, first of all, to the two-fold nature of romance as
it is determined by the tension between love and war. The text is simultane-
ously built in relation to these two levels, linked spatially through alterna-
tion: that is, love and war have a metonymic link, not a metaphoric one, thus
the action is a series not of developments but of mirrored situations. In the
words of Erich Köhler, adventure—in this specular form—is the means by
which the contradiction between the ideal of life and real life is overcome:
“Romance idealizes adventure and thereby gives it a moral value, dissociates
it from its concrete origin and situates it in the center of an imaginary feudal
world in which the community of interests between the different layers of
nobility, which belong already to the past, seems still achievable.”4 In a more
recent overview of the category of romance, Fuchs, following Cesare Segre,
substitutes war for adventure, making the opposition one between eros and
chivalry.5 Adventure, however, is always implicit in the love encounters that
may occur inside or outside the court, and the chivalric includes a skillful
handling of eros as part of the knight’s social identity, as it is indeed part of
his heroism. A much larger structuring function, adventure works both at
the level of narrative construction, and as the conceptual thrust of romance.
The rise of romance partook of a certain “atmosphere” in which monastic
practices, new approaches to historiography, and a certain taste for popu-
lar culture, already mentioned, all became part of a movement of which the
advent of prose would be one of the last effects.6 The rapid spread of prose
can be related to the different tendencies—didactic, moralizing, allegoriz-
ing—that, from the thirteenth century on, prevailed on the European conti-
nent and, remarkably early on in Spain, aimed at the constitution of a notion
of “belonging,” citizenship, or community through vernacular languages, as
 forest to island 3

espoused by Alfonso X.7 But by the second half of the thirteenth century,
common procedures of the romance, such as interlacing, began to be aban-
doned in these circles in favor of others more appropriate to new needs of
expression, whether it be causality, interiority, development, or other pro-
cedures. A change in form such as this had a radical effect on romance, in
particular on the notion of adventure. Adventure became the sign either of
a stage completed or of a moral quality. In any case, it became the sign of
something else. As a sign for another thing, allegory became its natural com-
panion, and the development of other generic forms, related to romance,
such as sentimental fiction, bear witness to this. The metonymic became
metaphorical in the most radical sense: it was driven into the long metaphor
of allegory. In allegory, characters, actions, and interpretations were system-
atized and then formalized in such a tight structure that the unpredictable—
the marvelous—could no longer take place in it.
Arthurian romance entered Iberia before the advent of prose, by way
of Occitan troubadour poetry in the late twelfth century that introduced
names and themes that permeated historiography. Geoffrey of Monmouth
constituted an important historical source, but it would not be until a cen-
tury later that the first translations, now in prose, of the Post-Vulgate trilogy,
also known as the Pseudo-Boron, would circulate. Translated by Juan Vivas,
a cleric, probably first into Portuguese at the end of the thirteenth century,
from here on the fragments and versions multiply into the many Iberian
romance languages.8
Of the later extant fragments and manuscripts, most from the fifteenth
century, those based on the Post-Vulgate seem to prefer the second and third
branches both in Portuguese and Castilian, summarizing and interpreting
the first branch—the Estoire, translated as the Libro de Josep de Abarimatia—
in terms almost exclusively limited to conversion, and articulating the struc-
ture of chivalric adventure from the other two—Merlin and the Queste,
translated as Demanda do Santo Graal in Portuguese and as Lançarote in
Castilian. By the fourteenth century, as Gómez Redondo notes, not only
the vernacular languages of Iberia, but courtly communities themselves
were able not only to interpret and appropriate the complex codifications
of culture within chivalric fiction, but also capable of producing their own,
as the Çifar, or more expertly, Amadís.9
4 forest to island

Chivalric romance founded its action in the enterprise of its hero and
was frequently framed in the quest, a type of journey that, by the testimony
of extant manuscripts, interested Iberian audiences in particular.10 The story
begins in a community from which the hero is suddenly summoned to leave
by an unforeseen situation, a situation that reveals the absence of an object
or person that must be recuperated. Upon the completion of this quest,
the reentry into the community reinstates the lost order. In his quest, the
knight—on horseback, armored, and ready—travels the world from com-
bat to combat, a task marked by chance and characterized by unpredicta-
bility. This unpredictability is the definition of adventure, which, in turn,
effects a sort of causality, as the adventure provokes the quest and the quest
is the guarantor of the existence of an adventure. Chrétien de Troyes and
other writers of romances after him gave adventure the specific meaning of
a trial inscribed in a series of trials, which produces the sense of a progress,
not only spatial but also spiritual and moral, toward a stage of perfection that
will allow the knight to restore order in society.11 Duration is inevitably
linked to this contrived unpredictability. Instability constitutes in this sense
an essential order of the romance, founding its structure.12 This precarious-
ness was to be intimately associated, even made synonymous with the mar-
velous. All variations of the marvelous are present in the romance, from the
fantasies of the Orient to Celtic folklore, bestiary traditions, tales of travel-
ers, and popular stories. Erich Auerbach called these elements a “magical
atmosphere,” an “enchanted world” that the critic saw as having no function
beyond signaling the distance the romance has with its social, economic, and
political reality, and finds its origins in folklore.13 These marvelous or fic-
tional elements were alternately, according to Auerbach, a result of a feudal
ethos that did not make sense anymore, an interiorization of knightly ideals
and the substitution of vassalage for courtesy, thus preventing the entire
courtly romance from representing historical reality in its depth and com-
plexity; for Fredric Jameson, these elements are associated with evil, if he
emphasizes the changing ideologies that take romance and adapt it to their
own political and literary needs.14
In a chapter devoted to the concept of adventure within a study of the
Grail cycles, Joan Ramon Resina remarks upon the same episode in Yvain as
Auerbach, picking up on the spatial and moral dimensions of the concept of
 forest to island 5

adventure. In regard to marvelous elements, Resina remarks instead that

their function is quite practical, in the sense that these motifs point to their
existence in the world as experienced by the author, and remarks that such
marvels have a particular relation to language, that of namelessness. As
interstices of the natural world, language fails to capture their meaning in
description. For Resina, language comes into play only after the event, suc-
cumbing to its temporal limitations, while adventure must leave its meaning
to an “act in the future, ignored; a sort of creative potential that nothingness
possesses,”15 leaving all of the determinations up to the subject undertaking
the adventure and (un)naming the event that will have taken place. If, as
Resina notes, the Grail cycles suffocated the unpredictability of adventure,
this was not the case for all chivalric fiction. The productivity of a notion of
adventure linked to hazardousness, to unpredictability, to an event that can
transform a given situation to render it anew is enacted in Iberian chivalric
romances such as Amadís where adventure, in terms of a subject, signals a
work of self-transformation.16
By the thirteenth century the chivalric was an institution, the knight’s
lifestyle considered prestigious, and his prestige anchored in the mythical
court of Arthur. The character entered the popular imagination as a media-
tor between the chaos of social life and an ideal order, and the space traveled
by the knight, even if not completely interiorized, became symbolic of a
domination, which can be related to cartographic procedures, made possi-
ble through its traversing.17 Adventure, as the core component of chivalric
romance, and as the defining action of the knight, imbricated with the mar-
velous, built itself within the romance in its own action, its “happening,” in
its projecting itself not only in a future but also onto a space and a con-
science, articulating the figure of a subject.

Marvels
Discussions of the marvelous in romance often return to questions of veri-
similitude. This preoccupation with levels of “truth value” in the romance is
linked at the onset to the parallel development of historiography. Both
romance and history develop new strengths in the expression of tempo-
rality, of the role of the past and the future in the articulation of a narrative,
and their common origin results in many contacts, contaminations, and
6 forest to island

confusions. Historiography does not differentiate itself from romance except

in the composition of the whole, whereas techniques, rules, procedures, and
even the means are the same.18 Spatiality, however, is differentiated within
the genres, especially in its associations with the marvelous. While histo-
riography concerned itself mainly with the production of spaces of sover-
eignty, the concerns of romance, while not excluding questions of nobility,
genealogy, and courtesy, all related to sovereignty, were more diverse and
included institutions, communities, and polities, figured through different
instances of the marvelous.
Reflection on the marvelous had been intrinsic to juridical thought for a
long time, especially in its relation to the miraculous. Alfonso X, the Learned
King, in his ambitious legal project Las siete partidas, defined miracle as
follows:

A miracle, that is to say a marvelous work of God, surpasses what is done

by Nature every day, and for this reason it does not often occur. That it may
be accepted as true it must possess four things in itself: first, it must come
through the power of God, and not through craft; second, the miracle must
be contrary to the laws of Nature, for under other circumstances men would
not marvel at it; third, it must be produced by reason of the merits of the
sanctity and excellence of him by whose instrumentality God performs it;
fourth, the miracle must relate to something which may tend to the confirma-
tion of the Faith.19

While in the previous law he clarifies that

This power is peculiarly that of God, and when it is manifested by Him the
act is called a miracle, because when it happens it is a marvelous thing both
to men and nations; and this is the case because nations see every day the acts
of Nature and therefore when anything is done contrary to her laws, they
wonder from whence it is derived, and especially when it takes place rarely;
for then they marvel at it as something new and strange; and of this the wise
man spoke, and with reason said: “A miracle is something which we see but do
not know whence it comes.”20
 forest to island 7

As we can see in Alfonso’s definition, everything wonderful that had to do

with the body, with physical materiality, particularly that of human beings
and especially that which expressed bodily desires or fears, was usually inter-
preted as a marvel of nature. From the classification of deformations in
Isidore’s Etymologies, all the way to Hieronymus Bosch’s corporeal compos-
ites, medieval representations attest to the intimacy of the marvelous and
humanity. For there is humanity in cynocephali, cyclopes, hermaphrodites,
and Amazons: their difference is primarily explained by the space—far
away, different—they occupy.21 Continuously rewriting the classical tradi-
tion of the marvel-collection,22 the monstrous was to be catalogued inces-
santly from the third century on, in treatises such as the Liber monstruorum
de diversis generibus (sixth century), or Thomas de Cantimpré’s De natura
rerum (1240), to name two of the most successful. From Ramon Llull’s Felix
or Llibre de meravelles (ca. 1310) to ordinary travelogues, no work with an
encyclopedic pretense failed to address such matters.23 Definitions of these
beings tended toward moralization, as the body, as we have seen, was per-
ceived to have a correspondence with the cosmos. Although the belief in
monstrous races diminishes with knowledge from travels and the critical
spirit of the thirteenth century, the fascination they provoked did not dis-
appear, and would return, if transformed, in the sixteenth century, where
the most eloquent testimony is provided by Ambroise Paré’s Des monstres
et prodiges of 1573.24
The relationship between monstrosity and the marvelous, as well as that
between the admirable and the marvelous, points directly to the question
of wonder. Wonder in the medieval and the early modern world has been
recently studied from the perspective of the history of science, in particular,
by Mary B. Campbell in Wonder and Science, and by Katharine Park and
Lorraine Daston in their account spanning from medieval times to the
eighteenth century, Wonder and the Order of Nature. The latter especially is
quite critical of Le Goff’s ideas on the marvelous due to their focus on liter-
ature, so I will detail now what this book will refer to as marvel. Daston and
Park’s emphasis on wonder as a recurrent sensibility, a “powerfully felt emo-
tion” with a history in specific reference to the history of science as one of
“wonders as objects of natural inquiry,” is inadequate for a number of the
8 forest to island

questions this study will ask.25 First, their definition of wonder (a Germanic
word that does not contain the visual elements of the romance words) as a
passion cannot be documented in any of the texts considered here, unless
one uses a different term, “curiosity,” from the Latin curiositas, documented
in its modern sense in the Diccionario de Autoridades, but which can also be
found in its sense of “care” (a sense which the modern curiosidad kept along-
side “the desire, taste, want to see, know and find things, how they are, hap-
pen or have happened,” Aut.), as cura from the thirteenth century onward, in
Gonzalo de Berceo, Juan Ruiz, and so forth.26 Secondly, the separation of
verbs and nouns (to wonder versus wonders) as if the “passion” were not an
effect of the “object” is problematic in relation to our primary texts, as is the
equation between the popular and the vulgar.27 Finally, the scope of Daston
and Park’s volume, even when accomplishing the task of documenting
reflections on prodigies and portent for “much of the medieval West,” rarely
includes Iberian texts. One exception is the consideration of Llull’s presen-
tation of “wonder” in his Llibre de meravelles, which “attempted to combine
all three types of wonder.” Characterized as a “valiant effort to bridge the gap
between university natural philosophy, Augustinian and monastic values,
and the literary tastes of courtly and urban elites,” it is carefully set aside by
dint of its “very limited influence” and the characterization of its author as
“idiosyncratic.”28 Llull’s articulation of different narrative strategies, from
the romance-travelogue frame narrative to the conceptual intellectual core
of adventure is especially eloquent of the literary definition of the marvelous
I shall here use to refer to specific elements of the texts I study. Precisely
because of its direct consideration of literature I have chosen Le Goff’s per-
spective to illuminate the role of the marvelous, and elected to interpret the
medieval monstrous in the same way Felix, Llull’s hero, views it: as part of
God’s creation that will, ultimately and strikingly in the books of chivalry of
Spain, bear more relation to the political than to the causal inquiry of natural
philosophers.
In the period when romance emerged and took shape as a genre, the
marvelous took over the medieval imaginary with great force. In Iberia it
invaded particularly the literature and social practices of that lesser aristoc-
racy, the caballeros, or knights. The Church, influential enough by this time
not only to not oppose the marvelous, as it had done before, but even to
 forest to island 9

include it, appropriated it, particularly under the rubric of the miraculous.
Not only within properly religious texts, but also at all levels of culture, the
marvelous also was aestheticized, sublimated, and turned into ornament,
literary procedure, and visual topos.
As the marvelous was incorporated into romance in Iberia, its difference
from the miraculous was clearly defined, following strict rules like those by
Alfonso X.29 Even though the miracle is more a rejection of the marvelous
than a force behind it, it constitutes one of the forms of recuperation of the
marvelous in the later Middle Ages, present in hagiography of course, but
particularly interesting in the development of Marian devotion, which in
Spain has two spectacular examples in the thirteenth century, the Milagros
de Nuestra Señora by Gonzalo de Berceo and the Cantigas de Santa María,
compiled by the Learned King himself in Galician Portuguese and lavishly
illustrated for a courtly audience. Scientific and historical recuperation would
also take place from the thirteenth century on, and literature closely docu-
ments this transformation of the marvelous in Spanish romance. As scien-
tific recuperation, Gervasius of Tilbury—a thirteenth-century English noble
living in Arles who dedicated his work to the Holy Roman Emperor—pro-
vides in his widely influential Otia Imperialia (ca. 1210) evidence of a ten-
dency to make of mirabilia not things outside nature but within it, even if
exceptional, thus objects of science. One can also see in this a transforma-
tion of monsters into “freaks.” Hand in hand with the scientific, historical
recuperation inventoried, catalogued, and, most importantly, dated marvel-
ous events, which Daston and Park relate to the emergence and development
of the spirit of natural philosophy.30
Mirabilia, partaking of the root mir from which the French miror, mirari
developed, also corresponds to a modern English mirror and to Spanish
mirar, “to look,” where the visual character of the marvelous is empha-
sized, a kinship that appeals directly to one of the senses, once again, to the
body and its measures. Le Goff puts forth the question of the possible links
between admirabilis and mirabilis, where the ambiguity of the marvelous is
once again conveyed,31 and if one is to believe the mid-sixteenth-century
cosmographer Sebastian Münster, the king of Spain would have (mockingly)
referred to Columbus’s title of Almirante as more adequately translating his
capacity for marveling as Admirans.32 In Spanish literature these semantic
10 forest to island

links are immediately discernible, as in Alfonso’s definition of the miracle or

in any text where a marvelous thing or event is experienced: the effect on the
spectator and, for that matter, the reader, is one of admiration, and explains
the way for its evolution into the magical and the spectacular of sixteenth-
century courts. But a more subtle link should be underlined, that of the mar-
velous and space, present to a secondary degree in the Columbus reference,
and in the topographical organization of wonders in Tilbury. Iberian lit-
eratures, sometimes in ways more explicit than others, present this link in
various genres, from Marian collections to encyclopedias, travelogues, and
romance. Peter Linehan has made explicit this relation of the marvelous and
land policy, for instance, by suggesting that the Cantigas’ recounting of won-
ders were meant to promote the population of newly conquered territories,
as the pictorial program of the manuscripts represent a sort of policy for
the possession of new lands. In a different context, Jerrilyn Dodds sees in a
dialogue between narrative painting programs and hunting manuals a series
of intercultural territorial claims, sometimes allegorized through “marvel-
ous” motifs, such as the fountain, the lion, or the wild man.33
As for the role of the marvelous in medieval society, especially in relation
to geography, E. R. Curtius documented a supplementary function through
the motif of the “reversed world” from Cockaigne to Jauja, from the Carnival
to the late medieval motif of Utopia, all of them variations on the themes
of abundance, nudity, sexuality, and idleness. In this motif are mixed the
ideas of Genesis and Eden, of a Golden Age and Arcadia, which are seen as
a source, as an origin and not as a future, a distant initial past ambiguously
perceived as happening before Christianity.34 Within chivalric fiction, the
marvelous, tied to adventure, produced new hybrid variations from all of
these possibilities that work at different narrative levels.
The quest for individual identity—the contact with the strange in chival-
ric romance—is at the same time a test that brings the knight to a new spir-
itual level but also something that is determined directly by the space in
which the knight rides. It is in this sense that adventure, space, and marvel
become tightly knit together, to the point that Köhler has written that ad-
venture is itself a marvel.35 In relation to truth, marvelous passages dot the
romance landscape without affecting the truth-value of the narratives. The
marvelous and its spaces have an everyday existence, but it is one that lies in
 forest to island 11

the past and one that chivalric romance suggests can be recovered through
fiction. Every space in a romance has a meaning in such terms. Thus, motifs
are recast for their power of allusion, their symbolic force. Among them,
as the result of the exploration of other spaces and the accumulations of
meaning, the space of the island emerges in the late medieval period as a
privileged setting for the marvelous as the stand-in for fiction.

Landscapes
In fabliaux or exempla, and in the romance, events are not exactly said or
told: to put it in spatial terms, they are staged. Throughout the twelfth cen-
tury, a number of descriptive “types” were created to fulfill one or another
well-defined function, among them the Unknown Land, the castle, the
closed garden, the spring, the storm, to serve as “props” or to compose the
set where events will take place. I refer to these spatial configurations as
types, or commonplaces, because they do not enter the narrative by descrip-
tion but rather by figuration. Description in romance is cumulative, displayed
on a surface rather than in depth; it is not there to present a “reality” or to
“imitate” anything, but to suggest meaning. This is particularly relevant
to the relation between literary and cartographical practices, as description
in cartographic writing and, especially, in maps—in the form of symbols
that represent a city, a river, or a chain of mountains—is understood as
related to meaning rather than to a detailed or precise presentation of any-
thing. The narrative use of topoi or motifs is but another way of referring to
the same operation, shared by cartography and literature in this period.36
The knight, usually by himself, crosses the frontier of the known and trav-
erses a space unknown. Every one of his battles is the result of an encounter,
whether it be of love or war. The space in which he travels is articulated in
contradictions taking the shape of opposing figures such as the forest and
the court, the civilized place of origin and the savage lands traversed. The
court is a sort of magnet that sends the knight forth into adventure but at the
same time gives that space an order through finitude, for the knight is drawn
inevitably back toward it.
Lefebvre specifically articulates this basic opposition between unculti-
vated land—the forest—and built space—the court—clearly at work in the
structure of the romance; Le Goff confirms an essential difference in tone
12 forest to island

between Antiquity and the Middle Ages in similar terms, arguing that the
traditional opposition between the city and the country (urbanity and rus-
ticity) is not to be assimilated with how the medieval world expressed the
opposition between nature and culture, for medieval culture expanded it
into an opposition between built, inhabited, and cultivated spaces of com-
munity such as the city, the castle or the court, and the wild, uninhabited,
primitive spaces of solitude, such as the sea, the forest, and the desert.37
This dualism is a source of themes and fantasies, which can be attested
in both epic and romance and in the increasing fascination within these nar-
ratives with descriptions of towers, castles, palaces, courts, and cities. This
fascination permeated the visual arts as well, which explains the explosion
of images of the construction of the Tower of Babel, for example, from the
twelfth century onward. Within religious life, the austere hermits would
oppose monasticism by fleeing to the “deserts” and refusing the “built.”
Monastic orders responded by making the enclave in which fraternal commu-
nities could found their edifices a supernatural one, destined to such purposes
by dreams or mystical visions, and by finding corresponding geographies in
the rugged Alps, like Saint Gall, or on an island, like Reichenau.
The development of cities, parallel to the development of romance, con-
ditioned the inclusion of the urban within the spatial ideology of romance,
which saw the urban with both desire and contempt, for the archetype of
the city evinces characteristics that mirror negatively the traits of the knight.
In 1200 Jean Renart wrote in L’Escoufle that the city of Toul represented the
vilest of temptations for the knight: a site of leisure, laziness, abundance,
and riches. The city’s features were obvious opposites for the conditions of
adventure, and by the end of the fifteenth century, Fernando de Rojas would
present an urban setting in his Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, better
known as La Celestina, where the figure of the knight is unimaginable, ren-
dering visible an impossible coexistence of the two.38 The marvelous, how-
ever, was intimately related to the urban as well, as part of the technological
or scientific marvelous, thus presenting a dilemma for romance. It is easy
to see this trait in the adjectives continually used to describe cities, such as
grand, beautiful, the most wonderful, and so on. These modifiers most
often concentrate on objects, buildings, and works of art. These terms were
expressions of wonder in view of the urban and the cosmopolitan, but they
 forest to island 13

were also a leitmotif, a rhetorical device. The city is there a topos, much like
the forest, appropriated by the imaginary, losing its ties with a geographical
reality.39 The twelfth century, as the great epoch for urban development
in the Christian world, saw from epic to romance, from the Poem of the Cid
to the Libro del cavallero Çifar, how urban descriptions began to inhabit
the literary landscape.40 Outside the urban sphere, the other repository of
“civilization” was the kingdom, which denoted the law, the right of the lord
more than a territory by itself, and which from epic and historiography
moved into the spatial ideology of romance.41 Here, it was the castle that
gave a shape to another built space, acting as a hinge for the desires of the
knight, torn between love and battle.
The castle immediately refers us to its opposite, a space of wilderness
and the uncivilized. This space is that of the forest.42 The forest functions in
the romance not only as a dark, negative setting or symbol but as the place
for narrative resolution, the site where adventure takes place, thus bringing
about the movement of the romance. In this sense, the forest is a technical,
structural element of romance. But even within the romance, the forest is
traversed by procedures that are not only literary. The forest is also a land-
scape of everyday life with a vast role in the medieval imaginary, not only
because of its symbolic force but also because of its economic, juridical, and
geographical reality.
In her study of the forest of medieval French and English romances,
Corinne J. Saunders writes that already in the early romances the forest is
a complex landscape in which many traditions converge. The first is that
of the historical forest, which can be accurately documented in England by
the Domesday Book of 1086, but which can only be approached indirectly
on the continent through allusions, references and, most of the time, by
inference.43 Up to the twelfth century, the forests of medieval Europe im-
pressed their dense, imposing reality on the medieval mind. This forest,
however, was not a uniform landscape but a mixed series of woodlands,
clearings, and pasture, and less solitary than one imagines. Hunters mainly,
but also herdsmen, swineherds, charcoal-burners, woodcutters, and others
inhabited the forest, along with marginals and wild animals. Parallel to the
cultivated forest, a source of nourishment for domestic animals, as well as
of wood, nuts, or berries, the forest held a juridical specificity in those parts
14 forest to island

of it that were set aside by kings for hunting, grouping a political set of
conditions with paradisiacal descriptors that parallel it to a locus amoenus. In
Iberia, the ties between sovereignty and hunting as territory and as policy
were to become more complex as they sought to integrate different cultural
perspectives. María Rosa Menocal has linked Alfonso X’s notion of a kingly
literary culture with the Libro de las animalias que caçan, a translation of
the Baghdadi Kitāb al-yawārih from Arabic to Castilian, and Alfonso XI’s
Libro de la montería can be directly related to cartographic survey practices,
as “it may be the first comprehensive toponymic survey produced in Castil-
ian,” in its modern editor’s words.44 This idea of the forest as a private,
regulated territory linked to royal privilege was to merge with the gen-
eral idea of the garden, finding expression in literature and developing
the topos of the hortus conclusus, but above all, in architectural practice
and visual programs that build on the links between monarchical power and
hunting motifs.
To the historical characteristics of the medieval forest was added the
material taken from the Bible. The forest, as the Western counterpart of the
Oriental desert, took on the many traits of the scriptural desert, which was
important not only to Christianity but also to Islam and Judaism. The bibli-
cal desert is a geographical reality, but one inextricably tied up with a sym-
bolic space. The desert of Genesis is that of original chaos, the antonym of
the Garden of Eden: it is a place of tests, of wandering, of exile, of solitude,
but also of revelation. The image of the desert changes in the New Testament,
making of the arid and rocky region where John the Baptist lives a place of
temptation, rather than of trial; and it is also the place of refuge and solitude
for Jesus. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christianity honed the great themes
of hagiography in conjunction with the spirituality of deserted spaces. Saint
Anthony haunted the literary and visual theme of temptation; while Saint
Paul’s desert was characterized by a mountain, a cavern, a palm tree, and a
spring, paradoxically reminiscent of a locus amoenus. From the Greek erēmía,
from erēmos, solitary, following the example of Paul and Anthony, the desert
Fathers sought this space to find in it the power of exile and hardship, ideals
the great medieval monastic orders would take up as their own.45
Through visions and temptations, the desert of Egyptian eremitism ap-
peared particularly permeable to the ambiguity of the marvelous, at times
 forest to island 15

marked by devilish temptation, at times the rewarding space of revelation.46

Once again, we find that the working opposition is not that of the actual
emptiness of the desert or of any other of its physical qualities as opposed to
those of the city, but one that has to do with its wildness, with the absence
of culture in this space: the Latin desertum, like the Greek erēmoia, from
erēmos, means uninhabited. This cultural emptiness clearly marks the link
between the desert and the forest. If the early Middle Ages chose the desert
as its metaphorical space, the twelfth century took the desert’s contents
and relocated them to the forest. Characterizing the wild and nuancing it
from the point of view of culture, itself determined socially, these comple-
mentary possibilities of the forest–desert were expressed in the figures of
the savage and the hermit. The savage, or wild man, is a primitive man, but
one who already dominates nature, while the hermit holds in interiority the
most profound link to culture, which allows his inclusion in the commu-
nity—in a variety of exile—as a sort of “saint.” The savage, the wild then, is
not what is absolutely outside but what lurks at the margins of humanity. In
this way, culture is defined, limited, encircled by its margins, and it simulta-
neously draws those limits as well, it distances itself from its other in a nec-
essary gesture pointing from the wild toward itself.47
The forest also began to be discursively elaborated as a place for knowl-
edge. Saint Bernard would write in 1172: “forests will teach you more than
books. Trees and rocks will show you things that masters of science will not
show you.”48 The force of the biblical transposition of meaning taken from
the desert made the medieval forest, to some extent, a symbol of another
world, one of spirituality and purity, opposed to the dubious image of the
city. The medieval forest thus inherited from the desert, due to their shared
characterizations as “wild,” “savage,” “uncultivated” spaces, the ideas of exile,
penance, prophecy, vision, and temptation. But the forest also became a site
where a higher level of spirituality as knowledge might be attained.
Saunders traces another thread that traverses the forest imaginary back to
the philosophical tradition in the words silva and hyle. Plato, in the Timaeus,
in reference to the chaos that gives way to order, uses the Greek word hyle,
literally “forest.” Aristotle, according to Saunders, used this concept in a more
concrete fashion, making of it the “primary materials” from which everything
is made: “Later neo-Platonic philosophers soon began to equate hyle with
16 forest to island

evil and kosmos, order, with good. . . . Chalchidius, in the late third century,
combined the attitudes of Plato and Aristotle, adding a moralistic represen-
tation of the ordering of the hyle as the providing spirit of God working upon
chaos.”49 Chalchidius would translate the Greek hyle into the Latin silva. The
Latin term silva rendered a difficult concept, and to explain it, images of an
angry sea or of malleable wax were often used in conjunction with it. Later on,
classical commentators would use the forests of Virgil for the same purposes:
Servius, Bernardus Silvestris, Guillaume de Conches, Jean de Meun, and
others, all the way to the Kitāb sirr al-asrār or Secretum Secretorum, grappled
with the concept of the silva as hyle in more or less specialized meanings.50
The deep symbolism of the forest is expressed not only in the poetry of
the troubadours and epic, but particularly in romance. To the biblical tradi-
tion of the desert–forest, classic and Celtic, “barbaric” traditions were added
to Germanic and Scandinavian ones, taken from the sagas and, most im-
portantly, from the forest of the Tristan legend, imprinted with erotic con-
notations. Classical images were transmitted through pastoral, from Virgil’s
Eclogues, where the forest functions as a locus amoenus; and from the Aeneid.
There, even if forest references are scant, the symbolic landscape of exile,
where the uncivilized is linked to outlawry, was of great importance for
medieval reworkings of the forest. Moreover, Virgil’s forest—whether the
forest of love where the gods set up Aeneas and Dido, or the forest of the
Golden Bough, an access to the other world—is presented as a place where
divinity might be encountered; not God, but pagan gods, what the medieval
mind will interpret as instances of the marvelous, made possible by the lack
of a boundary between the human and the supernatural.
The roman d’Antiquité, medieval reworkings of classical themes and char-
acters, from the Alexander legend to the theme of Troy, in the parallel devel-
opment of techniques it shared with Arthurian romance, elaborated on the
forest as a motif that retained many of the classical traits, emphasizing
some—such as the motif of the hunt for love or exile, but also the presence
of the marvelous—that offered a more positive image of the forest for
romance. The characteristics of romance description strip the classical for-
est of specificity and transform it into a codified, symbolic landscape.
As topos, mixed first with the idea of the forest in the circumscribed shape
of the glade, was the locus amoenus, which also took the name of the “garden,”
 forest to island 17

hortus conclusus, the secret garden or paradise of Isidore’s Etymologies, of

Vincent de Beauvais’s Elucidarium, of Flores y Blancaflor, of Pierre d’Ailly’s
Jardin amoureux, Hieronymus Bosch’s disquieting painting Garden of Earthly
Delights, of Fernando de Rojas’s dystopic Celestina. In his classic study on
the ideal landscape, E. R. Curtius traces the image of the locus amoenus back
to Homer, in the shape of an island (Odyssey, book 9) or a simple garden
(Odyssey, book 7). There, trees bear fruit year round, spring is eternal, and a
fresh breeze from the West blows incessantly. In the Odyssey book 5, Curtius
finds again these traits in the Calypso grotto, and in Ithaca, where there is
another grotto inhabited by nymphs (Odyssey, book 13), thus linking island,
cave, and locus amoenus.51
In the Aeneid, writes Curtius, loci amoeni are those that are useful only
for pleasure, those that have not been destined for utilitarian purposes (loca
solois uoluptatis plena . . . , unde nullus fructus exoluitur). The term locus
amoenus, however, was used as a technical term for the first time by Isidore
as a concept of geological configuration, following Servius, in the company
of forests, deserts, islands, and mountain ranges, rendering the link between
the literary motif and the geographical obvious.52
This series of traits that characterize forest spaces in literature bear the
mark of a rhetoric that takes them up, making these traits commutable, as is
the case of the locus amoenus. The porosity of these rhetorical places makes
them open to different contexts of production, to resignification, whether in
literature or in cartography, where they must bear a minimal link of resem-
blance, an essential similarity or capacity of association with a number of
places. It is this contiguity that allowed the content, that is, the sum of ideas,
practices, and discourses associated with the forest, to be relocated to a
similar space: that of the island. Romance, in particular, was the genre where
this relocation became more functional, and the Spanish book of chivalry,
the genre that made the archipelago structural to its composition.

Seascapes
The spatial tension that prevails in chivalric romance, as we have seen, is that
between spaces of culture and spaces of wilderness, mediated by the knight
through marvelous elements that often prove reversible, that are infernal and
divine at the same time. In the structure of romance, the site for adventure
18 forest to island

is the binome silva/desertum, which we have seen are synonymous. The for-
est has a double value of desire and repulsion; it horrifies and gives peace.
The forest is thus constituted as the space of isolation, for abandonment
to solitude, as the ideal space, in religious terms, for penance, as some ety-
mologies indicate.
The forest constitutes a matrix both literary and topographic that, at
the end of the high Middle Ages, began a transformation due to various cir-
cumstances. From weather conditions specific to the Mediterranean, thus
affecting the Iberian Peninsula in a much more dramatic way than the north-
ern continental areas, to herding practices, the reality of the medieval forest
radically changed while romance was being shaped in literature.53 The dense
forests Strabo had seen in Iberia in the second century had disappeared by
the time Muslim armies crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, and Charles Higounet
remarks that the forest reservoirs of which Islamic societies made use in the
Iberian Peninsula consisted only of the Algarve—a great pine forest—and
of the trees on the shores of the Betis, cork oak and chestnut forests. To the
interior of the Iberian Peninsula, only the Campo de Montiel could still have
been described in terms of “forest vegetation.” Cuenca’s range of mountains,
the Tortosa forests, and, above all, the Balearic Islands were the other im-
portant forest repositories from 500 to 1200 supplying Iberia, when a heat
wave favored the general expansion of forests in Western Europe, explaining
the impact of the forest in the Western imagination. However, in all of Europe
and particularly in the Alps and the Pyrenees, the return of a cold wave,
aided by civilization, saw the great deforestation of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, spurred by the need to furnish crusades, cities, and transatlantic
explorations.54
From 1100 on, the forest ceases to be a space beyond human control, and
it will disappear as a “wild” space between the fifteenth and the eighteenth
centuries. Zumthor equates this ecological reality to an erosion of the
imaginary, debilitating previously established links between man and space.
What is left, the “real,” domesticated forest, no longer corresponds to the
forest imaginary, replete with marvels and where adventure might be possi-
ble. Thus, the forest will be reimagined and set further into the fictional as
the literary forest of Brocéliande.55 The reality of deforestation can be traced
already in chivalric fiction itself, as one of the spaces crucial to the narrative
 forest to island 19

movement of Chrétien’s Yvain, the “essart,” or cleared forest, attests to the

developing economy that would change the landscape radically as other
spaces began to encroach on the forest in medieval romance.
Outside the symbolic, the sea began to infiltrate the romance as a new
space. The biography of one of the Desert Fathers, Columban, written in the
sixth century, illustrates the relation of similitude that made the relocation
of the forest imaginary possible, as he tells us that the wandering monks
hoped to find desertum in pelago intransmeabili invenire obtantes, “the desert
in the unsurmountable sea.” Such a space had been greatly anticipated by
the same traditions informing the forest of the romance. The sea did appear
as a transitory space in the Bible, in the roman d’antiquité, and in the Libro
de Apolonio, but had remained unexplored as a backdrop, a setting, until the
grim reality of the disappearing forest changed the potential of this land-
scape in the medieval imaginary.56
Romance thus began to represent the sea. The French Estoire del Saint
Graal, written around 1225–30 and interpolated as the first or introductory
part to the works that compose the Vulgate cycle (the prose Merlin, Livre
d’Artus, Lancelot, Queste del Saint Graal, and La mort le Roy Artu, which
were composed before), was translated into Portuguese and Spanish early
on from a later recension, known as the Post-Vulgate, composed between
1230 and 1240. In Portuguese and Castilian it was referred to as the Libro
de Josep de Abarimatía.57 The Estoire makes use of a wide variety of genres,
from fabliau to epic, Arthurian romance, hagiography, and roman d’antiquité,
while it also retains ties to religious writing in a variety of ways. In terms
of genre, the Estoire is the closest context for the elaboration of seascapes in
the Iberian book of chivalry, if sea and islands appear in Iberian literatures in
other genres, which I will discuss later.
After a prologue on the circumstances in which the writing of the book
came about, the Estoire tells the story of Joseph of Arimathea, first propri-
etor of the Grail, and his journey to Great Britain. Michelle Szkilnik, writing
a detailed study on nautical motifs in the Estoire,58 characterizes the anec-
dote of the Estoire as a migration, as a series of voyages because the charac-
ters do not travel at the same time or live the same adventures, and classifies
the characters into three traveling “groups.” The medieval author does not
narrate the travels of the first group: Joseph and his people leave Sarras,
20 forest to island

and we find them again just before their arrival in Great Britain.59 A similar
silence surrounds the character Chélidoine at certain points. Mordrain and
Nascien will take longer to make the trip to Great Britain. These last three
characters are of great interest to us: they all disembark upon an island,
where they will be morally tested, and from which they will finally be res-
cued in order to continue to their destiny in the British Isles.60 The premise
reproduces the story of Moses, and through it the Estoire intimates a double
allegorical meaning, one referred to Moses, the other to Galahad. Both of
these point to anagogical or eschatological meanings, which Szkilnik assigns
to the arrival in the promised land, to the possibility of death by shipwreck,
to the idea of purgatory in travel, and so forth.61 Overall, the text presents
Great Britain as a promised land, making the West a repository for saint-
hood through the arrival of Joseph, his followers, and the Grail.
In the Estoire, the sea voyage takes up a third of the narrative, narrating the
vicissitudes of the characters either on a ship or while they are imprisoned
on an island.62 While it is the ship that, in Szkilnik’s analysis, constitutes
the main image of the Estoire, based on the idea of the voyage, islands in a
way already inhabit the narrative. Here, islands are all savage, deserted, and
hostile places, inhabited by beasts, inspiring horror.
In the Estoire one can witness a first attempt at relocating the meanings of
the forest to seascapes; however, islands in the Estoire do not yet have a mul-
tiplicity of possible meanings or interpretations. The island in the Estoire
is never a place for paradise; even the pagan marvels of Corinth it describes
or the magic of Hippocrates are cursed.63 None of the islands is character-
ized in detail or even differentiated. The adjectives used to describe them
are identical and their role remains the same: they are places for rites of
passage, which is indeed the interpretation that Szkilnik gives them.64
Islands in the Estoire are only a point of view from which to see other
ships; they are not a produced space. It seems as if the island, space of the
marvelous but somehow fixed, functions only as a foothold for the spectator
of ships and boats, floating spaces of the marvelous. Ships, such as that of
Salomon, are different in presentation but not in function, for even if show-
ered with adjectives, they are remarked upon solely for their symbolic value.
In their symbology, ships are a motif much more developed in the Estoire
than islands, or even castles. Ships are a meeting point, and islands pale
beside their important role, sometimes even imitating their characteristics.
 forest to island 21

The islands of the Estoire are of particular importance, as they do point

to an interesting change in the landscape of romance.65 The island in the
Estoire is a closed space, but one that is not really ever entered. It is just
traced in its shorelines, a liminality precisely at the core of what the Estoire is
meant to emphasize. This limit is drawn on the sea, and only momentar-
ily, since the characters will embark as soon as possible. The narrative gaze,
moreover, is not turned within: the island is not seen, nor does it function
as a produced space, in the sense we have been analyzing. It constitutes, at
most, a point from which to look back at sea or continent (or forward, in
anticipation), a waiting area.66 Islands in the Estoire are most frequently signs
of conversion, of which the best example is Nascien’s Ile Tournoyante. On
this island, Nascien is tested as to the degree of his faith and his hope. From
the island as a mere point of view, he sees Salomon’s ship and doubts its
divine origin. Christ himself explains the meaning and comforts him; thus,
he is strengthened in his faith and confirmed in it by Christ himself. In addi-
tion, such a change of sign is not exclusive to islands in the Estoire: ships and
castles function in identical manner.
Szkilnik parallels the experience of the island in the Estoire to that of
the forest, common features stemming from overlaps between adventure
and conversion. Adventure and conversion seem to coincide specifically in
their “trial” quality, with the transformation that ensues. In all other senses,
however, we cannot equate the forest as the space for adventure in chivalric
romance with conversion and its location on insular spaces in the Estoire.
Above all, one must remember that knights seek adventure, an adventure
essentially defined by chance. But they are not compelled by divine or dev-
ilish forces to come upon adventure, as happens in the Estoire with these
initiation rites that are commonplaces of islands, and which tend to result
in conversion or confirmation of faith. This interpretation seems, in fact, to
have been that of the Castilian translator, who seems interested in copy-
ing those episodes more laden with religious doctrine. “The Libro de Josep de
Abarimatía,” concludes Gómez Redondo, “thus constitutes a history of con-
versions . . . along whose thread multiple theological ideas and marvelous
events are displayed, which are nothing but a demonstration of the power
of the Church over human materiality.”67 Space—whether that of the sea or
island, forest or ship—is thus subordinated to conversion, and the Estoire is
interpreted in this way as a treatise of Christian doctrine in Spain.
22 forest to island

Parallel to these translations, Iberia produced its own chivalric fiction.

Amadís will take up the motif of the island before it becomes allegorized,
before the geography becomes a sign of spirituality as an expression of the
theology that the last Arthurian romances would propose, and work it into
the core structure of the book of chivalry, whose main objective was the
promulgation of an ethos and a politics. Within Spanish literary tradition,
the island–archipelago will find its own development, its own metaphoriza-
tion into a rhetorical device unsutured from strictly religious connotations.
In order to explain how the movement from mainland to sea took place,
one must remember that this movement was not only produced by meta-
phor or poetics, by generic influences or literary tradition. From 1200 on,
the structure of communities was reworked into cercados, closed fenced
spaces, new establishments on the land beyond the village, closed-in spaces
surrounding a house, reminding one of the etymology of insula as a block of
buildings or to refer to a discrete place on firm ground, in the sense of an
isolated patch of land.68 At the same time, the development of cities ren-
dered villages inoperative. In Castile alone, more than two hundred villages
disappeared between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, in the reorga-
nization of rural space that spanned all Europe.69 The idea of isolation, linked
to the concept of property, gained thus a new force. Technology and popu-
lation increases occupy the real space of the forest, stripping it of the pos-
sibilities of housing a marvelous imaginary. The nearby forest, where the
marvelous could be found, disappeared. The medieval imaginary lost its
treetops, and, at the same time, a new rational urge began to scrape agency
away from the marvelous. Humanity will, by the fifteenth century, be the
agent of this marveling, resignifying it from ambiguity and difference to magic
and spectacle, as Anna Bognolo has shown.70 In between, Spanish literature
would thus produce in the archipelago alternative possibilities for fiction.

Insular Wonder
Marvels were principally connected in the medieval mind, as we have seen,
to a spatial perspective, that is, to the faraway. Thus, it would be in books of
travel that marvels would be found, and for a great part, the reason they were
read. The earliest books of travel to circulate in the Iberian Peninsula were
related to pilgrimage, as guides to the Holy Land or itineraries. The Fazienda
 forest to island 23

de Ultramar, a thirteenth-century document that has been defined as “a

Bible fragmented by itineraries and descriptions of cities and holy places,”
merges two genres popular in Iberia: Holy Land itineraries and “romanced”
translations of the Bible composed from the thirteenth through the sixteenth
centuries.71 The Fazienda is not a historical itinerary, yet it emphasizes its
closer links to “fiction”: the narrator travels the Holy Land in an imagined
periplus that results in a personal description in which places are mentioned
because of their role in an event or simply because of the narrator’s prox-
imity to them. The two criteria for the description of the Holy Land are
thus event-relatedness and geography.72 This is important, because it helps
establish that links between space and events—which share etymons with
adventure, and thus with the marvelous, understood as the fictional—were
narrativized in different genres before the book of chivalry.
Other types of travel also found a written form, motivated by diplomatic
efforts (Ruy González de Clavijo’s Embajada a Tamorlán, 1420) or mercan-
tile interests. Books of imaginary travels were composed (Libro del conosci-
miento de todos los reinos, ca. 1450; Libro del infante don Pedro de Portugal,
end of the fifteenth century) and translated (Mandeville’s Viajes, fourteenth
century; Marco Polo’s Libro de las maravillas, translated first into Catalan
in the fourteenth century), evincing the complex relation between the real
and the imagined, the fictional and the historical.73 Beyond this communi-
cation, the difference between medieval and Renaissance travel resided in
the type of knowledge sought from the process of traveling, in what was
perceived as truth and what had to be done to extract truth. Of course, the
discourse on and of knowledge and travel had changed radically by the six-
teenth century, and a series of technological developments—cartography
and printing in particular—had affected it profoundly. By 1576 any traveler
might put a hand in her pocket to find in it a Repertorio de caminos, com-
posed by one Alonso de Meneses and printed as a libro de faltriquera in
Alcalá for the comfort of its user.74
Sea travel had its own developments, which have been especially studied
as leading toward the events of 1492 and following. However, as Fernand
Braudel has shown, travel in the area of the Mediterranean during the late
Middle Ages and the Renaissance had specific circumstances that should not
be forgotten.75 The especially dangerous conditions of the Mediterranean—
24 forest to island

Prince Doria was still heard to say, in the beginning of the sixteenth century,
that there were only three safe “ports”: Cartagena, and the months of June
and July, which thus limited judicious travel to the summer months—and
commercial interests set the boundaries for seafaring at the Atlantic coasts
between Morocco and Flanders, and many of these interests stopped at the
exit of the Mediterranean, to which charts bear witness.76
But travel there was, at any risk, for curiosity or riches, historical and lit-
erary, imagined and experienced. By the time of Marco Polo, there was what
one critic has called “an insular romanticism,” naturalizing the bond between
romance and islands, referring to a particular sensibility or traveler’s imagi-
nation where mystery, visions, and literary and historical information co-
incided in navigators’ sightings of islands in previously unexplored seas.77 If,
in the epic traditions of Orient, the Sumerian paradise of Dilmun already
anticipated the isolation of Syria in the Odyssey, or if the island of Utnapish-
tim the Faraway prefigured Elysium,78 the Middle Ages reproduced a mar-
velous insular tradition, which the Spanish book of chivalry structured into
an “insular turn.” From Isidorian maps and the mappamundi of Beatus of
Liébana, to the invasion of monstrous and fantastic representations of the
real discoveries of Henry the Navigator on the coasts of Africa in the fif-
teenth century, there are signs of the pendular trajectory of marvelous insu-
larities spanning across history and literature.79 Every one of these islands
was a setting, a “theater,” writes Leo Olschki, of combats, enchantments,
adventures involving giants, monsters, a fabulous fauna that coexisted with
a vision of the natural world also described for its marvelous resonances.
Thus, the islands of the encircling limits of the world, loaded with the con-
tents of many literary traditions, reinforced by erudition and religion, tradi-
tionally located in the Orient—a localization that provided still more added
motifs and interpretations, such as that of Paradise and the general images
of the rich East, as has been pointed out before80—began to move on charts
and maps in two directions by the end of the Middle Ages. First, they moved
further into the West, into the Atlantic, as new incursions into these waters
gave territories to old myths in the shape of the Isles of Man (the false and
the real one), the island of Brazil, the Canaries, the Azores, all the way to
Antillia, now called the Antilles. And, simultaneously, they retreated to the
center, into the Mediterranean, ascribing the contents of these marvelous
 forest to island 25

insularities from the limits to very well known islands of the sea between
the lands.81 In the 1497 Castilian translation of Bernardus of Breidenbach’s
Viaje a Tierra Santa, for example, there is a description of Crete that fol-
lows book 14 of the Etymologies, as an island in which no evil beasts (such
as wolves or serpents) can be found, and where these in fact die if taken
there from other lands, illustrating the relocation of the marvelous from
the margins to the center—and mirroring accounts of travels in the Greek
islands.
To tie the production of insularity in the late medieval Iberian imaginary
to the chivalric even tighter, it should be noted that books of travel from the
fourteenth century onward respond, in the words of Miguel Ángel Pérez
Priego, one of the genre’s best scholars, “more than to a clerical, learned
ideology or a mercantile activity, to the chivalric mentality and lifestyles of
late medieval Spanish society.” Pérez Priego goes on to quote the prologue
to Pero Tafur’s Andanças e viajes por diversas partes del mundo avidos (ca.
1454) as proof of this ideology, where faraway lands and people are linked
to individual courage and deeds, requiring and enhancing the virtues of the
knight: “Travel literature should be ascribed thus to the literature of chival-
ric ideology that still presides in the Castilian fifteenth century.”82
As an effect of this close-knit web between space, the marvelous, and the
chivalric, there was an “insular turn,” that is, the production of an insular
imaginary specific to this period that was elaborated in the book of chivalry,
which brought all of these motifs, genres, and meanings together. Other
genres experimented with this space, and the need for an exhaustive inven-
tory of “insular models” in Spanish literature—and the absence of mono-
graphs on the subject—has been pointed out by Nicasio Salvador Miguel.83
Salvador Miguel looks at four possible models, each a fragment with “insular
descriptions,” taken from the Libro del cavallero Çifar, the Laberinto de For-
tuna by Juan de Mena, the Andanças e viajes de Pero Tafur, and the Castilian
translation of the Voyage to the Holy Land, by Bernard of Breidenbach.84 The
critic stresses the combination of verisimilitude and marvelous elements in
the description of these islands and what takes place in them: verisimilitude
given either by the conventionally fantastic frame of the episode, as in the
Çifar, or by the bookish nature of the information, as in Mena’s Laberinto; or
in the genre itself as narration of lived experience, that is, the travelogue or
26 forest to island

the itinerary. All of these texts provide island descriptions with marvelous
elements taken from tradition and supported by classical auctoritates, in a
manner that is reminiscent of the assemblage of isolarii, as we shall see in
the next chapter, exhibiting a simultaneous tendency toward the encyclo-
pedic and the humanistic, which thus characterizes what I have called a late
medieval insular turn: “The accumulation of elements coming from ancient
mythology stands out in the description of insular universes, because if such
references increase for some readers the fantastic nature of the islands, for
others they provoke images and allusions of an erudite nature . . . contri-
buting to create for the majority of readers a sheen of verisimilitude due
to the frequent indistinctness between mythology and history.”85 Salvador
Miguel rightly highlights the fluid condition of these insular models, be-
tween historicity and fictionalization, which is precisely what will put the
space of the island and its contents at the center of a debate on poetics a
few decades later.
Insular descriptions in medieval Spanish literature are not only perme-
able to various articulations between history and literature, but also between
different signs. Paradisiacal islands, whose characteristics include the abun-
dance of natural riches, the beauty of flora and quality of water, combined
with benevolent weather, serving as a refuge and, most important to our
study, inhabited by mirabilia, are common in Spanish literary insular descrip-
tions even if, as Salvador Miguel points out, the existence of cold or un-
healthy islands was not ignored, as Alfonso X, Juan Fernández de Heredia,
or Pero Tafur remind us.86 And Spanish literary islands are also open to both
the miraculous and the marvelous, pointing to the popular and cultivated
elements and the various genres that participate in their production.
At the very beginning of the fourteenth century, just a few decades after
Alfonso’s Cantigas and Berceo’s Milagros, which elaborate marvelous insu-
lar episodes themselves, the best-known occurrence of marvelous events
on an island is the Ínsulas Dotadas episode in the Libro del caballero Çifar,
the first chivalric text of prose fiction in the peninsula, if a hybrid of other
genres and motivations.87 James Burke listed a series of sources and motifs
that make up the episode, which deny it any originality but allow us to
catalogue the many traditions that already come together in the image of
an island.88
 forest to island 27

Cristina González has observed in this episode, along with the episode
of the Caballero Atrevido, the idea of a ritual initiation in the travel to the
Other World, the meeting with the fairy, interpreting it along the general
lines of personal, individual merit.89 This interpretation establishes the
link between the idea of an individual (compared to a community), with the
idea of merit (earned esteem, value, or power) in the setting of a particular
geography, the island, that we will find again in chivalric texts and, particu-
larly, in Amadís.90 The spatiality of this episode of the Çifar has been studied
by Reynaldo Ayerbe-Chaux, who discusses the fantastic episodes of the
text—the voyage of Grima, the adventures of the Caballero Atrevido in the
Lago Solfáreo, and the Ínsulas Dotadas.91 His interpretation is supported by
the analysis of the 11 illuminations illustrating this particular episode in the
Paris manuscript (out of a total of 242 illuminations), where Ayerbe-Chaux
notes the emphasis on the imprisonment of the lover.92 The contrast in the
images between a spatial openness (the eighth illumination, where even the
dog smiles, as the critic points out, representing the knight’s departure to
hunt) and confinement are interpreted as a symbol of the constraining ele-
ments of love, whether carnal or ideal: “the main symbol the illuminator has
left for the passage is the wall, the enclosed space with which he captures the
essence of the episode: the exercise of courtly love limits and blocks chival-
ric action, a theme central and present already in two of Chrétien de Troyes’s
novels,” whose Yvain is read to our knight as he travels to the island.93 This
analysis can be extended to the illuminator’s insistence on closely follow-
ing the text through the surrounding wall as way of emphasizing isolation,
and the insular nature of both the kingdom of Nobleza and of the episode,
otherwise left out of the general interpretation of the book as a whole. Such
insularity, along with the geographical traits of the other marvelous episodes
in the Çifar, has led critics to relate it to the Byzantine or Greek novel, traits
all determined one way or the other by sea travel. Both Byzantine novel and
the travelogue have been frequently mentioned as overlapping generically
with chivalric romance.
As later versions of the matière de Bretagne make sea voyage more fre-
quent, and as these texts make their way into the vernacular languages of
the Iberian Peninsula, insular models begin to take shape and inform the
production of the archipelagic imaginary of books of chivalry: the Kingdom
28 forest to island

of the Islands, the Island of Happiness, the Island of Gold, the Turning
Island, and the Lost Island appear on the Arthurian landscape, many of
them not specific to one text but present in many of them. The Kingdom of
the Islands, for instance, is a different territory situated in the Orient, which
marks its difference with the Hebrides, such as the marvelous kingdom of
Brangemor in the Perceval continuation, apparently a free land not paying
tribute, bringing in a politico-economic context that will recur in the Span-
ish book of chivalry. The Island of Happiness is the refuge to which Lancelot
takes the daughter of King Peles and twenty damsels who happily dance
around a green pine tree where Lancelot’s shield is hung, thus the name.
Upon their departure, the island changes its name to Dry Island of the
Green Pine Tree. The Island of Gold is a fundamental space in Renaut de
Beaujeau’s Li beaux inconnu, curiously also called Turning Island. Very inter-
esting in its relation to our Amadís is the enchanted palace in its center and
the domination over the island through a particular adventure. The Turn-
ing Island has in some versions a reference to a fortress located upon it
where Merlin is imprisoned by the magic of Abinor’s daughter, in parallel
to the Ínsula Firme, as the characters there will not be magically liberated
until the time of Arthur, as is narrated in the Esplandián, Amadís’s continua-
tion. Finally, the Lost Island, to which I will refer in relation to Amadís’s
Ínsula No Fallada later on, is one of these recurring insular spaces in the
chivalric romance.94
Beyond the peninsula, the enchanted island of Alcina in canto 7 of the
Orlando Furioso is probably the best-known insular landscape in the period,
along with the allegorical archipelago that Pantagruel travels, satirizing the
insular exoticism that contemporary discoveries had triggered. The articu-
lation between insular episodes in this vast panorama of texts and their con-
stitution as an absolutely necessary topos in the Spanish book of chivalry is
to be found in the Amadís.
 2
QW
Islands and maps
A Very Short History
So Geographers, in Afric-maps,
With Savage-pictures filled their gaps;
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.
—j. swift, On Poetry

S paces are constantly in the process of production. They are thus charac-
terized by change, substitution, and replacement. However, as Lefebvre
reminds us, spaces never disappear: they leave traces behind. A space like
the forest is crisscrossed by traces, from the paths that are trod upon in order
to traverse it, whether trails through pastures, footpaths, or merchant routes,
which link up glades, springs, and inns; islands are loaded with mythology,
colonization practices, marked as safe ports, or stepping stones in a com-
mercial route. All of these spaces are imprinted with values of safety, riches,
danger, and adventure, added on to the series of cultural build-up that they
support. Space is dialectical. It is result and cause, product and producer,
but, most importantly, it is a stake: “the locus of projects and actions de-
ployed as part of specific strategies, and hence also the object of wagers on
the future—wagers which are articulated, if never completed.”1 In the move-
ment from continental space to the sea, the experience of the space of the
Mediterranean must be thought of as the object of such speculation.
Before being traversed by sails and routes, the Mediterranean was for the
longest time an obstacle. Navigation worthy of the name, writes Fernand
Braudel, only occurred before the second half of the third millennium b.c.
with Egyptian travels to Byblos or, more accurately, with the rising popu-
larity of sailboats in the Cyclades in the second millennium, boats that,

29
30 Islands and Maps

provided with a keel, were able to find a way to root themselves in the
waters.2 Fear of the sea was not only a reminder to use common sense, but a
serious philosophical question.3 One can even hypothesize that sea travel
was possible among these islands because, at all times, at least one of them
was in sight. In this sense, the sailor was never really engulfed, empelagado,
or engolfé, as Spanish and French put it. In fact, throughout the sixteenth-
century, ocean travel was still a feat, one that was only attempted when a
profitable result was sure to come of it. Even though the compass was avail-
able from the twelfth century on, it was not generally used in the Mediter-
ranean, where travel generally consisted of small mercantile trips, buying
here, selling there.4
What the sailor could not afford to lose sight of was the shoreline, the
limit of what constituted the access to stability, to safety, to the reliability
of land. For it is the sea that sets limits to the land; or, as Strabo put it, it is
the sea that “shapes and defines the land,” emphasizing the inscriptionary
gesture in the Greek word geographei.5 This limit line, the reality of which
anyone can witness in the trace of sea foam left on the beach by an ebbing
wave, becomes in the process of being imagined or abstracted the primary
cartographic gesture.
I suggested in the first chapter a series of relationships between spaces of
the material world and spaces of fiction, their interaction and mutual influ-
ence. Any reflection on space, however, would not be complete without the
perspective granted by cartography, which I have only gestured at until now.
Cartography is relevant here not only in relation to discourses on or about
space. It has a direct relationship with the development of the romance. In
the pages that follow, I consider some lines in the development of cartogra-
phy especially from the twelfth century on, in order to arrive at a particular
cartographic genre that disembarks, as does the book of chivalry in Spain,
on an island. As another manner of interpreting the imaginary, maps focus
on insular geographies as the fifteenth century draws closer. Marvelous,
palimpsestic, insular cartographies will allow for a theory of islands in which
both cartography and narration serve as mirrors of the world.
The limit traced by the map was in ancient thought bound together in
one single notion, that of peirar, which designated simultaneously the
boundary of limit, the distant, and the shoreline or coast surrounding an
 Islands and Maps 31

island, especially in the context of the image of the island-earth surrounded

by the Ocean.6 A line drawn on the sand imitating that of the coastline is
a gesture of imitation, but it is also one of appropriation. Cartography, it
has been suggested, has one of its origins in this “domestication of remote
regions, this association of unknown and reputedly dangerous lands with
familiar territories, bringing them within a single homogeneous space,” into
the representation of a space where the unknown becomes merely “remote,”
fixated at a distance that is thereby made thinkable: “The map is thus an
instrument for overcoming the fear of the unknown by slowly integrating
the outer regions into the visual schema of the world,”7 writes Christian
Jacob. The map objectifies a space, and in the same process, it dissociates
itself and the spaces it represents from the consciousness of the subject. As
an object, then, the map recreates the world it visually replaces: “The map
confers a new, analogous yet symbolic reality upon the world, in accord
with a relationship that pertains either to the argument of authority, or the
power of perception . . . or to a social convention validated by usage: at a
given moment and in a given society, the country and the world where
one lives are to be identified with a certain graphic configuration.”8 Some
even argue that the map exists before the space, as the territory cannot be
imagined until the map exists.
The power of the image—which the map shares with all visual arts—is
one the map uses in order to turn an expression of subjectivity into an object
of knowledge. The map’s subjectivity derives both from the social conven-
tion on which the image of a certain space is founded, and from the cartog-
rapher himself, who serves as a vehicle for the expression of the convention.
The map is thus always a sort of narcissistic gesture, as it returns to the
onlooker that which she already expects—the map being a product of the
onlooker’s society. As such, it becomes an instrument of knowledge through
confirmation, obtaining thus a sort of pleasure. The map is an instrument of
knowledge, not only pertaining to geography but to the natural sciences, to
history, to mythology.
A world terrified by the sea, particularly by those waters from which the
shoreline would no longer be visible, produced a cartography of the world
within that enclosed horizon. Thus Strabo, at the beginning of our era,
thought the cartographer need be only concerned with the oikoumenē, the
32 Islands and Maps

known world. Plutarch established a similar link with history, sketching

the same kind of line between what is pertinent to history and cartography
and what is not, between regions of established knowledge and regions of
myth: “On the map, the latter are the zones at the world’s borders; it is
impossible to draw them, and the honest cartographer will content himself
with writing on the margins of the earth as on the edges of the sheet:
beyond, there exist only arid sands and dark swamps.”9
Herodotus, in his Histories, mentions a map for the first time within a lit-
erary source: Aristagoras, a Milesian, brings a map to convince King Cleo-
menes to join him in a military expedition against the Persians, around 499
b.c.10 Herodotus mocks this representation by calling it a periodos gēs, which
could also mean a literary portrait of the earth, but he was essentially criti-
cizing the clear boundary these descriptions presented (whether literary or
cartographic) through the Ocean.11 Herodotus proposes a varied new termi-
nology that introduces the figure of the informant in the composition of
a worldview—but paradoxically relies on the same mythic and legendary
contents the boundaries/boundlessness of Ocean had offered before.12
Almost a thousand years later, the commentary by Ambrosius Theodosius
Macrobius on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis from the De Republica introduced
the climatic zonal map. Macrobius’s is a schematic map: it makes no claim at
producing what we would now deem a realistic image of the earth. Many
medieval maps share this characteristic. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why
Macrobius’s, which divides the world into climate zones deemed habitable
or inhabitable, remained popular throughout the Middle Ages, in conjunc-
tion with other images of the world. Macrobius is of interest for the cartog-
raphy of islands as he shapes his worldview by accepting Eratosthenes’s
(third century b.c.) argument for the sphericity and the measurement of the
Earth, and taking the concepts of the ocean and land masses from Crates of
Mallos: “separating us from the people of the southern hemisphere, Ocean
flows along the whole extent of the equator; again, as its streams branch
out at the extremities of both regions, it forms two islands on the upper face
of the earth and two on the underside.”13 This “world-as-island” view is
recurrent, for even after Herodotus had mocked it, Strabo would affirm in
his Geographies that the Homeric island-earth vision had been proven right,
so that Ptolemy will have to refute the boundedness of the Earth once again
 Islands and Maps 33

six centuries after Herodotus.14 One of the Greek terms for a map, periodos
gēs, mentioned a few lines above, could mean not only the visual but a verbal
description of the earth, but in a literal sense it referred to a journey around
the world, meaning both the entirety or encyclopedic representation of the
world and the traveling around it to accomplish such a description. This
genre of Greek and Roman literatures, due to its appearance within other
genres of varying literary ambition, might also be labeled a strategy that
authors could employ in a visual or verbal medium. In the second century
a.d. a Periēgēsis attributed to Dionysius “enshrined the Greek view of the
whole earth for late antique and (in Avienus’s Latin translation) medieval
readers and students.”15 The appropriate expression for a world map was
then “circuit of the earth,” emphasizing thus the contour, the circular shape
of the earth as if following the Ocean’s course and its traveling. Latin used
the expression orbis terrarum to express this double meaning in close rela-
tion to the Greek words.
In geographic writing, islands, especially from the early Middle Ages
onward, received separate treatment, as in Orosius, who treats island groups
separately according to location after the continent they are adjacent to is
described (northern islands after Gaul and Spain, Fortunate Islands follow-
ing the description of Africa, etc.). In Isidore’s Etymologies, islands are linked
to land rather than sea and thus described in book 14 in a separate section
devoted to islands, promontories, mountains, and inferior areas—caves,
gorges, and so forth.16 But cartography proper will not, until the fifteenth
century, produce books of islands that prove that this detachment, this dis-
tancing had managed to break with the continent.
As a way of rationalizing the world through representation, perhaps
the most symptomatic of the differences between the cartography of today
and ancient cartography is the absence of a grid of latitude and longitude
in medieval maps, which conceived the organization of space in different
ways.17 Hydrographic features were what articulated location in medieval
maps of the world. The Red Sea of the Nile, the River Don, and the Mediter-
ranean thus figured as the main boundaries within the tripartite world rep-
resented in medieval mappaemundi. Around the entire world, conceived
as a great island or group of islands in classical tradition, as I have said, was
the Ocean.18 The reliance on water in the medieval period is not merely
34 Islands and Maps

traditional, or convenient, it also responds to the Bible as master text: “On

the third day you ordered the waters to collect in a seventh part of the earth;
the other six parts you made in dry land” (Ezra 6:42),19 hence the idea that
all of the earth’s waters were somehow connected. These schematic maps,
dividing the world into a three-part image, are known as T/O maps. The
name refers to the geometric abstraction that produces a graphic image,
the “T” representing the three bodies of water mentioned above, crossing
the land and dividing the three continents. These are placed as “islands”
in this water system—Asia, the largest, depicted above the bar of the T,
with Europe and Africa occupying the smaller spaces—while the “O” is the
Ocean surrounding and containing the world. That such an abstraction cor-
responds to letters is interesting in terms of how these maps were reinter-
preted for use within a particular mentality. The fifteenth-century idea that
these letters correspond to the words Terrarum Orbis, follows and comple-
ments the earlier idea that the T should be read as a figure of the Crucifixion,
making the map thus a symbol of sacrifice and salvation.20 This kind of map,
though inherited from the classical world, has its earliest version in Isidore
of Seville’s Etymologies, following Isidore’s description of the division of the
earth in book 14, 2.
From the link of early Greek words for maps intimately related to a de-
scription of a voyage, to the graphic quality of the T/O maps, an original
intimacy between maps and language, both seen as narration, as some-
thing to be read, can be postulated. This play between cartography and nar-
ration is articulated in different ways according to the nature of the map
in question: T/O and zonal maps share a certain elementary, minimalist
quality that has even led some to question their status as maps. Their recur-
rent presence is explained by the fact that they can be easily memorized
and thus reproduced in a form that will not suffer from deformation in the
process of transmission.21 They are figured in a circle, which offers a form
of delimitation and containment: the shape of enclosure and totality. This
shape reemerged in every encyclopedic project as a form of the “itinerary
of knowledge” or of “knowledge in the form of a circular voyage,” but also
as the vision of a mastered territory, as a finite object of knowledge in
which the medieval ideas of macrocosm and microcosm have a precise
expression.22
 Islands and Maps 35

The outside circle or border of the map is a circumference for which a

center, an omphalos, or navel must be provided with special value. It was, in
fact, the most valued place of the map: the Greeks placed Delphi there; most
Christian mappaemundi revolved around Jerusalem (sometimes Constan-
tinople), while al-Idrīsī’s world map for Roger, king of Sicily (twelfth cen-
tury), has Mecca as its center. From this center, the circle figures a series of
oppositions: center and periphery, the concentrated and the dispersed, focal-
ization and marginality, themselves originating corresponding oppositions.
Even in the shape of perfection, the sphere or the circle, these oppositions
suggest the fragmentation of geography, of knowledge, of a prelapsarian
unity visually reinforced by the emplacement of Earthly Paradise upon an
island at the top of the East-oriented map, or even walled up, inaccessible.23
Within the circle, following the Bible, the medieval world associated
the three continents with the three sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
The division of the world among the sons entails a symbolic meaning that is
reminiscent of George Dumézil’s well-known trifunctional model of ora-
tores, bellatores, and laboratores.24 In his Imago mundi (twelfth century),
Honorius of Autun explicitly associates the division of the earth among the
sons as a division of labor, and Alfonso X’s General estoria (second half of
thirteenth century) does the same in the chapters devoted to Noah and the
Ark. As representing both a physical and a symbolic reality, maps, in an inti-
mate relation with history established by Sallust and the Iberian Orosius,
reiterated throughout medieval historiography down to Juan Fernández
de Heredia, figured a representation of a reality in geographic terms that
revealed a spiritual meaning related to space, both in the past and in the
present. Edson writes that, particularly in the context of historical works,
maps of the high Middle Ages merge past and present time within a geo-
graphical framework.25
The Middle Ages developed an elaborate type of mappamundi in accor-
dance with the didactic, intellectual, and spiritual desire of representation,
as conveyed by the excruciatingly detailed Ebstorf, Hereford (both thirteenth
century), and Fra Mauro 1459 mappamundi. The Ebstorf—destroyed in a
World War II bombing—was a thirteenth-century drawing 3.5 meters in
diameter representing the body of Christ. His head was drawn at the top,
coinciding with the East and with the terrestrial paradise; his hands to the
36 Islands and Maps

North and South of the earth, while his feet were drawn below, on the West.
Crucified, his body (and his sacrifice) became the surface of the earth—
perhaps a reflection on the materiality of maps, here resymbolized by a
divine skin—and Christ’s gaze met the onlooker’s, offering him his body—
the world—for contemplation and spiritual reflection. Symbolically all-
encompassing, the Ebstorf map offered complete knowledge to the specta-
tor, both of the physical and spiritual worlds, spatial and historical, sacred
and profane, geography and salvation, origin and end: the limit or ends of
the earthly. It was the Encyclopedia. As such, it shared characteristics with
other discursive genres, such as universal histories, which emerge in Spain
roughly in the same period through royal patronage, with mirrors of the
world, or geographical treatises such as the Semejança del mundo. As a figure
of total knowledge, the encyclopedic map serves as a catalogue, as a form of
inventory of the world. A catalogue of mirabilia as much as it is an inventory
of known things, past and present, it offers samples of the world’s diversity,
it summarizes infinite difference in a microcosm. It contains the verified, the
known, and the possible.
Yet another type of map was produced during the Middle Ages, per-
haps the most influential of them all, contemporary with the mappamundi:
the portolan chart. Although their totalizing effect can be very convinc-
ing, medieval mappaemundi correspond to only one kind of knowledge,
they “are the cosmographies of thinking landsmen. By contrast, the portolan
charts preserve the Mediterranean sailors’ firsthand experience of their own
sea, as well as their expanding knowledge of the Atlantic Ocean,” opposing
cartographers of the central, firm land to those of the marginal, moving seas.
Portolan charts are sea maps, depicting coastlines carefully along with the
names of harbors, bays, rocks, cities, and rivers. They are not concerned
with the detail of landmasses, but with the accuracy of a shoreline on which
the survival of sailors, the users of portolan charts, depended. If a difference
must be noted here between mappaemundi and portolan charts, it would be
one of emphasis: the first are mostly concerned with a theologico-historical
message, the latter are with a practical knowledge, even when the qualifica-
tion of “accurate” or of “realistic” does not fit portolan charts, for as Camp-
bell observes, many legendary features can be found in charts, isolated in little
known continental interiors or around the edges of the map.26
 Islands and Maps 37

Medieval maps called for a reading that implied not only a spiritual result
or a practical use. They also called for the imagination to travel the memory
of stories taken from history, from classical authors, from contemporary—
real or imaginary—travels, from Pliny to Marco Polo to Mandeville. While
the contents of mappaemundi drew on biblical references and on miracu-
lous stories triggered by toponomy or iconography, portolan charts repre-
sented in their margins the monsters and marvels that used to inhabit the
islands of the encircling Ocean in the Beatus, Higden, and other generally
encyclopedic maps. From the thirteenth-century Ebstorf and Hereford maps,
where they populated Africa, to Juan de la Cosa’s universal map of 1500,
where they have moved to the northeastern tip of Asia, as the edges of
the earth were extended—into the Atlantic, into America—marvels and
monsters traveled along islands and disembarked on the new continent.
Portolan charts were key in this process. Witnesses to the growing knowl-
edge in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the Atlantic and North
Atlantic archipelagoes, they played an important part in the theories of the
marvelous and the imaginary islands of Man, Antillia, and Brazil that would
find a figured reality in the Americas.27 Islands, especially from the four-
teenth century onward, serve as laboratory for the emergence of “a new rela-
tion between the bookish and the real, between classical space and modern
space,” a relation that we have seen links geographic and historical genres,
cartography and politics, and, in later chapters, various literary genres, and
which, in Bouloux’s words, “leads to interrogate the real in a different way,
according to more complex processes than the simple opposition between
authority and experience, imaginary and real.”28
Whether schematic or encyclopedic, medieval mappaemundi inherited a
cartography from antiquity that inscribed the known world as the central
island surrounded by a peripheral Ocean. From antiquity as well, legend-
ary islands are depicted on the margins, this “space open to imagination,
where dreams and hauntings take place in their floating contours.”29Almost
all medieval mappaemundi represent these legendary, imaginary, mythical
islands; and all of them represent them in their margins, whether in a Ptole-
maic projection or in a mandorla-map, along with the Mediterranean archi-
pelagoes. Such is the case, for example, of the mappamundi found in the
mid-eleventh century Commentary on the Apocalypse of Saint John by Beatus
38 Islands and Maps

of Liébana, where islands reproduce the form of the overall earth, while fish
fill the encircling ocean. Another depiction of islands can be found in the
Miller Atlas. While the first sheet displays the Azores archipelago in an
Atlantic no-man’s-land, the map devoted to the Indian Ocean is saturated
with an exuberant insular geography. In Jacob’s description, “the oceans are
filled with luxuriant archipelagoes, with lively colors and aleatory forms, as
if these islands were being represented metaphorically as precious stones, the
dream of which continued to haunt both travelers and sailors.”30 This is the
cartography of Le Goff’s “horizon onirique” (oneiric horizon). The islands of
the Miller Atlas do not strive for a geographic reality. They are there for at
least two reasons: to entice the imagination into reveries of riches and exotic
fantasies, and to obliterate the blank spaces of the map. They also mirror the
allure that marvels had for a number of genres, from Hellenistic paradoxog-
raphy to Indianographic writing, where the wonders of both Asia and Africa
were often melded, a lust and pleasure in wonder writing that was simul-
taneously denounced and copied by Strabo, and especially by Pliny. This
last one wavers in his Natural History between the writing of unquestioned
wonder catalogues and arguments on diversity being the result of nature’s
games, between discussions on causality and attempts at subordinating the
charisma of marvels to some form of scientific objectivity. Thus, like Strabo
had done before, he presents Alexander’s military expeditions into the East
as simultaneous data-gathering explorations, which he buttresses through
Aristotle: “By way of this imagined partnership of omnipotent commander
and omniscient philosopher,” writes Romm, “a cognitive dominion is estab-
lished over the East, allowing the light of Greek rationalism to be shone
under every rock and into every thicket.” In his expansion of this part-
nership’s achievements, Pliny anticipates the relation among cartography,
marvels, an adventurous hero, and narration that medieval romance about
Alexander will take up and elaborate in myriad forms: “I ask that my readers
give them a warm reception, and with my guidance, wander at leisure amid
the universal worlds of nature and the central passion of the most illustrious
of all rulers.”31 Romance, that is, will elaborate precisely the wandering Pliny
demands from his audience.
Other cartographers used the depiction of islands for different purposes.
Ancient Greek or Islamic cartography had used them for mnemotechnical
 Islands and Maps 39

and denominative processes, a purpose the Renaissance atlas by Joan Mar-

tines (1587) takes up in an unusual fashion. Martines shapes his islands in
the form of letters. The viewer identifies the forms on the map as float-
ing signs, or isolated letters that do not constitute a language but that never-
theless stress the continued relationship of maps with language and with a
reading.32 Among those represented are the Fortunate Islands, later iden-
tified as the Canarian archipelago; the Island of Saint Brendan; Antillia or
the Island of the Seven Cities; the island called Brazil which would later
be identified as part of a continent;33 and Green Island, today Greenland, in
the middle of the North Atlantic.
Portolan charts also emphasized these islands in their Atlantic location—
that is, when they found it fitting to depict them. For most commercial
seafarers the Atlantic coasts were not interesting, thus, most charts would
stop at the end of the Mediterranean, thereby excluding Scandinavia, distant
Atlantic islands or western African coastlines. The Canary Islands were
among the first to be consistently depicted; the Azores and Cape Verde
archipelagoes would follow. Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, both part of the
Canarian archipelago, appeared with these names on Dulcert’s chart in 1339,
three years after their discovery was documented.34
Each of these Atlantic and Oriental islands, in a group or by itself, has
been surrounded by a considerable bibliography. The existence of most of
these islands has been questioned at one point or another, which leads us
once again to the ambiguous nature of insular space. Real or imaginary,
islands are always lurking in the margins of the medieval map. As exuberant
manifestations of a medieval imaginary, they crowd the waters in the Miller
Atlas, signifying abundance through metonymy: spices, riches, wonders of
all sorts are thus evoked. In the Atlantic, in the Ocean, islands play a multiple
role. They figure there as a margin, as an “edge of the world” that borders
the unknown; they confirm an ancient knowledge of lands beyond, be they
Atlantis, Antillia, or Paradise; they cipher in their shape an unimaginable
other, the ultimate wonder, a repository of that which cannot be verified
anywhere else but which still haunts the imagination as possibility.
Both in the imaginary and in its projection onto the map, the island is
a mix of the fabulous and the historical with a particular proclivity for poli-
tics. F. Lestringant finds that “the island appeared in all these cases as the
40 Islands and Maps

privileged element of a malleable geography, in which form and design can

be indefinitely rebuilt in terms of particular political projects. The uncer-
tainty of the island, its essential aptitude to anchor itself for a time on a
determined point of the mappaemundi will serve the divergent interests of
rival colonial powers.”35 Lestringant thus highlights traits of mapped islands
that expound possibilities that literature also saw in this geography, such as
their malleability, the possibility of arranging them in different ways, ambigu-
ity and openness to relocation, all related in one way or another to political
operations. Islands are also one way to approach the map’s intrinsic relation
to fiction, which can be understood from at least two viewpoints: a histori-
cal one, which we have referred through Edson’s reflections on the framing
of the past within geographical structures, but which can also be analyzed as
a projection onto a future in which the stumbling upon America confirmed
the fabulous dimension of Western cartography and its imaginary in gen-
eral; and, secondly, in the very nature of the map, closely related to literary
texts in the very operations of fiction. In “What Is a Map?” the question that
heralds Christian Jacob’s best-read chapter in The Sovereign Map, he writes
that the map is essentially a metaphor that describes human relations, power
relationships, and hierarchies. The very process of composition of a map, its
selection of traits to be represented and the process of symbolization that
brings the map into existence, homologizes map and literature; it is the same
process by which the map becomes a sort of model of “reality” that makes it
into a work of fiction. The hic est refers both to the materiality of the map
and the space painted on it and to the referred space, exterior to it, that must
be imagined.36 This trait of the map, not merely understood in its linguis-
tically deictic possibility but in its narrative production of spaces within
the text and outside of it, is shared by “fiction”: “simultaneously, the narra-
tion figures an exterior ‘real’ and represents itself as discourse: sign at the
same time of ‘something’ and ‘for something,’ the temporal representation
explodes . . . a tension is established between the time proper to the narrative
and that of a word it fictitiously assumes,” writes Zumthor of medieval nar-
rative—but he might have been writing of medieval maps.37
The reader of a map seems to be identical to the reader of romance, as
she is forced to move from the legible to the visible, from the now to a then,
from a here to a there that all exist simultaneously. Both texts, map and work
 Islands and Maps 41

of literature, demand of the reader a doubled consciousness of self-presence,

one within the text—a fictional one, one in the historical space/time when
the reading is occurring. Both discourses, moreover, share a bond of inten-
tion and legitimation with a hybrid genre that mediates between them: the
travelogue, a genre intimately associated with the marvelous as fiction. As
both historians of cartography and literary critics seem to suggest, map and
travelogue use and legitimate each other; they are codependent, especially in
relation to the marvelous elements they reciprocally incorporate. By 1400 the
map was essentially a collection of mirabilia, lavishly glossed or visually repre-
sented on its surface. Besides the wealth of representation these marvels con-
vey, they are markers for a paradox of cartographic representation, for they
simultaneously occupy space and denote its emptiness. Figures of monsters
are supplemented in these spaces with writing. Within cartography, as expe-
rience and technology converged, rhumblines first, then compasses substi-
tuted monsters in the absurd emptiness of space. The margins, in their chase
of monsters around the map, one day forced their disappearance from it.
In a manner similar to Western vocabularies on cartography, Arabic did
not have a specific word for map. Instead, “a number of words were used,
sometimes simultaneously or in juxtaposition to each other, to refer to map
artifacts . . . terms that derived from well-known Arabic roots” with mean-
ings that range from form and figure, to drawing, graph, and painting, per-
haps already allowing in this way for the permeability of genres that share
a concern with geography.38 The Islamic world, in a way that the rest of
the medieval world tended to share, presented insular geography in a variety
of texts and in a range of genres not easily discernible from one another.
Descriptions, catalogues of wonders, travelogues, cosmographies, and geog-
raphies all dialogue with one another. As for islands, these genres share an
odd consistency: they all seem to relate them directly with the marvelous,
which further supports the links between insular geographies and fiction,
but also with politics, for the term djazīra, comparable to the Latin insula,
designates both islands and peninsulas, but also territories between rivers or
maritime countries, oases, or districts.39
Angelo Arioli has studied a great variety of texts and assembled a catalogue
of marvelous insular spaces mentioned by ten Arabic authors throughout
the Middle Ages, from Sulaymān in 851 to Ibn al-Wardī in 1457. The entire
42 Islands and Maps

commonplace spectrum of marvelous places is arranged in this vast archi-

pelago, including nudity, riches, primitivism in nutrition, a prodigious nature,
spices, gems, and sexuality. Among them, the most familiar to Western cul-
ture are the Island of Women, the Fish-Island, and the Mobile Island, which
are common motifs of travel literature, cartography, and all sorts of collec-
tions of mirabilia.40
The Island of Women, versions of which are taken by Arioli from Cap-
tain Buzurg ibn Shahriyar, Shams al-Din al-Dimashqī, and al-Khwārizmī, is
located in the Sea of China and evokes the long-standing tradition of the
Amazons, also present in a great variety of texts in the Western tradition and
bequeathed to the toponymy of the New World in the name of California
through the Spanish book of chivalry.41 The Fish Island is taken from Sulay-
mān, and with this text his (contestedly attributed) narration opens. The
fragment chosen by Arioli speaks of a fish that, when it emerges, seems to
the onlooker as if it were an island. At times this fish will put out one of
its wings—a fin—which then seems like a sail. While this fish is not danger-
ous, sailors make huge noises, sometimes using bells like those of Christian
churches, in order to scare it away and avoid the risk of shipwreck, the text
tells us. Arioli footnotes that the fish referred to here is the finback or red
whale. This Fish Island has a parallel in Captain Buzurg’s Tortoise Island,
with links to clas- sical images of the world, and to the Navigatio Sancti Bren-
danis Abbati, a Latin text of the tenth century that Benedeit would rework
into the Voyage de Saint Brandan, mentioned in previous pages. Taken from
Saint Brendan’s legend, this island would be mapped as late as the seven-
teenth century, in a representation that mixes a tale with geography in the
sixteenth-century map of Novae Francia.42 By way of this Anglo-Norman
text we find yet another common ground with the Arabic island imaginary
in the shape of the Mobile Island. Arioli finds examples of this island in Ibn
Wasif Sah and al-H.imyarī. It is a geography that upon sighting provoked
in the sailors the desire to disembark upon it.43 Arioli plays on the illusory
character of the moving island by qualifying it as a “mirage.” If in the desert
the mirage is an oasis, its logical reversal—the mirage in the sea—is an
island, a vision of earth in the desert of sea.
The overlaps between desert and sea—open, seemingly infinite spaces,
lack of civilization, inhospitability, and so forth—are thus also present in the
 Islands and Maps 43

Islamic insular imaginary, where they bear relations with mysticism. The
marvelous, as intrinsic to the relationship between these spaces, presents
another way of establishing links among them, as a way of exploring their
transposition of meanings. We have also seen that the production of a
space—in the form of distance, established by the adventurous knight
galloping toward the beyond or by the traveler searching for the other, or
by the eremite seeking a personal encounter with God—is essential to the
encounter of the marvelous. It is interesting then here to note that sarāb,
Arabic for mirage, is related to walking, to going on one’s own way, par-
ticularly related to desert scenes and interpreted as deceit or instability.44
Marvelous, in turn, refers mainly to a literary tradition in which travel liter-
ature, cosmography, natural sciences, and the supernatural met. The words
came to refer to God’s creation and power, encompassing the physical
world, the human body, the heavens, and so on. Al-Kazwīnī, notes Huns-
berger, distinguishes between ὰjīb (marvel, wonder) and gharīb (strange),
“in that the former impairs the human being in his ability to understand the
cause of anything, especially the familiar (such as the sun [q.v.] rising),
while gharīb consists of unusual things (such as earthquakes),” a distinction
that bears resemblance to Alfonso X’s definition of natural phenomena and
miracles: “Thus, by contemplating even the everyday occurrences of life—
the growing of plants, the digestion of food, the flowing of the tides—the
believer marvels at the real, has a sense of wonder and amazement, and is
thereby led to an awareness of the transcendence of God.”45 Writers, such as
Ibn Bat.t. ūt. a, undertook great journeys in an effort to catalogue these mar-
vels, mirroring the example of the men of antiquity and of the Christian
Middle Ages.
In Arabic geography, the Ocean is the limit of the Earth, and in the Sea
of Darkness—also called Embracing or Encompassing, External Sea, Green
or Black Sea, Tenebrous Sea—is the Throne of the Evil One, whose prison
is an island. The Embracing Sea of Ocean surrounds a circular Earth,
crossed by two gulfs: the Sea of Rum, or Mediterranean, and the Sea of Fars,
or Indian Sea. The center of the Earth is Mecca. In one of these extremes
lies the Island of Masfahan—identified as Tenerife, Pliny’s Convallis, as al-
H.imyarī writes. He takes the reference from al-Idrīsī, probably the most
famous of Spanish Arabic travelers and geographers (1099–1165 or 1180).46
44 Islands and Maps

Within the Mediterranean, the signs for the end of the Earth are in Cádiz:
the Columns of Hercules, a monument that al-Zuhrī, geographer from
Almería, claims to have seen destroyed in 1145.47 Sprinkled across these two
seas, multiple islands present their wonders to the merchant, geographer,
and traveler: the island of the Androgyne, the Island of Reason, where one
can drink water from a spring that produces surprising effects on the mind;48
the island of Malakan, a monster the size of a hill with many man-eating
heads; and the Island of Little Ones, where people the size of a cubit—
already referred to by Homer in the Iliad, Pliny, and Aristotle in his Book of
Animals, picked up famously by Swift for the land of Lilliput—fight cranes
in a legend with counterparts in Chinese and even North American Indian
cultures.49 There are islands reminiscent of Circe’s island, and islands whose
carnations will allow their possessors to never age or grow gray hair; islands
of wonderful riches and well-being, and islands of cannibalism and incest.
But perhaps the most original to the Islamic world is the Island of the Waq-
Waq, found in many Iberian texts and mapped onto the Mediterranean, as
in the Egerton map of the “Inhabited Quarter” from the Shāhid-i s.ādiq, an
encyclopedic work in Persian by Āzādānī Is.fahānī.50
The Waq-Waq have been variously identified with Japan, islands of
southeast Asia and Africa, the Seychelles, and others. The Waq-Waq as
an archipelago is mentioned by Buzurg, Ibn al-Wardī, al-H.imyarī, and con-
sisted of sixteen hundred islands so called because on them grows a tree
whose fruit resembles young women attached to the tree by the hair: when
the fruit is ripe, a “waq-waq”–like noise can be heard, which the inhabitants
take as a good omen. From al-Idrīsī’s account, one might assume that the
word renders click-speakers; from the more imaginative accounts, they are
especially related to India and its catalogue of wonders; and from other
accounts, one gathers that the Waq-Waq designate not only a land, but also
the very edge of the knowable world.51
These are islands taken from works of various authors, books of travels
to China and India, compendiums of marvels, travelogues, cosmographies,
and geographies. The close relation between what is seen and what happens
there is transmitted in two ways, one is by way of images, and the other is
through language, in narration. Al-Idrīsī does both simultaneously in one
of the most incredible works of geography of the Middle Ages, the Kitāb
 Islands and Maps 45

nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (The Pleasure Excursion of One Who

Is Eager to Traverse the Regions of the World), written in the service of King
Roger II of Sicily.52 Etymology seems to point us once more to suggestive
territory for comparison. In Arabic the words that mean “to narrate,” “nov-
elty,” and “event” all derive from the same root. The first two were later
merged into the same word, as if to suggest that it is the event—that which
is new—that is worthy of narration. Conversely, anything that is the object
of narration is postulated implicitly as an event.53 Furthermore, the relation-
ship with space is already there: the primary meanings of the root h-d-th are
“to be recent, new” and “to occur, to happen, to take place.”54 Islands seem
to conjure in the Arabic geographical imagination this narratability linked to
the notion of adventure as expressed in romance, adding one more element
that buttresses the coupling of insularity and fiction.
Insularity thus moves in two directions, from extreme openness to ex-
treme concentration. The island conjures a power of miniaturization for
the real, the imagined, or the armchair traveler. Historic and imaginary trav-
elers, like Mandeville or al-Idrīsī—when at sea—found themselves in soli-
tude and desperation, in an isolated place. This experience of space marked
by exile and displacement, by traversing and appropriation, takes the form
of a discourse on space that is intimately tied to narration.

From Isolario to Atlas

In the late Middle Ages—when travels to the East were a matter of everyday
conversation because of the wide popularity of the stories of Marco Polo
and Mandeville; when marvels were known by all and had at least been con-
firmed by an acquaintance or by a close friend worthy of trust; when books
of chivalry triumphed in Spain and new seafaring heroes were born; when
the European gaze concentrated so much on the East that it would be a
while before it managed to get a perspective on the West—the modern
traveler began to make his way into the world. One of the first kinds of
books this late medieval traveler wrote was a book consisting exclusively of
descriptions of islands accompanied by maps: the isolario.
Isolarii are books that articulate diverse materials about islands, orga-
nized thematically in encyclopedic form, generally presenting a map for each
island and a corresponding text. Regardless of the variety in style and content
46 Islands and Maps

of the twenty different isolarii that we know—ranging from atlas prototypes

to personal accounts of a sailor or traveler—all claim an insistent relation-
ship between text and map. Indeed, the latter is often a visual interpretation
of the narration. Some isolarii contain regional maps or even mappaemundi
that show the location of the islands they focus on within a larger context,
showing the relations either among the islands themselves or to a conti-
nent. Yet others present specific illustrations of details of each island, such as
floor plans of fortresses, or representations of the inhabitants in traditional
costume, anticipating an anthropological gaze.55
George Tolias mentions Homer’s Odyssey as a first isolario of sorts, but
the classical precursor to the genre is Dionysius Periegetes’s section on
islands in his Oikoumenēs Periegesis (a.d. 124). Even though the image of the
world offered in this geographical poem was fairly conventional, perhaps
even outdated for its time, it became a standard textbook for the Middle
Ages, first translated into Latin in the fourth century, followed by two sixth-
century translations, and another, with extensive commentary in the twelfth.
Within the humanism that characterizes the cultural milieu that gave rise to
isolarii proper, Tolias points to Domenico Silvestri’s De insulis (1385–1406),
an alphabetical “learned island dictionary following the methodology of
Boccacio’s ‘De montibus, silvis, fontibus,’ to which it was a sort of supple-
ment,” as the immediate antecedent of the isolario, from which there are no
extant maps.56
Christophoro Buondelmonti’s Liber insularum archipelagi is the only
known island-book corresponding to the period before 1470.57 Even though
the data presented in it was available for a long time before Buondelmonti,
he seems to have been the first to undertake this task of assemblage, as
Elizabeth Clutton has called it.58 A compilation of facts and fantasy filtered
through personal experience, hearsay, and a series of more or less accurately
cited poetic and historical sources, his voyage is motivated by several
desires; a humanist curiosity, the search for Greek manuscripts, an archeo-
logical interest, a passion for Greek, all probably influencing the itinerary
that leads from well-known monastic retreats in isolated rocks to the urban
exuberance of Constantinople (Figures 1 and 2).59 His text seeks to enter-
tain and please the armchair traveler, the powerful Cardinal Orsini in par-
ticular, to whom the work is dedicated. Thus, Buondelmonti interpolates
 Islands and Maps 47

descriptions of historical and natural marvels, stories of pirates and of mira-

cles, complaints about food, quotes from Ovid and Virgil. The Liber quickly
became popular, as the more than sixty extant manuscripts in three differ-
ent redactions evidence; and, more importantly, it constituted itself as the
model for future isolarii, which until the seventeenth century derived from
it not only the content but also the structure itself, and, quite often, the maps.
The date for the composition of the work is given by the acrostic formed
by the eighty-two letters that begin each chapter. Some of the copies show
1422, some of them differ by as much as nine years, but the date for the first
recension has been determined to be 1420.60 Buondelmonti left Florence,
where he was born into a powerful family around 1380, in order to study
Greek in Rhodes, where he must have spent some eight years, according
to Émile Legrand. His travels among the Greek islands took him about six
years. During these voyages he acquired at least seven of the Greek manu-
scripts he had been sent to look for, kept today in the Biblioteca Laurenziana
in Florence, some of which he annotated, including the fourth book of
Aristotle’s Physics and a life of Plutarch.61
The system of sources that Buondelmonti uses in order to compile his
“descriptions” has baffled readers and critics for many, sometimes contradic-
tory reasons. For most of the information that does not correspond to that
of the reader or critic, Buondelmonti has been corrected and judged as igno-
rant. But research into personal history and context and the provenance of
his information often turns out to be, if not accurate, instructive, as Legrand
concluded.62 Buondelmonti himself lists events and the entertainment or
pleasure of an errant writing and reading as the purpose of his book, describ-
ing it as “an illustrated book of the Cyclades and the various other islands
surrounding them, with a description of the events that took place there in
antiquity up to our own times. . . . I am sending this to you [Orsini] so that
you can have the pleasure of letting your thoughts wander when you are
tired” (Figures 3 and 4).63
Buondelmonti’s sources include Ovid and Virgil, whom he quotes directly,
and references to Cicero, Livy, Pliny, Aristotle, Gorgias, Callimachus, Terence,
Demosthenes, and Varro, among others (Figure 5). Buondelmonti points
out in his preface that he will tell of the shape of the islands, their greatness
and, most important to us, the events for which they have been a theater or
Figure 1. The island of Candia (Crete) depicts Daedalus’s labyrinth at its center.
Christophoro Buondelmonti, Liber insularum archipelagi, MS 18246, folio 15r.
Copyright Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Figure 2. An inscription notes that Saint John wrote the Apocalypse while on this
island. Christophoro Buondelmonti, Liber insularum archipelagi, MS 18246, folio 42v.
Copyright Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Figure 3. Mykonos, one of the Cyclades. In the text that accompanies the map, the
author expresses doubt as to whether Saints George and Stephen were actually here.
Christophoro Buondelmonti, Liber insularum archipelagi, MS 18246, folio 32r.
Copyright Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Figure 4. Cephalonia, represented laterally, proudly bears the inscription “Hic fuit
olympica ciuitas.” Christophoro Buondelmonti, Liber insularum archipelagi, MS 18246,
folio 7r. Copyright Biblioteca Nacional de España.
52 Islands and Maps

a stage for a number of years, in his words. He remarks that his travels
took place under the threat of tempests and enemies of the faith (Figure 6).
The description of the Greek islands, divided into seventy-nine sections,
begins with Corfu and ends with Aegina. Buondelmonti considers the
Greek archipelago as the arche pelagos, stretching the etymology to mean the
archipelago of first importance, as “master” or “leader of the sea.”64 The texts
are interpolated among the maps of the islands, watercolors where green
corresponds to the sea and the rivers, white to the plains and dark ink to
the mountains, as is specified at the end of the preface itself, emphasizing
the maps’ integral role in the composition of the book.65
The island maps are intriguing reflections of the texts that accompany
them. These are not maps suited for sailing, but neither are they precisely
for the learning of a highly cultivated armchair traveler, as the illustrations
are not rich enough nor do they convey any information that the curious
mind of the time would not consider commonplace (Figures 7 and 8). It has
been often remarked that the isolario as a genre and, specifically Buondel-
monti’s text, is to be inscribed in a tradition of encyclopedic knowledge, an
attempt to encompass all information available for a specific space, in this
case, a series of islands. Hilary L. Turner, in an article devoted specifically to
the maps but which traces the manuscript tradition of the Liber, argues that
Buondelmonti’s work would be the result of two converging traditions. The
first, the encyclopedic tradition, from which classical sources derived knowl-
edge that was then passed on as geographical knowledge, was typical of the
fourteenth century. Yet, this tradition never included maps, and it never
attempted to present detailed or even generally accurate information. The
other tradition, which would explain the inclusion of maps, would be that of
portolan charts, confirming my observations above that the space of the
island seems to be especially apt for conveying new forms of interrogating
the real through the incorporation or assemblage of a variety of discourses.66
If encyclopedic indeed, the idea of totalization entailed in Buondelmonti’s
project is of a different nature than that of a summa or an imago mundi. His
isolario is a kind of guide of common sense knowledge combined with clichés,
an array of funny stories; obvious historical information; a series of archeo-
logical, anthropological, but, most of all, economical observations; unspe-
cific tales of miracles; and a compilation of widely known classic legends
 Islands and Maps 53

and myths. He is a traveler: not a sailor, or hermit, or a saint determined to

convert the infidels, or a man of commerce. I would say that he is one of
the first learned tourists, with an eagerness to demonstrate his intellectual
capacities, and particularly observant of his “creature comforts.”67 He even
has pictures. His maps, which he drew with his own hand following Ptole-
maic principles, are drawn according to the conventions of the period and
are close to actual island shapes, though for no map is there an idea of scale
or a uniform orientation. Maps are there to illustrate his text, to mirror
the information, to visualize the stories: to provide a setting.68 This collage
includes stories of islands inhabited by monastic communities, or by oracles
who used to reveal the future, or by harpies, flying griffins, and other mon-
sters; stories of islands prolific in wine as a gift from Bacchus, and miracles
that can be obtained after sleeping one night on the skin of a wild ass in the
island of Sikinos; stories of cities entirely inhabited, in the past, by giants,
like Sardopolis, in enumerations that inevitably remind one of Calvino. He
tells of the labyrinth in Crete and of the miracle in Polycandros, where the
death of a monk living in a cave is avenged by a voice in the sky.69 On a more
historical note, perhaps evidencing a personal sense of community, are his
mentions of monks in Les Strophades, Mykonos, La Panagia, Polycandros,
Nio, Le Caloyer, Athos, Patmos, and the islets around Constantinople (Fig-
ure 9). He sometimes questions his own information, as in the localization
of Homer’s tomb in Chios; other times he will credit anonymous people
with his information, as he has not seen the island himself.70 He describes
Thira poetically as “spread like the hem of a garment” and Ikaria as a sinking
ship.71 And there are stories of monsters inhabiting Naxos and Kos, and of
marvelous things happening in the times of the ancient Greeks, which he
always introduces with “It is said . . . ,” evading responsibility for their
marvelous nature. In fact, the only times Buondelmonti uses the adjective
“marvelous” to describe anything, the object is neither monster nor miracle,
but curiously, architecture, specifically ruins, that anticipate the description
of Constantinople toward the end of the book (Figure 10).72 His archeolog-
ical interest, coupled with his personal history, drive him to Christianized and
allegorical explanations, as in the case of Pallas Athena, where he explains
that she wears three colors that symbolize the three theological virtues, or
the cases of Prometheus, Apollo, and Bacchus.73
Figure 5. For Corfu, an Aegean island, Buondelmonti quotes verses from Virgil at the
top of the folio. Christophoro Buondelmonti, Liber insularum archipelagi, MS 18246,
folio 4r. Copyright Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Figure 6. On Lefkada, Buondelmonti represents a battle. Christophoro Buondelmonti,
Liber insularum archipelagi, MS 18246, folio 5v. Copyright Biblioteca Nacional de
España.
Figure 7. Athens and Negroponte face off on this map of the Saronic islands.
Christophoro Buondelmonti, Liber insularum archipelagi, MS 18246, folio 61v.
Copyright Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Figure 8. Islands and cliffs can be deserted and seem inaccessible. Christophoro
Buondelmonti, Liber insularum archipelagi, MS 18246, folio 30v. Copyright Biblioteca
Nacional de España.
Figure 9. Buondelmonti uses a different projection to depict Skopelos, showing the
prominence of cliffs. Christophoro Buondelmonti, Liber insularum archipelagi, MS
18246, folio 39r. Copyright Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Figure 10. The text ends with the land, at the shoreline where the ancient city of
Troy is marked through some ruins and the text that refers to it. Christophoro
Buondelmonti, Liber insularum archipelagi, MS 18246, folio 50v. Copyright Biblioteca
Nacional de España.
60 Islands and Maps

Via text or map, the Liber provides the reader with many traveling pos-
sibilities. One can read Buondelmonti and take his own itinerary as a guide
among the Greek islands, or one may choose a different route. In any case,
the alternation between text and map gives the whole a sense of continu-
ity, of progress in the illusion of an itinerary created through traversing the
pages. It is precisely the movement through the book that threads it to-
gether, “the book as a container or frame, comes to guarantee the integrity
of the isolario as an encyclopedic book of the world, as the heroic travel of an
individual humanistic (Buondelmonti) or courtly (Pigafetta) body in space
ceases to define the parameters of the book of islands genre,” where the
initial movement of the author (Buondelmonti), paralleled by that of the
reader, comes to disappear to leave the reader of the isolario, paradoxically
outside the book, as its only guarantor of narration and travel.74 Even if the
alternation of text and map continued to be used in the genre, the role the
insular model would play changed considerably from Buondelmonti’s first
assemblage to the last of isolarii. The combination of a literary enterprise
with a scientific one, prefigured in Buondelmonti, took over the thread of
the genre and, combined with new techniques, from print culture to wood-
cutting to rhumb lines, and with the revival of arts of memory, produced the
printed isolario. Already in the first printed isolario, published in Venice in
1485, Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti’s forty-nine maps were accompanied by a
particular recasting of the information provided in Buondelmonti. The maps
in Sonetti alternate, appropriately, with seventy-one sonnets, emphasizing
in a poetic genre what is visible in the cartographic representation: brevity,
enclosure, and miniaturization. Theodore J. Cachey argues that this transi-
tion to print is the “key moment in the history of the ‘book of islands’ genre,
between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centur-
ies.”75 Benedetto Bordone completed his manuscript in 1524 and published
his Libro di Benedetto Bordone nel qual si ragiona de tutte l’isole del mondo in
Venice in 1528. His is once again a tour of the Greek isles, which occupy a
symbolic center, but he then displaces this center to Venice, making of that
city the vantage point from which to gaze upon the world: “In Bordone, the
‘fiction’ of the book of ‘all’ the islands of the world and the fiction of some
kind of objectivity and encyclopedic totality is belied by the disequilibrium
in the proportions of the book which is heavily centered in the Mediterranean
 Islands and Maps 61

and within the Mediterranean is heavily anchored by the classical islands

of the archipelago originally described and mapped by Buondelmonti.”76
From this privileged standpoint, Bordone then multiplies the “centers,” in
an insular production that seems to spin out from West to East, from Mexico
to Venice as a series of archipelagoes. This proliferation and multiplication
is a sign of the changing role of the island in isolarii, from geography to meta-
phor, of its increasing capacity for expansion.
Venetian mapmakers thus initiated a genre that would have a profound
influence in Western culture still largely to be assessed outside the history of
cartography. Through Bordone and Sonetti, Tom Conley analyzes the influ-
ence of the isolario as genre in Rabelais and Thévet,77 and Lestringant traces
the changes through the writings of Thévet himself, from the Cosmographie
universelle to the unfinished Grand Insulaire et pilotage, where he finds it to
be a strategy, a structure, “a laboratory enlarged to the dimensions of geog-
raphy.”78 By emphasizing the island’s microcosmic quality, these printed
isolarii returned to the idea of an encyclopedia through the presentation of
a “specimen,” thus giving a new function to the genre’s initial drive. Its con-
tents seem to strive for an idea of totality that had, in its world-map version,
been rendered impossible by Columbus’s travels.79
The encyclopedic approach of the isolario after Buondelmonti, however,
is not the same as that of medieval mappaemundi. The isolario is an atlas
composed exclusively of islands. It is as atlas, then, that the drive for totaliza-
tion of the isolario must be understood. The atlas is “a device that can recon-
cile the desire for an overview and for detail,” writes Jacob: “The multiplicity
of maps turns it into a site in which all the geographical knowledge of a
period may be recorded. . . . It offers a symbolic mastery of space.”80 The
Liber circulated widely, and served as a model for future isolarii but also
influenced a variety of genres, one of them the atlas, in particular the pro-
duction of nautical atlases out of Venice. Tolias, in his overview of the genre,
writes that for the period between 1528 and 1571—precisely when the vogue
of books of chivalry would take hold of readers’ imaginations—there is only
one manuscript isolario known, the nautical work by the Catalan cosmogra-
pher Alonso de Santa Cruz, “clearly intended as a practical guide to navi-
gation. . . . In spite of its title . . . the Catalan cosmographer’s guide to the
islands covers much more territory than an ordinary isolario: for all intents
62 Islands and Maps

and purposes it is an early world atlas. Although islands account for most
of the material, there are also maps of most of the known parts of the old
and new worlds.”81 That is, Santa Cruz extends the structuring principle of
the isolario metaphorically to include all territories subject to that gaze that
the island elicits, beyond a strict geographical definition.82 The atlas, one
could claim, is but the extended metaphor of the isolario, sharing with it
three essential traits: its dependence on print culture for the development of
the genre; the betrayal of a fear of omissions that might jeopardize the total-
izing effect of the work; and the insufficiency of the image, which led to the
interaction of the map with the description of the map: a text, a narration.
After Bordone, the isolario chose between worldviews and regional car-
tography, between a small group and a selected few, fragmenting the thread
of the voyage, that is, the oneness of the single traveler, in a series of random
organizing principles. Leandro Alberti’s Isole appartenenti alla Italia (Venice,
1567), Tommaso Porcacchi’s L’Isole più famose del mondo (1572), Boschini’s
L’Arcipelago (1658), Vicenzo Coronelli’s Isolario dell’Atlante Veneto (1696)—
the last of the isolarii—all respond to different, unrelated principles: to Italy,
fame, and cultural prestige.83 Cachey compares Antonio Pigafetta’s Isolario
of 1534, in the tradition of Buondelmonti—that is, articulated by an “order
of travel”—to Bordone’s, which has an “order of sequence,” which sought
“to make accessible to his readers, as they turned pages of his book, the illu-
sion of the recovery of an edenic state of a direct knowledge of the archi-
pelago of the world.”84 In Thévet, the isolario has detached the text from the
context, the island from the map: “In the Insulaire, an atlas of islands, no
continuous voyage can be envisaged. Or, more exactly, Thévet breaks up the
continuity of real navigations; he retains only its ‘punctuation,’ these insular
stages that he disseminates along the thread of the chapters of his world.
Segmentation and ellipsis are clearly the ruling principles.”85 Such detach-
ment and fragmentation of any continuity between islands, and between
map and text, results in a revelatory different emphasis. Conley writes, “over
and over again, Thévet underscores how much the discovery of strange
object, flora, fauna or myths pertains to ‘singularity.’” In the process, the
isolario is questioned as a possible genre to represent the world. In Thévet’s
La Cosmographie universelle, the book is presented as “mythic continent and
island-world of worlds,” so that the image of the mappamundi, which seemed
 Islands and Maps 63

to haunt the isolario, returns in a typography that Conley analyzes in detail:

“The printer ends La Cosmographie universelle in a conventional typographic
flourish, in a cul-de-lampe design that leads the margins of the text toward a
verbal vanishing point. A last island off the coast of China, Quinsay, is being
described before the text comes to an arbitrary end.”86 This whimsical point
of arrival is the ocean, l’Océan.
As happened with the book of chivalry and the emergence of the novel,
“the appearance of the first world atlases toward the end of the sixteenth
century did not spell the end of the isolarii: in fact they enjoyed a second
heyday in the seventeenth century, in spite of the dominance of atlases.” The
reason for this was that isolarii had never competed with formal geography
and cartography. The information that isolarii contained (except those that
had specific practical intentions, as Santa Cruz’s) was not directed at a par-
ticular audience or a specialized reader, but for the common person “eager
for geographical facts and fascinated by tales of adventure and descriptions
of marvels and wonders.” Furthermore, early printed atlases incorporated
features from isolarii, in a further parallel with the relation, which I shall
detail in later chapters, between book of chivalry and the novel.87
The best known of early modern atlases, Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis ter-
rarum (1570), exemplifies the continued relation between text and map, a
structure or strategy explored by all geographical writing from antiquity
onward. Particularly attractive to the armchair traveler, the atlas combined
the security of staying home with the excitement of travel and adventure,
and, of no less importance, the knowledge obtained in the process. Reading
the map is traveling, thus promising adventure. “It is a novel, somewhere
between a travel narrative and a role-playing exercise,” writes Jacob, while
at the same time he underlines the link between the experience of the con-
struction of the novel and the development of cartography: “The metaphor
that Ortelius extended suggests a relationship between the atlas and the
development of travel in the Renaissance, from literary accounts by travelers
(Montaigne) to fantastic travel narratives (Rabelais). If Ortelius justifies his
undertaking through the utility of maps for reading by historians, he does
not neglect the pleasures of imaginary travel.”88 The changes from isolario
to atlas indeed manifest the changing relations between image and language
that informed the development of new genres. As Conley writes,
64 Islands and Maps

In their evolution toward a predominately pictorial form, atlases tend to

jettison their textual baggage. Verbal decoration is reduced, set on verso pages,
or suppressed. Like the repressed, the verbiage that flows from the cornucopia
of cosmography does not simply evaporate. It returns in different forms. One
of these, of course, is the encyclopedia, which will channel information
according to artificial organizational schemes. . . . A second is the novel of
travel, which uses the servility of the isolario to assemble discreet episodic
units that are studied from multiple points of view.89

Encyclopedia and travelogue, knowledge and experience, bound in the iso-

lario, take different paths in their separation, pointing to different possibili-
ties in narration, such as historiography and fiction, and to a spectrum of
pictorial presentations (Figure 11).

Theses on Isles
Traversing the Mediterranean would not be seen as a pleasure trip until well
into the nineteenth century, when the steamship made the journey between
Marseille and Piraeus a surprisingly brief nine-day adventure. Adventure—
with all its promises of danger, heroism, and overcoming—characterized
that immense sea, the sea of sails left to the mercy of winds, the sea of
boats that took two months to go from Gibraltar to Istanbul and at least
a week or two to go from Marseille to Algiers.90 The measure of the world
is, indeed, not only determined by technology, but is at once result and
cause of a specific spatial imaginary. Thus, Braudel advises that, when look-
ing at Arabic insularities, Western cartographic fantasies, or Greek island-
hopping books,

The historian must detach, whatever the cost, from this image that makes a
lake of the actual Mediterranean. Dealing with surfaces, we must not forget
that Augustus and Anthony’s Mediterranean, or that of the Crusades or even
that of Philip the Second’s fleets is a hundred, a thousand times larger than
those revealed by our trips across the air or maritime space of today. To speak
of the Mediterranean of history is, thus—a first care and constant worry—to
give it its true dimension, to imagine it in an oversized dress. By itself it used
to be a universe, a planet.91
Figure 11. The ancient city of Abydos. Christophoro Buondelmonti, Liber insularum
archipelagi, MS 18246, folio 51v. Copyright Biblioteca Nacional de España.
66 Islands and Maps

The Mediterranean was a world imagined and depicted in maps that con-
veyed a specifically produced space. The production of this space, as we
have seen, corresponds to an amalgam of discourses on space that traverse
that sea. Between the waves, the islands that dot these waters proved to be
especially sensitive to the production of fictions.
Maps, and fictive maps in particular, or maps with fictive elements, are elo-
quent about the perception and use of insularity in the late Middle Ages and
the early modern world. As Jacob writes, “in the typology of fictive maps,
island maps occupy a privileged place. While landscape maps are given to a
bird’s-eye or a profile view, the island is a space suited par excellence to ver-
tical, cartographical viewing.”92 Relying on the “closed” quality of the island,
read as autonomy, the island map immediately calls on a verisimilitude that
places it in the realm of the possible, even the likely. It is the minimal carto-
graphic unity, providing the viewer or reader with all possibilities in a con-
centrated fashion. To look upon the map of an island is to conquer a point
of view that is totalizing, comprehensive, and simple at the same time.
The impossibility of verifying in situ every detail of the map, let alone the
islands themselves, is what left the debate of their reality very much up to the
limits of a library that confirmed or denied their existence. The verification
of a map was, until very recently, in the absence of images from space, the
verification of geography with a fiction: the map. This verification depends
on a social convention that precedes the production of the image—the
map—articulated mainly in a series of texts, of narrations. We have already
established the dependence between maps and texts and their claims—or
absence of them—to a “reality.” Fictive maps and the texts on which they
depend share all these characteristics.
The isolario in particular bore an impact on writing that resulted in the
“reshuffling of the taxonomies that order knowledge in the age of humanism.”
The cartographic move “from an inherited concept of a world mirror,” to one
of “subjective singularities,” fathomed in part by every individual’s experience
of the world, as Tom Conley writes, is a change that can be traced in a par-
allel way in the development of romance into book of chivalry and into novel:
“The way that cosmography fails to explain the world gives rise to a produc-
tive fragmentation that momentarily allows various shapes of difference to be
registered without yet being appropriated or allegorized,” as contemporary
 Islands and Maps 67

developments in sentimental fiction or the picaresque novel would do.93 The

structure of the isolario itself, in its new fragmented yet totalizing effect stands
in close relation to the development of the structure of the modern novel.
Key to our study of the relation between insularity and fiction is Jacob’s
intuition that cartography can be defined more clearly as an effect of veri-
similitude, backed by authoritative techniques and the power of represen-
tation as a form of mimesis.94 The concept of verisimilitude emphasizes
the crossroads where literature and cartography meet. On the one hand, the
mapped or narrated island is the space of possibility, of likelihood; on the
other hand, it is a historically produced space.
A series of abstractions govern the insular imaginary up to the moment
when the Spanish book of chivalry comes into being. This set of paradigms,
which can still be seen at work in today’s island imaginary, can be enumer-
ated as follows:

1. Otherness. The island, whether near or far, is the representation of a beyond

that houses rupture, strangeness, and difference.95
2. Monstrosity. Related to otherness and to the sacred, to the other world and
sometimes to femininity (through procreation), as a figure of the marvelous or
of evil, increasingly as a figure for politics, monsters seem to favor islands as a
habitat, from classical imaginations to fictions of our day.96
3. Lost islands. Beginning with Plato in the Critias and the Timaeus in the island
of Atlantis, this idea was again taken up and emphasized in various degrees
throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, sometimes coupled and even
confused with other motifs, such as the receding or mobile island.
4. Supernatural. The dependence of the supernatural on a marginal space, or on a
borderline space, is what determines its relationship to insularity. Giants and
fairies are supernatural beings that usually inhabit islands, while islands are
also particularly sensitive to enchantments.97
5. Otherworldliness. This refers to the afterlife, as exemplified in a way by the
Arthurian Avalon, which through its subjection to the authority of fairies,
points at an afterlife that, in Celtic culture, is characterized by femininity. This
can be further emphasized through the Island of the Golden Apples (Insula
pomorum) of the Vita Merlini, and the Ínsulas Dotadas episode of the Çifar, to
cite examples from a general chivalric imaginary.98
68 Islands and Maps

6. Sacredness. Partaking of many characteristics, the medieval island inherits the

concept of illustrious births on islands in Antiquity: Zeus is born on Crete,
Hera on Samos, Hermes in Arcadia, in the center of the island of Pélops,
Apollo on Delos.99
7. Femininity. Emphasized through the common image of the island of the
Amazons, present in a great variety of texts, from Alexander texts to books of
chivalry to catalogues of mirabilia, such as the Liber de monstrosis hominibus
Orientis. Inherent to this feminization is the concept of desire, equating the
desire to disembark upon an island with the desire to possess a woman. The
coupling of eroticism and femininity give way, predictably, to a satanization of
the island, making it a figure of evil, for which the best-known examples are
Ogygia and Circe’s island in the Odyssey.100
8. Refuge. Related to motherhood through the idea of femininity, the island as
refuge is opposed to the ocean. It is a safeguard against drowning, but it is
also a place of uncertainty. In the Aeneid, it ciphers the uncertainty of the
future, as the island represents the moment where the hero does not yet
know his destiny.
9. Exile. Set at a distance, the island is, in ancient Rome, above all the place of
exile, for those banned from humanity. Pandataria in the Tyrrhenian where
Julia, daughter of Augustus, and Agrippina, widow of Germanicus, were sent,
where Octavia was murdered. Pianosa, Corsica, and Rhodes were also spaces
that received all types of condemned men, from traitors to magicians to
political exiles.101 Also as an idea of exile, the island served as the “desert” for
the monastic practices of early Christianity, relating the idea of exile to one of
purification, sometimes through marvels and monstrosity, as in the case of
Saint Anthony, and ultimately, to sacredness.
10. Origin. Related to the classic notion of “center” (Delos) and mixed with
the Christian idea of Paradise, the island takes on the idea of “origin” or
“beginning.” Examples are to be found particularly in maps, where Paradise is
represented as an island.

All of these traits are emphasized differently in texts and images, which
configure series of relationships and reshuffle paradigms that characterize a
period. A series of principles that articulate the motif of the island can be
drawn from these characteristics, principles common to all uses of the island
 Islands and Maps 69

motif that illuminate, in their brevity, the instrumentality of the motif for a
spatial narrative:

• Marvelous. Invoking inhabitants of islands can best convey this: gods (in Greek
mythology), hermits, giants, the jinn of Islamic culture, monsters in general,
women, prophets, and magicians. These are all marginal figures or related to
marginality, thus making the marvelous their obvious way of expression.
• Miniaturization. As an object of knowledge, the island must be subjected to
observation, best performed when miniaturization and separation from
relations takes place: “The island gives in this sense the equivalent of an
intimate or concentrated panoptism,” writes Lestringant.102 As the ideal legible
space, the island provides a perfect site for images of the microcosm, often
complemented or supplemented by caves or grottoes that were in any case
contiguous in classical geographical writing. This principle is what Lestringant
emphasizes when categorizing the world-island, a heterogeneous place where
all variety is encompassed, harmoniously in the case of a utopia, contradictorily
in historical cases.103
• Hyper-consciousness of a limit. This is the principle that sets off the island,
both as a visual element in a map, signaled only by the tracing of its limit, or in a
text, set aside by the narration of a journey (successful or ending in shipwreck)
that leads to it. Either in complete isolation or in archipelago, where it
emphasizes unity in diversity, the encompassing, achievable limit of the island
distinguishes it from any other space.
• Reversibility.104 Paradise-utopia/hell-dystopia.105 Islands seem to be
particularly sensitive to reversibility, often presenting both sides within the
same text, the same presentation. But reversibility can also refer to a “function”
of insularity that can be illustrated through synecdoche. In the same manner
as this rhetorical figure, the island can be generalizing—gesturing toward
totality—or particularizing—gesturing toward singularity—and often, it can
do both at the same time, reversing its sign and transforming the meaning of
what is set upon it.
• Totalization. This principle relates it to the idea of the absolute, figured on the
island as a circle or a sphere: safe spaces, regular, perfect. It invokes the idea of
the encyclopedia, of the world as island encircled by the ocean, of the
possibility of encompassing everything by looking at the mappamundi and
70 Islands and Maps

encountering Christ’s gaze on the way. It points not only to the microcosm of
the singular island but also to the atlas structure of the isolario. It is also the
cartographic legends that, framed as if they were islands and scattered on a map
or a globe, occupy one space by explaining another, as pictorial metaphors.
• Inscription. “Islands, better than any other space, demonstrate most forcefully
what is at stake with toponymy in cartography. Island names are toponyms
associated with a form and a surface; they often constitute the only inscription
within the island shape. The island is a toponym linked to a form. It is also the
space par excellence that best lends itself to the pleasure of naming,”106 a
process best exemplified in the toponymy of the islands of the New World.107
Inscription may come to the island not only as a designation, but also in the
idea of authorship, where the cartographer draws his own name following a
shoreline but, most frequently, upon a new island or rock just off the coast or
well in the middle of the ocean.
• Singularity. This quality refers to the tendency to allocate one marvel, one
monster, one species to the enclosed space of the island, to the possibility of
cataloguing, of inventory, of taxonomy. Examples are catalogues of mirabilia,
both in texts and in cartography, such as the islands of demons in sixteenth
century portolans, the island of satyrs in the Indian Ocean or the Amazon
islands in Thévet’s Grand Insulaire, the island as a minimal unit for a repertoire,
what Lestringant calls the monogram-island.108 As “a minimal unit of
cartographic space,” the island in its very limitation “provides the guarantees
of a maximal legibility.”109
• Experience. Insularity is experimental in sets of oppositions, in binomes:
experiences of the object in the singular island, of the exuberant microcosm
contained in the world-island; experience of the catalogue in the multiplied
island: the archipelago. But it is also an experience of the subject in the sense
of a trial and in the sense of adventure.110 The subject who actively, through
traveling, seeks and is seized by the event that must then be narrated as
experience.

These paradigms and principles are not present of course in every

instance of insularity. But they are there as possibility. The presentation of
insularity as archipelago invites both an author of isolarii and of books of
chivalry to explore a variety of possibilities in relation. After Buondelmonti
and Montalvo, who articulate a model for this exploration, the genres will
 Islands and Maps 71

evolve and dissolve, either because of an overextended metaphorization, or

because of the ossification of a single-minded understanding of the mar-
velous island.
In the first assemblages of islands, many itineraries within and from the
archipelago are offered. Christoforo Buondelmonti includes a long descrip-
tion and a beautiful map of Constantinople in his isolario (Figure 12): “We
now arrive in the very unfortunate city of Constantinople. Even though it
does not form an island, we will not fail, being here, to consecrate it a few
lines so that the reader may get an idea of it.”111 Turner argues that one of
the most important changes in the manuscript tradition of the Liber is the
development of the drawing of Constantinople itself.112 This anchoring of
the isolario in the city of Constantinople is particularly curious, as it is
also a city that holds together the archipelago in dalli Sonetti’s (1485) and
Porcacchi’s (1572) isolarii. By then, however, a revealing substitution had
occurred, which documented a critical change for the Mediterranean: the
city that anchors dalli Sonetti’s isolario is no longer Constantinople, but
Venice. Bordone’s Venice-centered perspective endured, as expression not
only of a personal choice but as the obvious selection based on cultural,
political, and economic reasons. It was at this moment, precisely when
Venice had schemed and completed the sack of Constantinople, redistribut-
ing not only the material but also the imaginary contents of the most famous
city of the Middle Ages, that the Italian city figured itself as the urban ideal.113
Bartolommeo dalli Sonetti inaugurated a type of isolario, the nautical iso-
lario, which had multiple examples throughout the sixteenth century, in-
cluding Valentim Fernandes’s Portuguese isolario of 1506–10, connected to
imperial expansion by way of its focus on Atlantic islands. Pīrī Re´īs’s Kitāb-
i Bah.riyye (1521) is the most spectacular example of this genre, exhibiting
the deftness and seafaring knowledge in the Mediterranean of the Ottoman
court, a work that belongs to the isolario genre but that has strong generic
ties to navigation manuals, artes de navegar. After Sonetti and Re´īs, isolarii
were ostensible commercial artifacts, as Bordone’s. Porcacchi’s isolario will
develop yet another strand, forging the “topical isolario,” which, set against
the reformulation from book of chivalry into novel in Cervantes’s Don
Quixote, lends itself to further analysis. For while Cervantes will not be con-
sidered in direct relation to the developments of isolarii, but as a specular
Figure 12. Constantinople is part of the archipelago, both an island and a city depicted
in all its real, and fictional, wonder. Christophoro Buondelmonti, Liber insularum
archipelagi, MS 18246, folio 55v. Copyright Biblioteca Nacional de España.
 Islands and Maps 73

discourse, we should note here that his elaboration of the Amadisian insular
model is in consonance with elements elaborated by Porcacchi. As Tolias
writes, in Porcacchi the structural unity of space is ignored, fragmented in
order for history and ethnography to come to the fore. The island becomes
a pretext for the account of political situations, focused almost exclusively,
as the times called for, on the eastern Mediterranean.114 Other political
enterprises, other expansionist interests took the isolario in the other direc-
tion, to the West, encompassing the entire world in a return to the universal
isolario, which Coronelli produces three times within the thirteen-volume
Atlante Veneto. Coronelli presents his work as a supplement to Blaeu’s atlas,
explaining its organization: “the whole work is divided into islands, starting
with the four continents, which might be described as large islands, and
ending with islands so small that they do not deserve the name and are
called rocky islets” (Figure 13).115

Figure 13. Coronelli’s “L’Archipelago del Mexico” uses the metaphor of the
island/archipelago to catalogue all diversity of the world. Isolario dell’ Atlante Veneto.
Ayer Collection, 135 C8 1696, p. 163, vol. 2. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.
74 Islands and Maps

Isolarii thus respond to and articulate a complex economic and political

reality, even when parading their qualities of entertainment, adventure, and
fiction. As a city that articulates the genre, both as center of the publish-
ing industry and as content, Venice, real and unreal, as Braudel claims, is, of
course, a concrete and known land. But it is a land only as those banks of
mud and sand that in the lagoon barely emerge from the salt waters. To allow
that land to sustain Venice, a consolidation of that land with rocks and, even
more, with thousands and millions of tree trunks, of vertically assembled
oaks was necessary: “Venice rises over an engulfed forest,”116 writes Braudel,
ciphering thus the palimpsest production of spaces, a forest, an island, a city.
Such a coincidence of limits, of contents, of production, was not invisible to
earlier geographical writing: Hugh of Saint Victor had listed Venice as an
island off the Adriatic Sea in his Descriptio mappe mundi, and the Hereford
mappamundi represented it as island as well, anticipating a new relocation
of fiction.
 3
QW
A dv e n t ur e a n d
Archipel ago
Amadís de Gaula and the Insular Turn
“Good friend, our enemies are here.” And he said,
“Let us arm ourselves and go see them.”
—Amadís, Book I

F or the contemporary reader, Amadís’s positioning between Arthurian

romance and Cervantes’s Don Quixote is between a rock and a hard
place. The unquestionable allure of the first and the celebrated status of
the second have contributed to Amadís’s fading from the memory of readers,
who for the most part will have never heard of it. To the late medieval and
early modern audience, however, Amadís was very much a household name.
Amadís de Gaula is the first Castilian book of chivalry.1 Emerging in the
thirteenth century in the context of “molinismo,” that is, in the precarious
political situation that Queen María de Molina presided over, next to the
Libro del Caballero Çifar, the first chivalric romance in the peninsula, the
first medieval version of Amadís de Gaula adapted itself to a complex and
generous group of traditions and interests. It had at least one other medieval
version, of which there are some extant fragments, dated to 1420, kept at
the Bancroft Library in Berkeley (ms. UCB 125), known as the Trastámara
version.2 At the end of the fifteenth century Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo,
regent of the town of Medina del Campo, rewrote the story into four
books (out of the original three) added a fifth, titled Las sergas de Esplandián,
and gave them to the printing press. Adapted to the tastes and expectations
of a Renaissance audience, in the political atmosphere of the reign of Ferdi-
nand and Isabella, and tied to the development of print culture, Amadís

75
76 Adventure and Archipelago

inaugurated a literary and editorial genre with a success unparalleled by

any other in the period.3 Montalvo himself launched the genre’s develop-
ment through continuations that other authors took up, both in Spain and
elsewhere, for the book of chivalry was not only astoundingly successful in
Spain, but also in France—where François I sponsored the first translations
by Nicolas D’Herberay des Essarts—and the success was echoed in transla-
tions into English, German, Dutch, and even a Hebrew version published
in Constantinople in 1541, as well as in translation and inspiring original
works in Portuguese and Italian. By this success, the book of chivalry came
to substitute Arthurian romance in prestige and following, generating other
new genres associated with it, such as the Thrésors, collections of quotations
favored by courtiers throughout Europe. Among its famous readers Amadís
counted Ignacio de Loyola and Santa Teresa de Jesús, and among the many
who imitated him and his feats, whether privately or in ornate festivities,
were kings and queens of many a European country. That literary taste
indeed changed, favoring claims that already in the first French translations
were present, trying to dispute nationality, but especially cultural prestige
to the Spanish works in the context of imperial competition, cannot allow
the literary historian to forget Amadís’s crucial role in the development of
Western narrative fiction.
Developing well-known textual traditions, Amadís follows the paradigms
established by French Arthurian romance, and of the Trojan legends, if in
a lesser form, which had already entered the Iberian Peninsula by way of
translations of the Vulgate and post-Vulgate cycles, a tradition that initially
favored an attribution to a French original.4 Already in the beginning of
the twentieth century, Grace S. Williams, after a careful comparative study
of toponymy, nomenclature, and structure, concluded that Amadís mainly
followed the Lancelot and the Tristan, owing some of its traits to the Vulgate
Merlin and other Spanish materials such as the Gran conquista de Ultra-
mar, a source study that Lida de Malkiel supplemented with texts from the
Trojan legend.5 Spurred by these analyses, the geography of the Amadís
has been looked at from many perspectives, ranging from critics who have
tried to fix its places to a “reality,”6 to those who have declared its exis-
tence to be absolutely imaginary. E. B. Place, in a passage that one might take
to be a model for the rest of Amadisian geography, wrote that Gaula might
 Adventure and Archipelago 77

be considered “one more Arthurian place name conventionalized through

long use.”7
Critics have called attention to the treatment of space in the Amadís
as one of the ways in which the text drastically departs from the French
romance tradition. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce writes that, at the risk of being
obvious, as chivalric literature required the horse, the romance was bound
to land, and surprisingly the literature finds navigation merely supplemen-
tary.8 However, the intensity of maritime orientation that governs the geog-
raphy of Amadís from the third book on contradicts that assertion: this
orientation does not rely on Arthurian materials—Lancelot, Tristan, and
Merlin for the greater part—which have, for the first two books, marked
most of the routes of the Spanish romance through fantastic geographies.
In some way this maritime orientation can be traced to the Estoire, which
as we have seen laid out the seascapes, as it were, for future elaborations
in the genre, if Iberia in general preferred the elaboration of adventure in
other branches of the cycles rather than the religious themes of the Estoire.
Montalvo, as he rewrites and recasts Amadís, introduces glosses and moral-
izations to adapt the book to the new political and behavioral interests.
Especially from the third book onward, where Montalvo’s intervention is
increasingly visible, seascapes enter the story and substitute interior conti-
nental spaces. Two of the most emblematic episodes of his version, the battle
against the Endriago and the love penance on the Poor Rock, take place on
an island.9
In Amadís de Gaula the hero’s life opens with the motif of the aban-
donment of the newborn child to the waters, anticipating the maritime ten-
dency that will become evident as in the middle of the third book, islands
and littorals begin to clearly predominate over the mainland. While in books
I and II routes of communication and places of adventure are roads and
forests, florestas and springs (separately or in conjunction), Amadís’s depar-
ture for the Orient inaugurates the charting of a new space. This space will
be crossed by new routes, new means of transportation, new places of en-
counter and adventure.10 Ínsulas are given this name in the romance because
of the genre’s archaizing tendency, but islands in the Amadís are not a meta-
phor, they are so in a literal sense: a geography, a portion of land surrounded
by water. Individually, they serve different functions and perform different
78 Adventure and Archipelago

tasks within the whole of the narrative. Taken together as archipelago, they
constitute the radical novelty of the Spanish book of chivalry—as an inven-
tory of the marvelous, as an anchor with a chivalric reality in its political,
economic, and juridical dimensions, as a structure for the construction of
narrative fiction that prefigures the modern novel, and even as a spectrum
for thought on fiction itself in its relation to philosophy.
The Amadisian archipelago, “the vastest and most eloquent example of
this insular romanticism that appears in turn in legends and narrations of
travelers,”11 deploys a series of narrative strategies that, articulating a num-
ber of traditions, explore different uses of the sea and its islands in order
to present variation in the notion of adventure that have important struc-
tural consequences. The presence of islands as sites of adventure has been
noticed many times, and mostly interpreted as a group, at times dismissed as
being scantly and monotonously described. The islands are in fact hazily
individualized as geography except for the events that take place on them,
mirroring the equally repetitive settings of forests and florestas of the first
two books. This redundancy, while emphasizing the displacement of the
function and contents of the forest to insular spaces, also highlights the
ambiguity, the imprecision of a geography that may or may not be identi-
fied. As Cacho Blecua notes in his edition, “in no case can we analyze
them as a wish to propose a verifiable geography.”12 Thus, if Olschki writes
that although fantastic islands that from a variety of texts seem to predate
the Amadís—Ile Tournoyante, Isle Estranje, Iles Lointaines—are located in the
Ocean, in the West, that is, in the Atlantic, Amadís will travel to the East,
thus forcing those cardinal points, those margins of the map, to coincide
in his journey. The Amadisian archipelago brings the ambiguous marvels
of Western and Eastern insularities together within the known sea, into
the Mediterranean: it charts the unknown inside the everyday, making the
unverifiable—fiction—part of the known or the real.
Parallel to the displacement toward the sea as a setting for adventure,
Amadís continued a change in the meaning of chivalry, already present and
paradoxically ciphered in its spiritualization in the realm of ideas and its sec-
ularization in the reality of chivalry’s increasing absorption into state ad-
ministration. Simultaneously, new structures and narrative techniques were
needed to articulate the multiplicity of characters and spaces included in a
 Adventure and Archipelago 79

general narrative thread, and as romance developed, these techniques be-

came part and parcel of narrative advancement. This structural and techni-
cal problem is, crucially, a spatial one: the opposition between the space of
community and the space of individuality, the space of courtly love and that
of chivalric adventure. Critics have elaborated typologies of these spaces,
which might be matched with categorizations of the narrative into “events.”13
Silvia Lastra Paz’s structural analysis reveals the multilayered function of
space in the novel, and the numerous overlaps, ambiguities, and contradic-
tions that inform the use of space in Amadís.14 Two ideas proposed by Lastra
Paz are relevant to my analysis: First, that space constitutes a structure in the
book of chivalry—a structure I relate to the technique called interweav-
ing or interlacing; and second, that these spaces function through opposi-
tion, at times radical, but mostly through contradiction and ambiguities that
contain both extremes.15
In spatial terms, the repetitive structure of separation, confrontation,
recognition, and reconciliation, in Harry Sieber’s concise formulation, artic-
ulates two basic spaces, one represented by the court, the other by adven-
ture.16 The hero, in his civilizing mission, travels farther each time, accreting
the territories newly traversed to the romance’s geography, and recreating
an East/West opposition that culminates with the arrival of the hero in Con-
stantinople in book III.17 The motivation to move from court to the space of
adventure may be personal, prompted by a letter, a lady’s disdain, a rescue,
kidnapping, and so forth. But what configures space as structure is the
multiplicity of simultaneous spaces, which only becomes obvious when
more than one character is involved. That is, if we take some distance from
the hero’s adventures and take into account the many other characters tra-
versing the narrative, we can piece together what may be called a tapestry,
following James D. Fogelquist’s analysis of the relation between the second-
ary characters and the hero.18
For Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua, interweaving as a form of amplification
implies a distance from the compositional models of Arthurian narrative
and its folkloric roots. This critic argues for a “modernity” of the interwoven
romance precisely because of its taste for multiple plots. Interweaving, then,
would be a technique that allows new narrative models to come into being,
to give way to this preference.19
80 Adventure and Archipelago

Cacho Blecua cites two basic means of interweaving, one that formally
indicates a change in plot and one that does not.20 These marks aid the
author in suggesting the simultaneity of events, even when a precise time
sequence is not indicated or even remotely intended. The necessary rest
follows the intensity of the moment of adventure for the knights wounded
in battle, a pause that is the cue for interweaving. The formulation “dexa
la historia,” or “dexa aquí el cuento” (leaving the story aside), is common to
both historiography and book of chivalry, suggesting a common solution for
space–time problems in narrative contexts.21 Space, coupled with adven-
ture, functions thus as intrinsic to interweaving, standing at both ends of the
process, motivating it, serving as setting for it, or providing a meeting place
for the narrative threads at the end of a particular interweaving sequence.
As Montalvo perfects his narrative techniques, new solutions come forth
that include the narration of events remembered at the end of book IV, or
the radical solution of making the protagonist a narrator of his own story in
the Sergas.22
Once we have established that space is structural and key to the devel-
opment of narrative techniques in the book of chivalry, we can look at geog-
raphy proper. If the geographical domain of the Amadís is limited in the
first book to vague but known places (Brittany, Gaul, Scotland, and Great
Britain), in the second book the space of the romance is extended to new
spaces that will take on greater importance as the text advances: Ínsula
Firme, Peña Pobre, Ínsula de Mongaça, and so on.23 By the third book, there
is a great increase in the geographical reach of the romance, as it grad-
ually displaces events to the East, reaching its climax in Constantinople,
while the hero collects adventures in the kingdoms of Bohemia, the Ínsulas
de Romanía—with extraordinary intensity in the Ínsula del Diablo—and
Greece, to then, after Constantinople, make a hurried return to Great Britain.
Book III’s “amphibious destiny,” in Avalle-Arce’s words, marks a distance
from Amadís’s Arthurian models and makes way for new motifs that will
become models for the Spanish book of chivalry. The particularities of
sea travel become decisive: navigation and its dangers, the most important
among them being sea tempests, are key in the coming into being of adven-
tures from this point on. In this particular setting, a newly conceived archi-
pelago draws its silhouette.
 Adventure and Archipelago 81

The Amadisian archipelago is composed of rock formations and islands,

reminiscent of Coronelli’s definition of the islands that make up the world,
from continents to rocky islets. These “cliffs” or “rocks” (peñas), which
include the Peña de Galtares (I, 3),24 the Peña de la Doncella Encantadora
(IV), and the Rock of the Hermit or Peña Pobre, Poor Rock (II, 48), are dis-
tinguished from islands by their size. They are small, arid, and inhabited by
serpents; denote austerity in one case (the Poor Rock); and stage a mar-
velous marked by tragedy in the three others. The case for some peñas as
maritime spaces remains problematic, for in some cases it is not mentioned
that a boat needs to be taken to get there, and at other times in the text,
peñas, not singularized as a proper name, are just taken to be boulders, large
and small. Most often, though, these spaces specifically articulate traits sum-
marized in the previous chapter: the Poor Rock is described specifically as
a hermitage located far into the sea, on a rock so steep that boats can only
approach it in the summer, underlining navigational conditions; while the
Rock of the Charming Damsel requires six days of sea travel to be reached.
Ínsulas are legion throughout the romance, so I will only mention here
those that are individualized through a name: Ínsula Gravisanda (I, 41);
Ínsula No Fallada (II, 59; III, 68); Ínsula Dudada, after Ínsula Firme (II, Prol
and 63; 84 and 126 as the most important instances); Island of the Boiling
Lake, or Ínsula of Mongaça (II, 54); Ínsula Triste (III, 65); Ínsulas de las Lan-
das (III, 65); Ínsula Leónida (III, 68); Ínsulas de Romanía (III, 72); Ínsula del
Diablo, later Ínsula de Santa María (III, 73–74); Ínsula Gabasta (III, 74);
Ínsula Profunda (IV, 96 and 108); Ínsula Sagitaria (IV, 108); Ínsula Fuerte
(IV, 109); Ínsula del Infante (IV, 127); Ínsula de la Torre Bermeja (IV, 127);
Ínsulas Luengas (IV, 129); and Ínsula Liconia (IV, 132).25 Of a total of seven-
teen named islands in the four books, thirteen appear in the last two books.
The peñas and ínsulas of Amadís de Gaula make up an archipelago where
the whole spectrum of traditional, folkloric, scientific, and religious contents
ascribed to islands is represented. From the space of penitence and sanctity
inherited from historical monastic enclaves, to spaces of enchantment and
magic, exoticism, riches, and spices; places inhabited by monsters and
horrific beasts, home to giants, paradisiacal and thus utopian spaces, ciphers
of the foreign and the strange: these rocks and islands of the Amadisian
archipelago form an inventory of the marvelous. They are, in romance, what
82 Adventure and Archipelago

Bordone and later isolarii would compile in cartography: as an isolario of

all the islands in the world, the islands of Amadís constitute a catalogue of
the universe of fiction. As the site for adventure to take place, as the situation
of events through narrative, they thus present a theory of fiction.26
The marvelous takes on a series of meanings, often complementary and
simultaneous in their occurrence in the text. The most immediate of these
senses is the marvelous as the strange and ambiguous, as both weird and
as foreign. Amadís as a child is described in this manner, his early feats
are described in similar terms, and he identifies himself using the word in
both senses: “soy un caballero estraño”; “I am a stranger knight” (I, 13, 358;
136), implying his own foreignness, his unknown identity.27
The term “marvelous” is used in many other less spectacular or intrigu-
ing ways, where the strange may or may not be implied. One of these is as a
sign of quantity, of great numbers; often the concept is lexicalized in the
untranslatable adverbial locution as “a maravilla,” and related to this use, the
word serves as an intensifier with the same formulation, sometimes chang-
ing the noun for a passive conjugation of the verb maravillarse. The mean-
ing of “surprised” or “astonished” is represented by the verb maravillarse,
its recurrence so systematic that it alternates with a noun form meaning “a
thing to be admired.” Paradoxically, the element of wonder remains uninter-
pretable for most occurrences because of the sheer number of times the
word is used in this sense, rendering the supernatural natural.
Closer to what we might expect to be described in terms of the marvelous
are all sorts of magical things, such as those events related to Urganda la
Desconocida and Arcaláus el Encantador, often represented in the engrav-
ings, especially those of the French translation, where the events themselves
are sometimes labeled enchantments. At other times even the wondrous
effect of these events is subsumed under the marvelous presence of the
enchantress herself, as when Urganda produces a sword for Galaor from
a tree:

“You shall not give him that one [sword], but the one yonder that is hanging
in that tree, with which you will be happier.”
Then they all looked at the tree; they saw nothing. She began to laugh in
earnest, and said,
 Adventure and Archipelago 83

“By heaven, it has been there for all of ten years, and no one ever saw it who
passed by here and now everyone shall see it”
And again looking, they saw the sword hanging from a limb of the tree, and
it appeared very beautiful, and as fresh as though it had been placed there just
then, and the sheath very richly wrought of silk and gold. (I, 11, 339; 118)

The sword appears hanging as a fruit in the tree, highlighted by the author’s
description of the sword appearing “fresh,” as a fruit would, contrasting the
natural and the marvelous worlds.28 By contrast, the magic of evil enchanter
Arcaláus is tinged with treason and artifice. Even the architectonic marvel
that is his palace is a trick, where the marvelous acquires negative undertones.
While some other buildings in book I provoke wonder without suspicion, as
the castle of the Peña de Galtares, Arcaláus’s palace itself is an architectonic
marvel that anticipates the development of the theme of marvelous architec-
ture that will take on great importance from the second book on.29
The introduction to chapter 41 of the Ínsula Gravisanda and the marvel-
ous events that take place in it—the battle and scene of recognition between
Amadís’s two brothers, Galaor and Florestán—is the result of a series of de-
velopments of insular space.30 Even if islands and coastal spaces only begin
to predominate in the third book, seascapes are present from the beginning
of the romance, such as in this crucial scene. The most memorable of these
irruptions is a structural, characterizing moment: Amadís’s abandonment to
the sea at birth, which gives him his name, from the moment of his rescue by
Gandales to his recognition as the son of the king and queen of Gaula, with
the name of Donzel del Mar, Child of the Sea. But the presence of the sea
does not mark only the protagonist. All the main characters, notably Oriana
and Amadís’s two brothers, Galaor and Florestán, have a particular relation
to the sea. Oriana is daughter of Brisena, “the most beautiful maiden to be
found in all the islands of the sea” (I, 3, 268; 54), and is introduced in the
text in chapter 4 of the first book when her parents, seeing that she is seasick,
agree to leave their daughter with King Languines of Scotland, under whose
queen the Donzel del Mar serves. Galaor, for his part, being two and a half
years old, visits his father the king in a village by the sea called Banguil.
There Gandalás, a kind giant lord of an island, kidnaps Galaor to fulfill the
prophecy that told the giant the child would recover the Peña de Galtares for
84 Adventure and Archipelago

him. Galaor will live on the giant’s island raised by a hermit until he reaches
a knightly age and fulfills Urganda’s prophecy. The third brother of Amadís
is introduced as Florestán, the lover of Corisanda, lady of the Ínsula de Grav-
isonda, in the next-to-last chapter of the first book that has been discussed
above. Amadís and his lineage are thus marked by the sea and insularity.
Islands and seascapes are referenced throughout Amadís de Gaula, through
coastal itineraries and navigational remarks on sails, anchors, weather con-
ditions, rivers, ports, ships, and harbors. The narrative stresses the change-
able conditions of the sea, and the hero’s self-definition links the sea to
adventure: “que yo fue hallado en la mar por gran aventura”; “for by extra-
ordinary chance I was found at sea” (I, 10, 327; 108). But most revealing
is how this insular imaginary is lexicalized in expressions that make todas las
ínsulas del mar, “all the islands of the sea”—an archipelago—into a figure for
the world that recalls Alonso de Santa Cruz’s Islario de todas las islas del
mundo. In this vast and complex archipelago, I will emphasize three islands,
as they seem to present models or paradigms for the narration of fiction: the
Ínsula Firme (Firm Island), the Ínsula del Diablo (Island of the Devil), and
the Ínsula No Fallada (Not Found Island), signaling various other places
of the archipelago of the book of chivalry that reenact or reformulate these
paradigms.

Ínsula Firme
The second book of Amadís begins with a justification for an excursus on
the Ínsula Firme, or Firm Island, which argues that while this space is partic-
ularly important for events of the fourth book, it is pertinent to read about
it at this particular moment of the narrative. This introduction is an obvi-
ous sign of Montalvo’s intervention to expand and rewrite his own interests
into the book. In fact, the immediate crucial events that take place on this
island in the second, and not in the fourth book, undermine Montalvo’s
first assertions.31
There are several studies devoted to the Ínsula Firme, either on the gen-
eral events that take place there or more specifically to the buildings, and
general criticism on the Amadís must address it. A frequent approach to
the Ínsula Firme has been to see it as a “center.” Maier sees in London (by
which he apparently means Lisuarte’s traveling court) and the Ínsula Firme
 Adventure and Archipelago 85

“symbols of the values which each character represents,” that is, symbols
of Lisuarte and Amadís, respectively. Following a folkloric approach, this
interpretation has dominated as a method for reading Amadís and still con-
ditions studies on the book of chivalry.32 Centered on the main hero, studies
tend to view space in the Amadís only as a sign of something else, as “sym-
bol,” or mirror of the character. Here, without overlooking the moral val-
ues that these episodes articulate in the configuration of chivalry, I want to
emphasize a spatiality that can be further analyzed in terms of a political
utopia and a reflection on law that has numerous parallels in contemporary
debates on nobility and chivalry.
A few lines into the prologue we are told that once there was a king of
Greece, married to a sister of the emperor of Constantinople. The first of
their two sons, Apolidón, is described as having strength of both body and
mind and of having dominated with his “subtle wit” the “sciences of all
the arts,” necromancy in particular. When the king of Greece must choose
a successor, he divides his estate between the two brothers: the first-born
will have the kingdom, the second shall have the treasure and books. After
the younger brother complains, Apolidón generously gives up the kingdom
and takes riches and library into a boat, having such favorable winds that
he arrives by chance in the Roman Empire in no time (II, Prol, 658; 420). In
Rome he falls in love with the emperor’s sister, Grimanesa, and together
they take to sea, arriving on the Ínsula Firme, ruled by a fierce giant (II, Prol,
659; 420). Apolidón fights and kills the giant, becoming lord of the island,
where he and Grimanesa live for sixteen years, yielding to their mortal de-
sires and building rich edifices with their treasure and knowledge.
The story merits close attention. We have moved westward from Con-
stantinople to Greece to Rome and then, presumably still further west, to
the Ínsula Firme. With the union of Grimanesa and Apolidón, the author has
linked two empires, Constantinople and Rome, and the kingdom of Greece
(later called an empire), with its political and cultural prestige, to the Ínsula
Firme, and has given this union a realm of its own. This ínsula, previously
ruled by a brave, cruel giant, is won over by Apolidón, marking a change
in “sign” of the island that is eminently political, and which will be reenacted
by our hero later on. The story goes on to tell us that after sixteen years, his
grandfather dies without an heir, and Apolidón is summoned to occupy the
86 Adventure and Archipelago

throne. Before their departure, they arrange for a series of enchantments to

guard the island and commemorate their love.
The entrance to the island is said to be by way of the castle. Castle and
island are made synonymous, referring either to the castle as guarding the
entrance-bridge to the island or to the castle located on the bay that looks
to the continent.33 But toponymy has other functions in the book of chiv-
alry. Like Apolidón, Amadís is characterized by the steadfastness of his love.
The trials in which he triumphs proclaim what knights around him who
inhabit the island feel toward him as well, characterizing him as a leader
who elicits loyalty from his companions and subjects: “And all were very
firm in their affection for Amadís and determined to follow him in every-
thing that he might will to do” (II, 63, 915; 658). Such harmony or “con-
cordia,” on the other hand, has been interpreted as an element revealing
the idealized or paradisiacal characterization of the Ínsula Firme.
Maier uses Hesiod’s Works and Days to look at these aspects of the Ínsula
Firme. He traces the Golden Age concept, linked in Hesiod to the Isles of the
Blessed, to Amadís through Juan del Encina’s translation of Virgil in his 1496
Cancionero, to the Ínsula Firme episodes of the Amadís de Gaula. According
to Maier, a contemporary reader of the Ínsula Firme episode would have
been reminded of Paradise through “the wished-for return to an age of
stability and justice,” linking it to the reign of the Catholic kings, in a politi-
cal reading not taken further by Maier.34 Maier specifically considers the
description of the garden in the Ínsula Firme as a paradise on earth, a locus
amoenus, qualifying it as a mere rhetorical exercise that would have linked
it to the paradisiacal tradition. This imagery is subsumed under a general
“Golden Age concept” that permeates the entire work.35 In this interpreta-
tion, the space of the island is made to signify a time, a period, and an age,
and any meaning tied to its geography or more loosely spatial significance is
subordinated or dismissed. Closely read, moreover, the idea of the Golden
Age in the Amadís is in fact not articulated in the Ínsula Firme episodes them-
selves, but through a scattered authorial gloss vaguely linked by Maier to
these episodes. Thus, even if the theme of the return of a Golden Age is a
constant in Iberian literatures of the latter half of the fifteenth century, this
“moral renaissance of the body politic” is figured in Amadís through the
narrator/author but not specifically referred through the production of the
 Adventure and Archipelago 87

space of the Ínsula Firme. As the place of reunion of these knights who
defend the weak from the strong or proud, Maier claims that it emulates
Hesiod’s Island of the Heroes, in that the abundance and productivity of the
place is a sort of reward for a chosen race.36 However, Hesiod’s semidivine
beings hold exclusive rights to the space, while in Amadís it is only en-
chanted spaces, such as the garden beyond the Arch of Loyal Lovers and the
buildings in it, that are reserved for the select few knights and ladies who
are able to pass the tests. The rest of the island, as when it was ruled by the
giant before Apolidón’s arrival, was and is inhabited not by knights and
ladies, but by common people. Amadís is to rule over them now, a people
who, during the time they awaited the most perfect of knights, were gov-
erned by Isanjo, who in fact keeps this title under Amadís’s supervision.
In pursuit of a political reading, Harney analyzes these episodes as will-
fully ahistorical, as the expression of a desire not to revolutionize the system
that renders the institution of chivalry useless, but to become integrated into
it. Thus, he reads the enchantments as “designed to fill the leisure character-
istic of the noble habitus,” while the abundance of fauna ensures hunting
privileges associated with this class: “Firm Isle, like Eden, is a self-sufficient,
enclosed environment, where economic necessity is supplied” in the form
of jewels and treasure, which can satisfy everyone’s needs.37 This utopian
place is not only a place where people are happy, but also where strict strat-
ification is accepted and works to the taste and benefit of the knights, and
where labor is ultimately taken for granted in the face of the knights’ obvi-
ous superiority. Happiness, in the end, is not premised—or not solely—on
the supply of food and water, on the isle’s good weather, or even on endless
riches, but on the possibility of locking out the threat to these struggling
lesser nobles to stand their ground in a crumbling system. Their happiness,
their utopia, lies in the locking out of history: “Forgotten are those things
that impede household formation in real life: closed marriage market, money
economy, bourgeois interests, fractious peasantry.”38
This willful forgetfulness, this obliteration of historical political condi-
tions that render the integration of the institution of chivalry into the estab-
lishment possible—an establishment that is crumbling down—makes the
book of chivalry utopian in general: “It permits the trial—above all the exile
or estrangement affording the pretext for a glorious second chance—that
88 Adventure and Archipelago

proves the worthiness of the protagonist. Looking at the chivalric narrative

as an amusement park, each adventure, each geographical locale, is a ride or
attraction that leads the reader (visitor) to the grand finale—the ride of all
rides, the pièce de résistance—represented by marriage and living happily
ever after.”39 In this analogy with Louis Marin’s analysis of Disneyland,
the role of the Ínsula Firme—as part of “the route of adventure”—becomes
clear: it is the concentration of that utopian possibility that the romance
offers its readers. In this sense, Harney reverses Marin’s analysis in terms of
chivalric romance: “we may . . . describe readings by the audiences of chival-
ric romance as vicarious itinerations within the utopic space defined by the
narratives.”40 We can extrapolate Harney’s reading of the Ínsula Firme to the
entire archipelago of Amadís, where reading the book would be just this kind
of wishful journeying through a no longer existing political world.
Taking in the entire spectrum of island possibilities that the Amadís pro-
poses, the Amadisian archipelago moves between the two opposing interpre-
tations I have just summarized: one that sees chivalry as a call for a link with
reality (Maier) and one that sees chivalry as utopian wish (Harney). These
interpretations are possible and valid because they are supported by the
historical contradictions between chivalric ideology and the institution of
chivalry itself, contradictions that fueled the intense debates on chivalry
throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The period of expansion
of chivalry, between 1390 and 1492, is preceded by a period of definition
(1250–1350) and one of restriction (1330–1407), in Rodríguez Velasco’s
assessment.41 The first is represented by Alfonso X’s legal discussion in Par-
tidas (XXI, II) and Don Juan Manuel’s corrections to the Alfonsine idea of
chivalry, in which the secularism that Alfonso had stressed in order to give
chivalry a political dimension is revised and Christianized. Both figures rep-
resent a theoretical stage in the development of chivalry in Castile, as the insti-
tution of chivalry has no real systematic existence at this time. Rodríguez
Velasco summarizes this “theory” in a series of propositions that are assumed
or loosely laid out in the period itself: (1) chivalry is a company of noble
men; (2) its highest virtue is prudence (which Alfonso calls sanity); (3) the
lineage of these men is essential to their consideration in the institution,
which identifies chivalry with nobility; (4) the origin of chivalry is essentially
real and its character secular; (5) bearing the chivalric title is so important
 Adventure and Archipelago 89

that not even the king himself may arm knights if he is not one himself; (6)
the king is head of knights and he is tied to them in nobility through the
shared chivalric title; (7) intellectual formation is indispensable for the
knight, and it is provided through three kinds of text, hierarchically orga-
nized, from best to worst, as follows: historiography, oral narratives of chiv-
alric deeds, and epic. The second period is represented by Alfonso X and his
Orden de la banda (Order of the band or of the scarf), the introduction and
dissemination of Egidius Romanus, and the work of Pero López de Ayala.
During this period, knights begin to participate in state administration, and
they dispute official posts to professional letrados or clerks (which calls into
question, for Spain at least, Fuchs’s remarks on the contradiction within
chivalric romance triggered by the presentation of chivalric values by a
clerkly author, for chivalric romance and chivalric institutions are, in fact,
written and legislated by knights in Spain).42 Knighthood gradually begins
to be consciously seen as a political exercise ruled by prudentia, or discre-
tion. Thus, the old chivalric virtue of fortitudo, strength, is driven out of
chivalric ideology. From the invention of the institution of chivalry to its
expansion in the fifteenth century, the existence of the knight as a specialist
is regularly called into question, even during Alfonso XI’s attempts to con-
stitute his court in a center for knights and princes, which would serve as a
symbol of political power. Chivalry, and the diverse interests that surround
it, would work to adapt it. During the last period, two polemics, one con-
cerning nobility and the other the model of knighthood, characterize the
debate. While the fifteenth century is the period of maximum success for
chivalric ideology, this same success casts a shadow that covers or overtly
contradicts the decadence of institutional chivalry and a general disenchant-
ment with chivalric values.43
Two factors—the gap between the desire for knighthood as an institu-
tional reality and the historical conditions that split the idea of knight-
hood into the separate routes of nobility and state administration—account
for the paradox of utopian and historically “symbolic” representations of
chivalry in literature. Several traits of the book of chivalry itself support
the ambivalent relationship with history found in the Amadís. Fogelquist
argues that the greatest change introduced by Montalvo, distancing the
romance from its Arthurian predecessor, is the fact that lovers do not fear
90 Adventure and Archipelago

the consequences of adultery, but live “under a sense of honor and justice of
the woman’s father.”44 Sieber suggests that a changing taste in the reading
public accounts not only for the success of the book of chivalry, but also
for its fall from grace: “In the very shadow of the romance, new literary
tastes emerged and were satisfied by a new literature of immediacy. . . . The
new fiction was set not in a remote land and the distant past but in con-
temporary urban centers—Seville, Toledo, Madrid—with recognizable geo-
graphical landmarks and street names,”45 such as the picaresque novel, and
the military prowess displayed in books of chivalry was also displaced by
new technologies. This change, already reflected in Amadís in the change
from individual to collective battles, also effects a change in chivalry’s rela-
tion to and its effects on society. The old institution’s perceived lack of legit-
imacy brings first a crisis and then a new social order. Ultimately, a general
disenchantment would cancel both, the historically symbolic possibility
and the utopian one.
If ideology is the “representation of the imaginary correlation between
individuals and their real conditions of existence,” as Louis Marin argues,
then utopia is an “ideological locale,” a place in ideology, a “theatrical set-
ting” where ideology is put to the test. Marin’s definition of Disneyland as
“ideology in the form of a myth” helps Harney discuss utopia in chivalric
texts: “The utopia of chivalric romances . . . encompasses not one central
locale, such as Çifar’s Fortunate Isles or Amadís’s Firm Isle nor the Near East
and North Africa of the Catalan romances. It is, rather, the unbounded nar-
rative space of notional topography, taken as a whole, which is utopic. The
romances provide a mythogenetic playground for wish fulfillment—i.e., for
an ideological resolution, on various levels, of the contradictions inherent in
the habitus defended and justified by the fantasy.”46 In not so many words,
Harney presents through this concept what I suggest is the archipelago’s most
interesting function: to “isolate” upon individual spaces types of adventure
that address one or another aspect of these contradictions, while providing
as a whole a set of possibilities to rearrange a wish or need.
Utopia is defined, however, not only by what it promises, but also by
what is not here in the present, what lies outside it, beyond its limits. In this
sense, it is not the pleasures offered by the space but the possibility of re-
turn, of a second chance that characterizes the chivalric utopia.47 This is just
 Adventure and Archipelago 91

what Utopus’s literal ditching of the continent did for Thomas More: it
established a distance and a difference. The active embodiment in a space,
or in a persona of otherness, the setting of a limit that makes it an indepen-
dent, isolated other is what constitutes utopia.
For Maier, the idealized realm of the Ínsula Firme is a temporal one,
referred to in the past, and characterized by the respect, love, and loyalty of
Amadís toward the king, Lisuarte, leaving other questions, such as economy,
to the side.48 For Harney, the utopian representation is motivated histori-
cally by the desire of lower nobility to gain prestige in a society characterized
by the values of epic. The result is an economy that emulates that which
is represented in epic itself: booty, the products of territories conquered.
Harney terms this activity “economic predation”: “wealth in the romances
is gained through various modes of predatory appropriation, then used not
to create additional wealth, but to reward, to motivate, to secure networks.
The economy of the romances is, then, obstinately redistributive, in disre-
gard of the contemporary monetary economy faintly reflected in the texts.”49
Perhaps the fact that the economy implied by books of chivalry is not an
exclusively monetary economy is what Sancho questions and Don Quixote
finds puzzling, as Harney has suggested. Books of chivalry display a nostal-
gic tendency to represent a pre- or antimonetary economy in consonance
with the long tradition that sees commerce and the amassing of wealth as
not only sinful but also or otherwise vulgar. Privileged social status has
never gone hand in hand with labor and engagement in trade, here empha-
sizing a transformation of the knightly into the courtly, aristocratic figure, a
process ironically portrayed as well in Lazarillo de Tormes, the picaresque
novel that inaugurates the most modern of genres.50 This is precisely why
Amadís’s Ínsula Firme is characterized as a paradise of wealth and abundance
without labor for the knight’s part; knights are served by native inhabitants
of the island, and their riches are those that Apolidón and Grimanesa left
there. Amadís’s contribution to the prestige of the island is his status as a
knight and as a lover; and the wealth he brings with him comes from the epic
system of pillaging, booty, and warfare. It is in this sense that the Ínsula Firme
cannot be related to a Cockaigne or a Jauja.51 It is not a place of magical abun-
dance, but a place of absolute leisure, supported by a compliant, happy-to-be-
there work force that serves the knightly ruling class. It is for the privileged
92 Adventure and Archipelago

alone that the Ínsula Firme houses a few more distinction-granting mecha-
nisms, its things of mystery under the sign of luxury.
Constructions displaying mechanical artifices like the palace of Arcaláus
el Encantador in book III, chapter 69, structures featuring robotic figures
and other effects, are generally equated with pagan or evil characters. These
mechanisms contrast with the wonderful buildings positively character-
ized elsewhere in the romance, which are related to knowledge—that is,
to bookish knowledge—and magic. The buildings described in greatest de-
tail in the romance are those found on the Ínsula Firme. Among them are
the Arch of Loyal Lovers, the Defended or Forbidden Chamber, and four
houses Apolidón built for himself: the building of the serpent and the lions,
the one of the deer and the dogs, the Turning Castle, and the cave of the
Bull. The culminating enchanted building is the round palace mounted on
twelve marble columns that, when entered by the couple who can parallel
Apolidón and Grimanesa in their love, will undo all enchantments of the
island (II, Prol), a building that is forgotten in book IV, or more probably
conflated with the Defended Chamber. Built with Apolidón’s wealth and by
his knowledge, these edifices are not only examples of the marvelous that
characterize the Ínsula Firme, but also a political and social policy for chiv-
alry. The buildings code a hierarchy among the most important characters,
for example, between Agrajes and Amadís, or between Briolanja and Ori-
ana. Each of the trials that serve to establish the differences between charac-
ters is minutely described, so much so that they might be read as manuals:

Then he made an arch at the entrance to a garden in which there were trees
of all kinds, and furthermore there were in it four vaulted chambers richly
wrought; and the garden was fenced in such a way that no one could enter it
except under the arch. On top of the latter he put a copper image of a man
with a horn in his mouth as if he were about to blow it; and inside one of those
rooms he placed two figures, one in his own semblance and the other in that
of his mistress, so contrived that they seemed alive, with their faces and figures
the same as his and hers, and beside them a very bright stone of striped mar-
ble; and he caused a column of iron five cubits in height to be set up, at half
the distance of a crossbow shot from the arch, in a large field that was nearby.
(II, Prol, 660–61; 422)
 Adventure and Archipelago 93

The human figure will produce surprising special effects (not only beautiful
music, but sweet-smelling flowers flow from the trumpet) when the most
loyal of lovers walks under it, and Oriana will also receive special treatment
in book IV. The conditions for the test, not reserved exclusively for the
heroic couple, are that

From now on no man or woman will pass ahead if they have wronged those
whom they first began to love; because the image that you see blowing that
horn, with such an awful sound, amid smoke and flames of fire, will cause
them to be paralyzed; and almost like dead they will be thrust forth from this
place. But if there come here such knights, matrons, or maidens as be worthy
of completing this adventure by reason of their great fidelity, as I have said
already, they will enter forthwith and the image will make such a sweet sound
that it will be delightful for those to hear who are present; and the latter will
see our images and their own names inscribed on the marble, not knowing
who inscribed them. (II, Prol, 661; 422)

The enchantments shall end, and all people are to pass under the arch when
the island has a lord, and when a woman by virtue of her great beauty comes
to occupy the chamber with the knight.52
The Arch of Loyal Lovers is the only entrance to an enclosed, wonder-
ful garden.53 The hortus conclusus, a variant of the locus amoenus, is a topos
that follows strict rules: it is described as intensely desirable, located in
remote places or behind barriers. Its original sources are in the garden para-
dise in the first chapter of Genesis, and in the enclosed garden that appears
in the declarations between lovers in the Song of Songs or Songs of Solomon
(IV, 12).54 In terms of our analysis of an evolution of the opposition between
savage and civilized spaces, the enclosed, idealized garden of the Ínsula
Firme “embodies a harmony of city and wilderness, of reason and the non-
rational faculties, and thus often constitutes the setting for the resolution of
a problem involving the conflict of these elemental psychic forces.”55 The
medieval gardens of earthly love, frequently rendering parodies of the
Church’s beliefs and institutions versus private morality, find in the Garden
of Loyal Lovers a particular solution. By secluding Oriana in Apolidón’s
Tower, which distances her and all ladies from the knights in a kind of
94 Adventure and Archipelago

improvised monastery where their honor is guarded, Montalvo keeps parody

at bay while still invoking all these references. The fragile balance between
the savage and the civilized, between desire and reason, is maintained
impeccably in the romance, displacing the erotic connotations of earlier
Arthurian romances and focusing on the political construction of an elite
within the elite.
The garden Cligés makes for his runaway mistress, Fenice, in Chrétien’s
Cligés (6259ff.) and the garden of the Roman de la Rose seem to be the most
obvious direct antecedents for the garden guarded by the Arch of Loyal
Lovers in Amadís, with changes derived from Spanish tradition. In Cligés
the garden is a symbol of private morality, which nonetheless must account
for a social morality. This elitist system of morals is betrayed by the pear
that, falling from the tree, leads the lovers to discover Bertran’s voyeuristic
delight. The garden as a symbol of social elitism, manifested clearly in the
Roman de la Rose, suggests the unavailability of courtly love to those who
lack adequate leisure and the corresponding vulnerability of the idle to the
assaults of sexual temptation. The symbol is more successfully developed
in the Spanish romance. In Amadís the garden appears in terms of an ethics,
rather than a morality. The enclosed garden is a symbol of a private ethics
of an exclusive class, more anchored in an Augustinian idea of a spiritual
paradise than in a biblical garden.56 A wilder version of the garden is to be
found in the floresta, where the encounter with enchantresses and the sen-
sual ways of earthly love and deceit takes place.
Within this garden of perfect lovers, the marvelous serves to highlight in-
dividual merit, establishing a strict hierarchy, where achievement is minutely
followed and inscribed. This “ordering of the world” only needs to take
place until the best knight, Amadís, finishes the process of hierarchization,
thus ending a phase of opportunity for the knights of his generation. The
next generation will undergo similar tests, in order to settle in its own hier-
archy established not through blood but through individual achievement.57
The hierarchy is notably visual and spectacular. When Amadís and his
friends reach the Ínsula Firme, they go through the palace gates and they see
in it many shields laid out in three layers according to the virtue, or bondad,
of each knight: a hundred or so in the lower layer, ten set a little higher, and
over these two more, one of them still a bit higher. Each of the shields bears
 Adventure and Archipelago 95

a sign where the owner is commemorated. After they pass the columns,
reaching the arch, a sign of the outcome is given through sound. What the
inscriptions show is the name of the knight who has finished the adventure,
and the name and title of his father, making the result of the encantamento
and not the phenomenon itself what can be interpreted as a utopia. Amadís’s
inscription is equally extraordinary: “This is Amadis of Gaul, the faithful
man in love, son of King Perion of Gaul” (II, 672; 431, my emphasis).
The Ínsula Firme is thus a space whose insularity makes it able to hold
and contain at distance the most wonderful of pasts until the valorous lover
Amadís can come and test the adventures and open the door for an order
that is to come. It is a placeholder for a political future, it is the adven-
ture that is to take place but that is already known will happen, the event
of chivalric politics. As geography it also contains a number of marvelous
adventures whose isolation give it a more special aura, where the extraordi-
nary may be located. Specifically, the Ínsula Firme contains a number of
marvelous and magical elements pertaining to the technical or scientific
marvelous, the properly magical, the architectural, and even the miraculous,
all enmeshed poetically through the collapsing of a number of topoi that
include the paradisiacal, the hortus conclusus, the locus amoenus, and so
forth. But most importantly, what the Ínsula Firme does is codify the pro-
duction of a political space on an island within a very strict process of
hierarchization that brings with it a visual program, a code of manners and
behaviors, a project for the division of labor and the consideration of this
fiction of politics as if it were already part of the world. As part of the world
of Amadís, even if it is an island, it does not exist in isolation, but as part of
an archipelago, with which it negotiates its meanings through the different
possible itineraries.

Ínsula del Diablo

Opposite the paradisiacal island, the Middle Ages elaborated a counter-
balancing space in the imaginary ocean: the island of Hell. The distancing
and removal of the Other, whether as monster or angel, fairy or witch, are
equally circumscribed. This distance produces a perspective, a distancing
that refers not only to the horrific or the different, a motif more common to
the travelogue, but also to the fantastic or the merely strange.
96 Adventure and Archipelago

In the Amadís the encounter with an absolute Other takes place on an

island ruled over by a monstrous beast, the Endriago, in book III, chapter
73.58 The arrival at this island is equally clouded in mystery, haphazardness,
and omens. We learn the island has been able to overturn the sailors’ feelings
of relief after being surprised by a fierce tempest they find themselves on
shore. They have been moved from premonitions of death to feelings of
life—literally, “como si de muerte a la vida tornados fueran” (as if from death
to life they had been rendered), only to learn again of the dangers that await
them on shore. The dangers of the island surpass the worst dangers of the
sea, one of the most fearful experiences that could be expected, even at
the time.59 The island of the Endriago is identified, and fear of it supersedes
anything the sailors have just gone through. Absolute danger—the absolute
adventure—has been introduced.
The island is described as uninhabited. Some paragraphs later we are told
that it once belonged to a giant called Bandaguido, who ruled over other
giants who had territories around his realm. Bandaguido married a gentle
giantess whose kindness balanced her husband’s cruelty to Christians. Their
daughter, Bandaguida, turns out to be a most beautiful creature, in fact more
beautiful than any of her blood and size. Incest is introduced as a prelude
to the story of the beast itself, linking beauty, vanity, and sin in the young
giantess. Believing herself worthy of everyone’s love but finding that no one
attempts, because of her father, to court her, she decides to court her own
father. Before the Endriago is born, another sin is added to that of incest,
the sin of homicide, as the text suggests that one sin carries another with it.
Father and daughter make up their minds to assassinate the kind giantess,
wife and mother, and the giant takes his daughter as a wife. While character-
ized as proud giants, these are not the first to appear in the story.
Giants or their relatives are very popular in Amadís, and in the book of
chivalry in general they are linked to a feudal lordship of islands that is
against Christianity in some way.60 From Gandalaz to Famongomadán (giant
of the Boiling Lake and the Ínsula de Mongaça) and his wife, Gromadaça,
Madanfabul (giant of the Island of the Red Tower), Cartadaque of the
Defended Mountain, Albadançor, Gadancuriel, Ardán Canileo the Feared,
Balán, Bravor, Basagante, Dandasido, Cuadragante, Lindoraque, Andaguel,
Madásima, Barsinán (lord of Sansueña), Madarque (giant of the Sad Island),
 Adventure and Archipelago 97

and his sister Andandona are just some of them. It is at times difficult to
discern just how much giant there is in some of the characters, since mar-
riages between giants and shorter humans are common in the book of
chivalry, which is a sign of how ambiguously the marvelous can function
within the romance. Some of them are good, some bad, some gentle and
kind, some horribly cruel, some beautiful and some particularly ugly. A
good number of them rule over islands. Their character is revealed according
to circumstances, not by their nature or their appearance. When the jayán
who kidnaps Galaor is characterized as “dessemejado,” unrecognizable, what
provokes fear is not precisely his appearance, but the fact that the parents of
the young prince cannot do anything to help their child. Afterward, we see
how Gandalaz, the giant, is quite a nice fellow who raises Galaor appro-
priately and, leaving him with a hermit, sees to his knightly apprenticeship
through books.
Eight chapters before arriving on the Ínsula del Diablo, and as a grand
opening for book III, as Amadís sails from his Ínsula Firme toward Gaul,
and after just five days of good and bad weather, they find themselves near
an apparently beautiful island, covered with trees. Bruneo de Bonamar and
Amadís decide to disembark in search of adventures, but a master warns
them against it, telling them that it is the Sad Island, the kingdom of Madar-
que, most cruel of giants.61 Not without fear, Bruneo and Amadís take up
the challenge and go in search of the giant Madarque. Suddenly, they see
Amadís’s dwarf, Ardián, come running toward them, urging them to save
Galaor and King Cildadán, who are fighting the giant’s men. There is a brief
digression on pride, built upon the biblical Babel episode and the mention
of Nembrot, the proud giant, builder of the Tower.62 All four knights then
marvelously defeat men and giant, who is pardoned because first, he is the
father of Gasquilán, King of Suesa, whom Cildadán loves dearly; and second,
because Amadís makes him promise he will become Christian and build
churches and monasteries. His pardon binds together two motifs: the topos
of Arthurian romance to have the knight fight against mauvaises coutumes, or
evil customs, and the motif of conversion that will become prevalent in later
books of chivalry. The prisoners are liberated; they thank Amadís and are
sent on their way to Brisena. As the knights prepare to leave, they stop by
to check on the giant’s recovery. He is being looked after by Andandona, his
98 Adventure and Archipelago

older sister by fifteen years, who presents a peculiar physiognomy: she is

covered with rough white hair that cannot be brushed; her face is extremely
ugly, so much so she seems nothing but a demon. She wears a bow and
arrows for weapons, is dressed with the skin of animals she kills, and is a
fierce enemy of Christians. She presents paradoxical qualities, such as being
extremely large but also extremely light, while she also has the ability to
tame all animals and to mount all horses, no matter how savage they are.63
She is on many occasions confused with a devil, but she remains a woman,
which will prompt Amadís, three chapters later, to charge his squire Gan-
dalín with the task of beheading her, for she has tried to kill the hero, in an
episode that is both courtly—knights do not fight women—and humorous,
a paradox that Cervantes will take up in comments by Sancho when he com-
pares his own wife to Andandona in chapter 25 of the second part.
The motifs of pride, cruelty, and ugliness are shared between Madarque
and Andandona, though their end is very different. But we do not really
encounter ugliness until we have read the description of the Endriago.64 It is
covered with hair and scales as armor, arms strong as lion’s paws with hands
strong as an eagle’s talons, enormous wings, teeth protruding one cubit
from his jaw, and eyes like red coals that can be seen at night from afar. Like
Andandona, it is very light and can run fast, only needs to drink but rarely,
and takes pleasure in killing. It screams in anger, smells like poison, and
causes its scales and wings to creak so that it seems to make the earth trem-
ble (III, 73, 1132–33; 164–65).
The Endriago itself is no giant. It is a monster, its wings covered in a
“gleaming, hairy, leather-like hide black as pitch” and not in feathers, as angel
wings would be. It has parts of lion and eagle, and blows smoke out of its
nose. Not only is its appearance horrifying, but also the noises it produces
make all things alive fear it like death. All these characteristics add up to a
description of the Endriago as a machine of war, as Cacho Blecua has sug-
gested. Its lightness, its meanness, its physical power and, most of all, its
indifference to food or water or rest all make it apparently invincible. That
is, until he faces our hero.
Amadís’s adventure in the battle with the Endriago entails not only a
victory over ugliness, following Ulrich of Strassburg’s dictum in his Summo
Bono that ugliness is the triumph of chaos over order, but a victory that
 Adventure and Archipelago 99

would be the restoration of order in the world, perfectly coherent with the
notion of events in this book.65 It is also a triumph over sin. For, as the text
carefully informs the reader, while the Endriago is the result of incest and
homicide, its traits are also the result of a cult of idols. One of those, in human
shape, bequeaths reason to the monster; another has the shape of a lion,
which gives the beast courage and strength; while the third, in the shape of a
griffin, gives it wings and talons and lightness. The participation of devils in
the conception of the Endriago is explicit: “having been informed by his false
idols, whom he worshipped, that if he married his daughter, there would be
engendered in her the fiercest and strongest thing to be found in the whole
world” (III 73, 1132; 164). The Endriago kills all the women who raise the
monster from birth, except for the fourth, who does not offer the beast her
breast but feeds it cow’s milk for a year. When the Endriago’s parents come
to see it for the first time, the beast kills its mother and Bandaguido acciden-
tally kills himself, while the Endriago flees. In a short time the island is
deserted, bringing the geography to an appropriate staging for adventure.
Ultimately, the association of ugliness and depravity or sin is a common-
place, as Goldberg remarks, that takes its authority from the Bible (Leviticus
21:17–23), where the deformed are forbidden to approach the altar or to
profane the holy sanctuary, and from a campaign that related historical
events to the birth of monstrous children from incestuous relationships.66
By the end of the twelfth century, writes Georges Duby, it was necessary
to provoke the anxiety present in the population through the threat of tera-
tological effects of sexual relations with blood relatives, necessary because
simple prohibition was not doing much to stop these relationships.67 This
campaign took shape in the peninsula in, among other elements, the print-
ing in the fifteenth century of the Libro del Anticristo, which associates the
incest motif with the conception of the Beast itself, the Antichrist, through
the sexual encounters of a father with a daughter and the participation of
devils in the conception of the Beast, which clearly finds an echo in the con-
ception of the Endriago, as Paloma Gracia notes.68
Its appearance is that of absolute ugliness, according to Goldberg’s clas-
sification; and this is what distances the Endriago from all other beasts,
“animalias,” or evil beings in the romance. The most common form of ugli-
ness in medieval texts is exaggeration—such as being a giant or a dwarf. It
100 Adventure and Archipelago

is a question of size, but it is also distortion or deformity. The link with the
beastly also brought with it the characteristics commonly assigned to ani-
mals in bestiaries, most of the time linking a moral dimension to the physi-
cal one. In Amadís, the example of Ardián Canileo, a giant who presents the
ideally ugly portrait (thick neck, flat wide nose, snout like a dog’s—which
gives him his name—reddish freckled skin, thick lips, heavy, bony, and with
hair and beard so curly he was unable to comb them), is an excellent exam-
ple of this overlap, which can also be seen in Andandona.
Goldberg argues that along with the expected sensation of fright these
descriptions produced in the reader, she or he also experienced a “frisson of
delight,” provoked by a relief and feeling of pride from surviving, vicariously,
a perilous encounter, or, as Goldberg compares with De Bruyne’s terms, felt
the “expressive force” that with the intensity of ugliness produces beauty.
The popular motif of the comparison between beauty and beast—in the
episode of the Endriago alluded to only by Amadís’s invoking of Oriana—a
common situation in which one finds the ugly, suggests another interesting
scenario: “The nature of the sexual fantasy inherent in the encounter of
innocent, vulnerable beauty with an ugly, lascivious, unrestrained creature is
evident.”69 The coupling of monster and hero or beauty and the beast does
not put sexuality on the side of evil; it simply places a sign onto such sex-
uality, offering usually two solutions, one through moralizing and another
through humor as in the case of Andandona.
The episode on Devil’s Island enacts the defeat of evil and the conversion
of a space: from its savageness, its “sinfulness” revealed by its deserted, unin-
habited quality, to a change in toponym that reinscribes this space into that of
Christianity. Amadís, as Knight of the Green Sword in these episodes, writes
to the emperor of Constantinople—anticipating his own arrival in the city—
informing him that the island has been liberated and is under his lordship,
and that it can now be repopulated and renamed. The defeat of the Endriago
is duly labeled not only marvelous, but miraculous, and as is common in the
Amadís, the event is inscribed into the landscape in the form of architecture,
in this case, statues and a monastery: “and on a large copper plaque I shall
cause a description of the battle to be inscribed, together with the name of
the knight. And I shall order a monastery established there in which friars may
live in order to restore that island to the service of God” (III, 74, 1154; 182).
 Adventure and Archipelago 101

This episode is central to the structure of the romance. It is the most

spiritual of Amadís’s adventures, and the most difficult for him to achieve.
The setting of the event on an island that the characters reach by chance
and the reinscription of the island into Christianity not only because of
the conversion—still not fully accomplished: that will be the task of the
monastery—but because it is returned to its original ruler, the emperor of
Constantinople, provide eloquent testimony to the role of insularity in our
romance. As a space, Devil’s Island is fundamental for the construction of
the character’s heroic, spiritual, and hierarchic—social—evolution. In spa-
tial terms, the Ínsula del Diablo is important because of the many changes in
relation to a community it offers. As we first encounter it, undifferentiated
from any other sighting of land, it is a place of salvation; once identified it
is charged with evil omens. The space’s story has this duplicity embedded in
it, for there is a change in sign from a temperate lordship of the island to the
dismissal of morality that leads first to the opposition to the community and
then the obliteration and banishment of all population. Amadís’s conversion
of the space through the adventurous defeat of the monster marks only a
beginning, for the restoration of order after chaos entails two processes that
he claims no responsibility for: a political repopulation obligation that is
ceded to the emperor and a moral one with which the monastery is charged.
In terms of the recuperation of a territory for the community—the empire,
Christianity—it is especially interesting that what the archipelago offers
here enlists the loyalty of others to sustain the process of reincorporation of
that space, previously lost.70

Ínsula No Fallada
The images of loss and recuperation have manifest political, territorial, and
religious overtones that can be related to contemporary interests in the East,
or closer commercial interests in Mediterranean island territories, as well
as in more symbolic interpretations. The idea of something being lost also
brings in the idea of a quest, of a search for a lost object. But if what has been
lost is a space, and especially a space that no one has seen, then the quest is
in a way an interrogation of something’s existence, that is, it is an ontological
question. In a space lived as near and concrete, evil, according to Augustine,
takes shape as “a lack in ontological space, an islet of nonbeing, an obsession
102 Adventure and Archipelago

that can only contemplate the image of a nonexistent island.”71 Such a defi-
nition would seem to anchor the realm of Urganda the Unknown, enchant-
ress and protector of Amadís in a marvelous directly connected to evil, for
her kingdom is labeled Ínsula No Fallada, the Not Found Island. Linked
to the magical but marked positively, as it is closely connected to the hero’s
success, the Not Found Island is ambiguous, and it is also paradoxical. If an
island has a name and someone rules over it, we can conclude it exists. But
if it has not been found, how can it exist?
The territory of the enchantress is in fact the stage for only one episode
in the entire first five books of Amadís: in chapter 59 of book I, Galaor and
King Cildadán are mysteriously taken to a place where they are cured of
their battle wounds. On opposite sides of a battle that confronts all lineages
of giants against the knights of King Lisuarte, which include all three broth-
ers Galaor, Florestán, and Amadís himself, Galaor and Cildadán have been
victims of mortal wounds, found among the bodies after the cruel battle.
Near death, unidentified damsels claim their bodies to heal them and for-
bid anyone to come with them, and Amadís watches them from the shore as
they set sail. Galaor and Cildadán wake up to find themselves captive and
healed in mirror places: a fenced-in house on marble pillars set in a walled
garden with a single door as entrance and a high tower surrounded by the
sea on three sides. Strange contradictory events follow, which do not assure
the reader that they are there to be healed or killed, but after the events that
have taken them there are revealed to Galaor, Urganda identifies herself and
tells them she has brought them to her realm to be cured. The characters
then leave the island, and nothing else is ever said of it.
The discourse on insularity, remarks Dubost, takes the concept of the
phantasmagoric characterized by Saint Augustine as the faculty of speaking
of that which has never been seen.72 This confirms the enchanting and more
properly marvelous nature of the Not Found Island, but the name is also a
philosophical reminder, for the island that has not been found, the Lost Island,
in fact became the center of an eleventh-century debate around the existence
of God, promoted by Saint Anselm, who argued that the existence of a per-
fect island in the middle of the ocean, which no one had seen, was not to be
denied ontological status. Gaunilon de Marmoutiers would famously rebuke
his argument, a debate that highlights the vitality of the image of the Lost
 Adventure and Archipelago 103

Island in medieval imagination.73 That which has not been seen is known,
however, even if mediated by theology or the fantasy of literature or legend.
The geographical coincidence of islands with a Western margin plagued
by marvels would frequently locate the islands of Saint Brendan, San
Borondón, or San Brandano, in all cartographic forms, near the Canarian
archipelago, as I anticipated in chapter 1.74 The Voyage de Saint Brandan,
a twelfth-century Anglo-Norman text, rewrites a tenth-century Latin text,
the Navigatio Sanctii Brendanni Abbatis, which narrates the pilgrimage of
Brendan, a sixth-century monk, in a sort of “Christianized Aeneid,” as Marie-
José Lemarchand calls it.75 Read as adventure story, but also as a libro de a
bordo or logbook, the monk’s travels motivated the search for that island
which Brendan and his mates found in the eighth year of their periplus:
the Island of Paradise, Eden, the Garden of Delights. Brendan became the
discoverer of the island, thus giving it his name. The popularity of this story
was enormous, and it was translated into many languages. A testimony to
its vitality in the Hispanic world is the 1479 Treaty of Alcáçovas, in which
the kings of Spain and Portugal dispute the rights to the Canaries, conceded
by his majesty to Spain, including the mythical eighth island “si la hallare,” if
it were to be found.
From classical times, the Canary Islands were given the diverse titles of
Elysian Isles, the Blessed Isles, and the Hesperides. Pomponius Mela and
Pliny in the first century called them Fortunate Islands. In medieval map-
paemundi the Canaries, along with the rest of mythic and real Atlantic islands,
kept their marginal, peripheral position up to the fourteenth century, when
the knowledge of what was west and south of previous representations of
the world started to permeate portolan charts.76 Among the problems in-
herent to the identification of real islands designated by diverse toponyms,
many of which had no geographical equivalent, Campbell points out that
the Canaries, due to their position and shape, do not present any doubts
as to their authenticity; Lanzarote and Fuerteventura already appear under
these names in Dulcert’s 1339 chart, only three years after their discovery,
and are a staple of portolan charts from then onward.77 However, portolan
charts were themselves well inhabited by the marvelous: “It cannot be
claimed, of course, that the portolan charts were totally free from what today
we call superstition, but neither were medieval sailors. Yet Prester John, the
104 Adventure and Archipelago

four rivers of Paradise, the mythical Atlantic islands, and other legendary
features found on some charts are all placed in the little-known interior or
around the periphery.”78
Brendan’s lost paradise left a long cartographic trace. The De imagine
mundi (ca. 1100), a text widely circulated in the Middle Ages, reads that “in
the ocean there is an island called Lost, superior to all other lands for the
amenity and fertility of all its coasts, unknown to men, which, found once
by chance, has not been found again since its discovery, which is why it is
called Lost.”79 Ebstorf ’s twelfth-century mappamundi reads: “Lost island.
Saint Brendan discovered it, but nobody has found it since,” and the Libro
del conoscimiento also labels them as lost. In the famous Catalan atlas of 1375,
the work of Cresques Abraham, two legendary islands are represented,
Brazil and the false Isle of Man, both near Ireland. The Canaries are charac-
terized there in such a way that they could be mixed with the description
of Brendan’s Lost Island, reminiscent of course of paradise, and thus repeat-
edly labeled as “found,” or “again found.”80 The myth of earthly paradise fig-
ured during the Middle Ages through two main traditions.81 One of them
locates it in the East, in Asia, a location that allows the development of
the theme of the four rivers of Paradise; while the other places it on an
island, a motif that is fused with the Celtic Other World in the Voyage de
Saint Brandan, making the name of Lost both a theme of discovery and one
of theology. The description of the Island of Paradise or of the Saints bears
a strong resemblance to the description of the Fortunate Islands:

With beautiful forests and rivers they see that land blessed. . . . No thistles or
brambles, nor nettle can prosper: among the trees and plants there is nothing
that does not spread sweetness. . . . Rivers of milk flow and everything over-
flows in abundance. With the dew fallen from the sky, honey springs from the
rushes. . . . The sun shines there with eternal splendor, because there is no
cloud in the air to rob the sun of its clarity nor winds or breezes rustling the
hair. He who lives there will not suffer any woe, nor know any hostile thing:
neither stormy wind, nor heat, nor cold, nor sorrow, nor hunger, nor thirst,
nor shortage. He will have such abundance of riches that they will overcome
his desire, he will not be able to lose them because they are sure there, and he
will be able to use them every day.82
 Adventure and Archipelago 105

Such is Brendan’s island, while the Fortunate Islands are described in Cres-
ques as abundant with fruit, and quoting Pliny, called “master of mappa-
mundi,” the chart reads that in that archipelago there is an island where all
goodness of the earth exists, where no labor is required, where trees do not
lose their foliage and fruit spreads about a wonderful smell.83
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Saint Brendan’s Island was fre-
quently depicted in cartography, from the Novae Franciae map, where it is
placed south of Terranova, all the way to the Map of America, included in
Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum. In Pierre Du Val’s Mappe de Les Isles
Canaries of 1653, the long reputation of the island is confirmed. Here we
read that: “To the West of the Canary Islands, some place those of Saint
Brendan, one of which is the Inaccessible, which others call the Fortunate
one, the Enchanted one, the Not Found one.”84 This cartographic itinerary
identifies the “island of the saints” of Brendan with the name of Lost and,
more interestingly yet, with the name Non Trouvada, not found. This tradi-
tion spans five centuries, fusing two of the seven islands that Brendan finds
in his voyage: that of the whale or mobile island where the monk and his
friends celebrate a Mass and that of the saints, related to paradise.
Those are some of the derroteros, or routes, over which Montalvo might
have traced his emplacement of a space for Urganda.85 While one can see the
parallels between the Ínsula No Fallada and the Ínsula Firme in terms of a
general utopia, the signs of the marvelous stake out differing interpretations
for each that Montalvo carefully lays out. While the Ínsula Firme is a political
utopia, marked by hierarchies determined by merit, the Ínsula No Fallada
points to a marvelous abundance related to a different ontological status.
Without claiming an influence, the itinerary traced above, from Isidore to
Anselm and from Pliny to Cresques, does spell out a tradition, a diverse
series of routes that converge in the paradigm for the Lost Island to which
other layers might be added, such as the imaginary spaces of the Critias and
the Timaeus in the shape of Atlantis, an island that Pierre d’Ailly would take
for his Imago mundi. In this manner, the Ínsula No Fallada of Amadís de Gaula
might be seen as a sort of wind rose, ciphering and signaling directions, dis-
courses, different interpretations.
As a point of convergence of multiple meanings, the Ínsula No Fallada
relays a particular function within the archipelago of the hero’s adventures
106 Adventure and Archipelago

and in the chivalric program proposed by Rodríguez de Montalvo.86 If for

Saint Augustine the phantasmagoric is a way of talking about that which has
not been seen, we can say that the Ínsula No Fallada is the location of an
event that cannot be described because it has not been seen, but which may
nevertheless be circumscribed. The only passages in which anything within
the Ínsula No Fallada is described note this encirclement by isolating the
spaces where the characters are kept not once, but thrice: within the island,
on a tower encircled and walled, or inside a fenced building within a walled
garden. Its existence is not left unquestioned, but in fact confirmed in its
being named as “lost,” in the insistence on mapping a space of which there
is no certainty. And its ambiguity—the fact that it acts as both a place of lib-
eration from death but where the characters are held captive, even by their
own interpretation—mirrors the status of the space itself.
The phantasmatic existence of the Ínsula No Fallada seems to suggest the
configuration of a different type of insularity than those previously analyzed:
a nonplace.87 To take this function of the Ínsula No Fallada as an indicator of
the archipelago, in the same way that a system of nonplaces can be articu-
lated through the relocations of a traveling circus or an itinerant market,
islands in Amadís, in their probable but uncertain existence, might be postu-
lated as a non-archipelago. The Ínsula No Fallada is perhaps the most trans-
parent or self-conscious example of this function of the archipelago, as its
anchorings in cartographic discourse rendered it “real” for at least five cen-
turies, making the links between fictional, historical, and even philosophical
discourses patent. Even the political interpretation might be read onto it,
for in a sense, the distribution of maritime realms, remarks Olschki—the
extreme case being, of course, Don Quixote’s Ínsula Barataria—mirrors his-
torical figures such as Portugal’s Joaõ II, who “with a certain ironic generos-
ity distributed the islands his subjects saw, but never managed to find.”88
The Amadisian archipelago as a whole can be read as articulating a system
of nonplaces in a phantasmatic geography that may and may not be identified
with a “real” geography, supplementary spaces of fiction that make possible
the affirmations of something within the real as if it were already part of it.
In the different itineraries they follow, these fictions that the insular adven-
tures offer articulate possibilities for hypotheses on truths on aesthetics,
politics, ethics. Such a system, the geography of Not Found Island would
 Adventure and Archipelago 107

suggest, constitutes the deep structure of the book of chivalry, taking the
island as the geographic shape of the episode, and thus a theory of fiction.
This theory of fiction, where the intent is not in showing real spaces or
addressing historical geographies, uses insularity as a way of building within
chivalric fiction’s political and ethical program a series of hypotheses on the
real. Insularity, especially because it is presented in archipelago form, where
the itineraries between islands are enacted by the hero, thus comprises a
laboratory of experiences for the subject—the knight—that, in their com-
pletion as adventures manage to change the situation by forcing a new real-
ity onto it: whether by claiming a reserved political realm by merit (Ínsula
Firme), or by recuperating a lost territory (Ínsula del Diablo), or even by forg-
ing the space for interiority, as Peña Pobre. The insular episodes that I have
studied in these pages are but paradigms that the myriad islands and rocks
in the book of chivalry provide nuance for in a variety of ways: for love,
for government, for self. The Ínsula No Fallada is the nonplace that self-
consciously points to the possibility of reading the Amadisian archipelago in
this way by naming the possibility of the event without giving it a site, enun-
ciating the possibility of event for all the other islands in the archipelago.
By way of such a system, the different archipelagoes in Hispanic litera-
tures beginning with Amadís might be compared, analyzed, and studied. Just
as nonplaces can present themselves as openings to immortality, they can
be faces of the abyss, routes to hell. The Ínsula No Fallada, the space of a
fugitive fiction, a fiction that wishes to remain unfound, is also eloquent of
the ways in which space subordinates time to itself in the book of chivalry:
at the end of the Sergas, the fifth book of Amadís, Montalvo has Urganda
come out of the Ínsula No Fallada to rejuvenate (or turn back time for) the
protagonists, and to enchant them (to freeze in time, to stop it) on the Ínsula
Firme, which she then sends to the depths of the earth, only to reemerge
when the appropriate time for them has come in time of Arthur. Space in
the Amadís subjects time to its shape, it circumscribes it and contains it
within the fiction for the fiction to produce more, later, in other books,
other cycles.89
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 4
QW
shor e s of f ict ion
The Insular Image in Amadís and Cervantes
A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island;
each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more
complex and mobile than ever before.
—j e a n-fr ançois lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

B uondelmonti’s account of his travels in the Aegean can be seen as the

first of a genre, since explored in many different ways and cultivated
well into the twentieth century. It confirms a model of modern travel writing
inaugurated by Petrarch that is related to “the emergence of a subject that
writes and records and memorializes the self,” in Cachey’s words, summariz-
ing in a way the West’s response to the Aegean, constituting one of the first
cultural inscriptions of subjectivity articulated through writing and geogra-
phy.1 That coincidence between internal and external geographies is made
possible by the inscription of the traveling and writing subject. In the Liber
insularum archipelagi, this inscribed subjectivity gives the genre its shape,
in the sense that it is the body of the traveler-compiler-cartographer that
guarantees the text’s continuity, between island descriptions, and between
texts and illustrations, maps and legends.
The connection between geography and the writing of fiction through
the mediation of a traveling subject in the isolario and the book of chivalry
was manifest in many genres before, but in the fifteenth century a particular
relation between chivalric fiction and cartography became evident. Histori-
ans of cartography and literature have noted as an oddity that the first men-
tions of the rediscovery of Ptolemy in the late medieval world would appear
within chivalric romance. The cultural atmosphere from the beginning of
the fifteenth century and continuing throughout the seventeenth century

109
110 Shores of Fiction

favored a relationship between chivalric fiction and its emphasis on geogra-

phy and the discourse of cartography. “At the end of the fourteenth and in
the first few decades of the fifteenth century,” writes Gautier Dalché, “the
people of Florence could hear the works of poets writing in local idiom
recited and declaimed on the banks of the Arno.”2 An established singer of
chansons de geste and compiler of chivalric prose romances, Andrea da Bar-
berino has recently been labeled the “missing link between the early Italian
reworking of the chanson de geste and the Renaissance epic masterpieces.”3
Especially interesting to us is Barberino’s Il Guerrin Meschino, a chivalric
prose romance composed at the end of the 1410s and the beginning of the
1420s, for scholars have pointed out Barberino’s wide use of Ptolemaic
toponymy in it (though whether it has been taken from the text or from the
maps remains undecidable). The Guerrin tells the story of a knight whose
adventures take him to Constantinople; unfit to become a serious suitor to
the emperor’s daughter because of his unknown identity, following a pat-
tern closely related to both Byzantine and chivalric romance, he decides to
travel the world. Chivalry, travel, and the interest in the East, represented by
Constantinople, are, again, elements that bind the book of chivalry and car-
tography together. More interestingly, the connection reveals in Barberino,
and in consequence, in Amadís and Buondelmonti, the popularity and per-
meability of cartographic discourse via chivalric fiction. The Guerrin links
Italy and Spain early on, as it was translated and published in Seville in 1527
as Guarino Mezquino and thus entered the canon of books of chivalry, if
linked to the Carolingian and not the Arthurian tradition, as is Amadís.4 As
Karla Amozurrutia Nava notes, the identifiable itinerary of Guarino—which
distances the book from the ambiguous, isolated spaces of other books of
chivalry—is traced, however, according not just to mere geography, but
to an interest in going through places notable for their religious or liter-
ary relevance, such as Santiago de Compostela and the Purgatory of Saint
Patrick; places related to the Carolingian tradition in Italy, such as the cave
of the Sybil; and places related to other cultures and the marvelous, such as
the Mosque and Arch of Mohammed or Alexander’s Tree of the Sun and the
Moon, directed always to the East.5 The coexistence of these symbolic and
fictional places alongside a verifiable itinerary make the text more akin to the
structure of the portolan in its perplexing mix of medieval and Renaissance
 Shores of Fiction 111

elements, of symbolic and real geographies. Gautier Dalché notes that in any
case in Barberino, and in general in these first texts, the interest in Ptolemy,
whether one regards it as encyclopedic or humanist, seems to be mainly
connected to place-names. The preference is curious, since it benefits from
the verisimilitude granted by the source (Ptolemy) but without any special
regard to geographic precision.6 In the Guarino, moreover, in contrast with
other books of chivalry where interlacing guarantees the unity of narration
while integrating other spaces and other characters’ adventures, narration
almost exclusively follows the protagonist and his travels, where adventure
is more of a moral nature (rather than political) in the encounter with the
marvelous—much more linked to a type of chivalry represented by Amadís’s
son, Esplandián, than by Amadís himself—from which the knight must learn
and gradually rebuild his identity, the core preoccupation of the book.
Chivalry and cartography would continue to be connected and would
constitute in Italian literature, in Cachey’s words, the “fullest literary inte-
grations during the Renaissance” of Ptolemy and modern cartography, cul-
minating in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, published a century later. Ariosto’s
precise use of maps contrasts with the marvelous voyages he invents, tying
cartography and literary imagination together in chivalric epic: “Ariosto’s
cartographic conquests,” as Cachey labels them, “thus represent an illumi-
nating parallel or counterpoint to other more historical journeys of con-
quest and political uses of the map.” Amadís is concerned with the East, and
it will be later in the genre that the Americas will be gradually brought in; in
contrast, the marginalization of Italian courts from the enterprises of empire
and discovery effected a closing of the margins of the map in subsequent
Italian epic, as in Torquato Tasso’s exclusion of America in his Gerusalemme
liberata. Not surprisingly, this displacement is predicated on a mobile island,
as Tasso relocates the island of the enchantress Armida from the shores of
Patagonia in the first version, to the Fortunate Islands or Canarian archipel-
ago in the final version.7
These later elaborations confirm a continued relation between cartogra-
phy and chivalric literature in the early modern world, and simultaneously
reveal the political differences between Italian and Spanish literary traditions
that would be imperially tied through Charles V’s coronation in 1530, and
especially differences within Italian literature between epic and romance.8
112 Shores of Fiction

Published some twenty years after Montalvo’s recension of Amadís, Orlando

treads very different waters, even if the body of the hero still guarantees the
narrative unity of the geographies traveled.
In Amadís, narration advances with the protagonist, its “subject,” who
transforms the space he travels through his adventures. Space also effects a
change in the protagonist, a correlation between internal and external spaces
that is most obviously expressed in nomenclature or toponymy. A mirroring
between external and internal space is evidenced in the name of the Ínsula
Firme, as I detailed in the previous chapter, or in the change in name from
Ínsula del Diablo to Ínsula de Santa María. In this production of space, as
Rosario Santana Paixão has pointed out, the goal of the genre is to “create its
own space, where the fantastic side is presented as an end in itself,” where
the emphasis is not on the particular reality of a feat, but on the universal
truth of heroism.9 What Santana Paixão calls essential truth consists of a sub-
jectivity expressed both in the body of the adventurous traveling hero and in
his internal characterization—as firm, loyal lover and friend. In other words,
his subjective truth resides in emotion, in the order of feeling and being that
are taken as a universal knowledge, “which transcends the dimensions of the
immediate and focuses on ethical or existential preoccupations, with the goal
of nurturing human perfection, encouraging the pursuit of Virtue,” expressed
in a series of behaviors and gestures that will give Amadís currency in the
courts, beyond its literary success, as a book of manners, and more collec-
tively, as a manual for spectacles.10
While in cartography there is a gradual effacing of the author–traveler as
the organizing thread of the isolario, no doubt in response to the transition
from manuscript to print and the commercial success of the genre, in the
book of chivalry there is no such effacing, but a shift from the hero’s subjec-
tivity to the author’s. If in the Amadís it is the hero himself whose body,
whose subjective experience and fidelity links the separate adventures—
especially those at sea, for those on land convey at least visually an illusion
of stability—in the process of development of the genre, this subjective
experience will increasingly be that of the author. This displacement is
expressed structurally in the topos of the finding of a manuscript that will
then become the book.11 This author’s experience, let us note, is that of an
explorer and a discoverer; but it is also an experience of a bookish nature:
 Shores of Fiction 113

it is the experience of the reader.12 In some way, one might compare the
displacement of the experience from protagonist to author to reader in the
book of chivalry and the novel, to the displacement from traveler to explorer
to cartographer as the atlas comes into being. A Renaissance idea, that of
reading as traveling—linked through the ancient topos of travel as means for
knowledge—makes its way into the chivalric genres as cartography dissem-
inates its power through the printing press.
Buondelmonti threads his book with his own name in the shape of an
acrostic, assembled from the red block letters that head the isolario and
read: “Cristoforus Bondelmont. De Florencia Presbiter nunc misit Cardi-
nali Jordano de Ursinis MCCCCXX” (Cristoforus Bondelmont, Presbiter
of Florence sent by Cardinal Jordano de Ursinis 1420).13 In the book of
chivalry, the acrostic can be paralleled to the genealogy of protagonists that
characterizes the genre. Genealogies articulate not only Montalvo’s refur-
bishing of the story but also anticipate the many books and the organization
in cycles that will follow his remastering of Amadís de Gaula. The isolario has
other manifestations of subjectivity, such as when the author of the Liber
mixes personal data in the pseudo-historical narration that accompanies
the description of islands, and above all, the extraordinary episode in which,
having been shipwrecked on an island and about to starve, Buondelmonti
engraves his own epitaph on a rock in the Furni islands.14 This engraving
recalls the many inscriptions of Amadís’s name and feats in many contexts,
from toponymy in the Ínsula del Diablo to the marvelous engravings on stat-
ues and buildings both there and in the Ínsula Firme. Other authors of isolarii
and books of chivalry followed this singular method of self-inscription,
highlighting travel itself as heroic feat.
Buondelmonti makes use of all possible resources, from fiction to history,
from legend to myth, even to his own testimony as traveler in order to write
his periplus. That is, subjectivity in the isolario is not dissociated from the
encyclopedic thrust that makes it possible, and is essentially medieval. The
encyclopedic side of the Liber finds a perfect niche in the print culture that
would follow its conception:

Printed books increasingly come to be conceived as a collection of places that

are arranged or organized in space. Increased spatialization of the textual
114 Shores of Fiction

epistemology (vis-à-vis the manuscript book) coincided with a revival of the

classical and medieval arts of memory whose practice involved a spatialized
organization of knowledge. The repercussions throughout the literary system
of this particular conjunction of technological and cultural factors (related to
but distinguishable from the coeval conjunction between print and rhetorical
canons of imitation) have just begun to be appreciated.15

A printed book of chivalry such as Amadís can be seen as a collection of

places organized in space, but the idea of the book as a memory gallery can
also be extrapolated to the chivalric in general, for example, to understand
the reception of Orlando furioso, “which was reorganized into a kind of ‘World
Book Encyclopedia’ by polygraph, editorial entrepreneurs like Orazio Tosca-
nella.”16 Buondelmonti and Montalvo anticipated with their assemblages the
development of their respective genres in this direction. Frequently, the
notion of the book as collection of places was expressed visually in the com-
position of text and images. In its very makeup, the book of chivalry retained
this characteristic, among many others, in its passage from manuscript to
print.17 The context of representation of insularity, however, from verbal
descriptions to different forms of visual representation effected changes
in the ethical and political project of chivalric fiction presented through the
archipelagic structure in Amadís.

Images of Place
Common among illustrations in the book of chivalry were the richly dressed
knight (whose illustration is not exclusive to books of chivalry, appearing
also in heraldries, historical chronicles, heroic personal chronicles, ballad
chapbooks, etc.), usually accompanied by his horse either in an open land-
scape or with the background of a castle, scenes of pledges of allegiance,
heraldic motifs, knights and ladies, ladies with a lance, battle scenes, and
tournaments (Figure 14). Particularly frequent were maritime scenes, re-
peated constantly within the same work and between books, reflecting the
importance granted this motif. José María Diez Borque finds the scene of
ships near a coast in the Amadís (Venice, 1533) and Tristán (Seville, 1538)
repeated several times in each; the same happens with the scene of king and
courtiers watching a boat and others (Figures 15 and 16).18
Figure 14. Gandalín, the loyal squire, follows Amadís on horseback on the title page of
the 1533 edition. Amadís de Gaula: Los quatro libros de Amadís d’Gaula nueuamente
impressos et hystoriados [Venice, 1533]. Houghton Library, Typ 525.33.138 F.
Figure 15. Three large ships send out dinghies to disembark on an island. Folio 9r,
from Amadís de Gaula [Seville: Juan Cromberger, 1535]. Houghton Library, Typ
560.35.138 F.

Figure 16. A king and courtiers welcome or bid farewell to a man on a ship. The image
highlights the opposition between the built space of the court and the unstable sea.
Folio 169r, from Amadís de Gaula [Seville: Juan Cromberger, 1535]. Houghton
Library, Typ 560.35.138 F.
 Shores of Fiction 117

Images used in books of the period may be classified in three general

categories: illustrations proper, thematic images, and disjunctive images.
Logically, images could be used as proper illustrations only once, because
only once could they be illustrating the episode or chapter in which they
were inserted. This only once is extremely important. From the moment of
their first use on, these images will entail a change in the operations made by
the reader/spectator of these images and texts. The juxtaposition between
text and image cannot continue being a two-way mirror; after the first time
illustrations appear, text and image stop being a repetition of each other, a
summary, a duplication, or a commentary (depending on the value ascribed
to certain visual characteristics in terms of what is valued or not of the epi-
sode illustrated). The relationship between text and image changes radically
when this mirroring effect is absent. The reuse of images within one book,
in a chapter or episode presenting a similar theme—a battle or a tourna-
ment, for example—or just to occupy the space for the illustration, results
in a disjunctive relationship with the text. In a sense, the images in these
last two situations become texts themselves, as they remind the reader of
another text for which the image is a substitute. Transformation of the image
into a text that must be remembered is what Marian Rothstein calls a “com-
memorative” use of the image. The commemorative use of woodcuts de-
pends for its power on the reader’s familiarity with an earlier, illustrative use
of the image (Figures 17 and 18).19
Images juxtaposed to text are not only commemorative in the chivalric
genre. They serve as guarantors of continuity, as another version of gene-
alogy, established this time not by the protagonist or the author but by
the printer himself, the chooser of the images. It has been pointed out
that books of chivalry establish relationships among themselves, resulting
from direct blood relations between protagonists or in an indirect manner
through the reworking of names or the revisiting of spaces, as in the re-
elaborations by Juan Díaz or Francisco de Morais of the Ínsula No Fallada
detailed in the previous chapter (Figure 19). The juxtaposition of images
would in this sense have two functions. On the one hand, it would provide
another kind of continuity to the cycles, reminding the reader each time of
the link between the present text and others, forcing her or him to establish
contrasts, to compare adventures and heroes, and to put them on the same
Figure 17. A walled city contrasts with the open space of the sea in this engraving from
the French Amadís. Amadis de Gaule, book IV, chapter title 32. Special collections, case
Y7675 .A 458. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.
Figure 18. Ships in the foreground seem to have traversed the seascape behind them
in this framed engraving for the French edition of Amadís. Amadis de Gaule, book IV,
folio 1r. Special collections, case Y7675 .A 458. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.
120 Shores of Fiction

level. In this manner it also creates a sense of genre, in a very material fash-
ion. On the other hand, this juxtaposition would support the interpretation
of the “grotesque” nature of the romances, in the overlay not only of image
over image but also of text over text through the image, in a series of trans-
lations between systems, as well as between languages.
The French Amadís (1540–44), for example, had the privilege of hav-
ing most of its blocks cut specifically for it. They were used for the next ten
years or so, and they were later found illustrating Palmerín, a different cycle.
Rothstein writes that because of this special treatment, the Amadís is a good
case for arguing that commemorative images referred constantly to it, fol-
lowing not only its extraordinary success but its normative, modeling role
in the genre: “With some important exceptions, the woodcuts decorating
the large folio pages of Amadis are small, roughly eight by ten centimeters.
Woodblocks of this size were more durable, less prone to cracking, cheaper
to have cut, and more commercially flexible since they could be, and were,
used in octavo volumes as well as the luxury folios printed to meet initial
demand. The first book of Amadis has fourteen woodcuts,” complex, de-
tailed visual narratives (Figures 20 and 21). These are invariably set between
the explanatory chapter title and the text of the chapter itself. In this way,
even if too vague to be sufficiently descriptive, the explanatory chapter title
serves the image as caption.20 If that is the first relation between text and
image that the reader establishes, a second, in which the reader follows the
events represented visually, contradicts the simultaneous presentation of
the order of events that illustration offers by forcing the reader to find the
proper sequence. This, of course, is only possible when the illustration func-
tions precisely as a mirror of the narrative, for in the thematic or disjunctive
use the images serve only as flashbacks or digressions (Figure 22).21
The most famous episodes of Amadís de Gaula were profusely and pain-
stakingly illustrated in the luxury edition presenting Nicolas d’Herberay des
Essart’s translation into French, commissioned by François I (Figure 23).22
The magnificent woodcuts, each set apart on its own page in an enormous
folio edition, are decoratively framed and made to head a chapter. Among
these lavish engravings, whose blocks were overseen by the translator him-
self, island episodes seem to be of particular interest. What is interesting
about these island illustrations is not only their detailed presentation of the
Figure 19. The title page of the fifth book of Amadís, narrating the story of Esplandián,
his son. Sergas de Esplandián. Ayer Collection *438 M76 1587. Courtesy of the
Newberry Library.
Figure 20. The Arch of Loyal Lovers rejects lesser knights, letting through only the
most loyal of lovers. Folio 3v, from book II, Amadis de Gaule, Paris, 1550. Houghton
Library, Typ. 515.46.138 F.
Figure 21. Urganda’s ship is recurrently represented, in substitution for her realm.
Amadis de Gaule, book IV, f 80r. Special collections, case Y7675 .A 458. Courtesy of the
Newberry Library.
Figure 22. The engraving tells the entire episode of the battle with the Endriago, up to
its death, and of the hero’s delicate condition. Folio 49v, from book III, Amadis de
Gaule, Paris, 1550. Houghton Library, Typ. 515.46.138 F.
 Shores of Fiction 125

sequence of events in the narrative, but also of the presentation of islands

in relation to on another: on the horizon boats and islands appear to sug-
gest this relationality of the Amadisian archipelago. For the beginning of the
second book, the French luxury edition presents a two-page illustration of
the Ínsula Firme laid out on the left as map, an architectural plan of the
island’s enchanted buildings that closely follows the description provided in
the text (Figure 24). On the right, the edition offers a plan of a raised build-
ing of the Ínsula Firme.23 In the plan of the Ínsula Firme, however, there is an
interesting development, for the shape of the island seems to have given in
to the shape of the page that sustains the image: the island is represented not
as geography but as a floor plan, suggesting that the interpretation of ínsula
is here much closer to its etymological definition as a block of buildings than
that of a land surrounded by the sea. There is, in fact, no visual reference to
the sea, and the lines detailing the topography of the island are controlled,
rational limits signaling labyrinths, columns, corridors, and perimeters. The
extremely influential French edition, whose popularity included the copy-
ing of its illustrations, coupled with Amadís de Gaula’s ever-increasing suc-
cess within and beyond Spain’s borders, would find its way into yet another
expression of the romance’s visual qualities: the tapestry.
Tapestries are specifically referred to in the Amadís itself: in book III, chap-
ter 68, after the defeat of the Seven Kings has been narrated, King Lisuarte
and his men enter the tents of his enemies: “That night Galaor and Agrajes
and many others of their friends lodged in the tent of Arcaláus, which was
very luxurious and beautiful. On it they found depicted in silk and embroi-
dery the battle that he had had with Amadís and how he had enchanted
him, and other things that he had done” (III, 68, 1052; 98). Cacho Blecua
remarks that this scene might be included among the group of tents painted
with the feats of heroes, such as the tent of Alexander in the Libro de Alexan-
dre that has been related to the tent of Don Amor, in the Libro de Buen Amor.
The romance does not specifically refer to the tent—the walls of the tent,
as in the Libro de Alexandre—as being painted, but tells of a silk cloth upon
which these feats are represented, which I take to be a tapestry.24 The link
with Alexander is productive, because it elevates the hero to the level of
other heroes whose feats also have been represented in tapestries. Art histo-
rians have identified nine tapestries of an Amadís series, designed by Karel
Figure 23. A knight kills a giant, while in the foreground knights fight monstrous
beings in this French Amadís. Folio 22e (F2r), from book V, Amadis de Gaule, Paris,
1550. Houghton Library, Typ 515.46.138 F.
 Shores of Fiction 127

van Mander the Elder and manufactured in the François Spiering workshop
in the 1590s.25 Two of them were shown as part of the 2001 “Vermeer and
the Delft School” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,
on loan from their London owner, one of which was later bought by the
museum and is now part of its collection. Two others are in the Poldi
Pezzoli in Milan, two more in private collections in Rome and London,
and yet another is part of the collection of the Princeton University Art
Museum; the remaining two are only known from photographs in sale cata-
logues (Figures 25, 26, and 27). Princeton’s is particularly interesting, as a
direct inspiration on the illustrations made for Herberay des Essarts’s edi-
tion may be argued.26

Figure 24. This extraordinary double-folio illustration in the French Amadís is

composed of a number of perspectives that underscore the motifs at work: Paradise,
the labyrinth, locus amoenus, hortus conclusus, forest, and island. On the right hand,
architecture between the historical and the fabulous. Folios 3v–4r, from book IV,
Amadis de Gaule, Paris, 1550. Houghton Library, Typ 515.46.138 F.
128 Shores of Fiction

The Princeton tapestry depicts the buildings of the Ínsula Firme from a
slightly elevated perspective, providing thus the possibility of making it a
narrative, following the text, or of reading it as a map. The Princeton tap-
estry works then not only as a commemorative image, but as a subjectiv-
izing force, making the reader/spectator make her way into the image/text
itself:

The map is a microcosm that takes the form of a landscape, a geographical

garden in which promenades can be taken. Only the traces of human occu-
pation require recourse to symbols; the natural landscape can be reproduced
by the mimesis of forms, matter, and colors in which the very material identity
of the natural elements is preserved. . . . The promenade through the geo-
graphical garden is a voyage because the traveler goes from country to coun-
try, contemplating the mountains from above, following the course of rivers
or the seashores. But a map of this kind also provides symbolic power over the
space that it represents.27

Figure 25. Tapestry of the Story of Amadís de Gaula. The protagonists are depicted
several times in the tapestry, representing different moments in the narrative. After
Karel van Mander the Elder, Dutch, 1548–1606. Frans Spiering, 1551–1630. Scene
from Amadis de Gaule. Tapestry 249 × 432 cm. (98 ¹⁄₁₆ × 170 ¹⁄₁₆ in.). Princeton
University Art Museum. Gift of Hugh Trumbull Adams, Class of 1935. Photo:
Bruce M. White. y1954–76. Courtesy of the Princeton Art Museum.
Figure 26. This detail of the Princeton tapestry depicts the protagonists, Amadís and
Oriana, attempting the adventure of the Arch of Loyal Lovers. After Karel van Mander
the Elder, Dutch, 1548–1606. Frans Spiering, 1551–1630. Scene from Amadis de
Gaule. Tapestry 249 × 432 cm. (98 ¹⁄₁₆ × 170 ¹⁄₁₆ in.). Princeton University Art
Museum. Gift of Hugh Trumbull Adams, Class of 1935. Photo: Bruce M. White.
y1954–76. Courtesy of the Princeton Art Museum.
Figure 27. The magic of the chamber of Apolidón is represented by smoke in this
detail of the Princeton tapestry. After Karel van Mander the Elder, Dutch, 1548–1606.
Frans Spiering, 1551–1630. Scene from Amadis de Gaule. Tapestry 249 × 432 cm.
(98 ¹⁄₁₆ × 170 ¹⁄₁₆ in.). Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of Hugh Trumbull
Adams, Class of 1935. Photo: Bruce M. White. y1954–76. Courtesy of the Princeton
Art Museum.
 Shores of Fiction 131

That is, the tapestry of the Ínsula Firme is a landscape where both nature
and human action are represented, where the garden and its buildings sum
up the contradictions between the civilized and the savage. Reading the
tapestry is parallel to walking its world. The reader is thus taken within the
image; she is made part of the tapestry. For, in the same manner that Jacob
says is done with maps, the first question asked of this tapestry is for the
reader: “Where am I? It is essential to define this fundamental landmark,
this anchor and origin, this guarantee of the individual’s identity, a central
reference in respect to which all surrounding space is organized.”28 The
reader, identifying her/himself as knight or lady, places herself within the
Ínsula Firme as a traveler within the space; for the map is a construction from
a subjective point of view, and not an impartial, impersonal mirror. The pos-
sibility of mobility within the tapestry is motivated by perspective—in this
case eloquently called a “horseman’s perspective,” reinforcing the chivalric
association—and the idea of promenading is bolstered because what is rep-
resented there is precisely a garden: “Bodily mobility was an aspect entirely
integral to the pedagogical scenario,” which we have seen the ethical utopia
of the Ínsula Firme striving for, the education of a class. If in the nineteenth
century, as Jacob writes, “Map-gardens still figured among the great peda-
gogical utopias aiming at popular education and the dissemination of geog-
raphy,” we can find one of their earliest examples in this garden of loyal
lovers, this garden of delights reserved for a hierarchized class of ethical de-
fenders of a merit-based order.29
Many island episodes were represented, both in the more rudimentary
Spanish woodcuts and in the French illustrations. The absence of the Ínsula
No Fallada in the many woodcuts and engravings that accompanied the text
signals a particular difficulty in representing that which has not been found,
that is, woodcuts and engravings mirror the marvelous status that the island
retains for itself in the text. If in the first five books of the Amadís cycle—
that is, those written by Montalvo—the Ínsula No Fallada is not described
within the narration, maintaining the suspense of its marvelous existence,
Juan Díaz will describe it in chapter 7 of his Lisuarte de Grecia, and later
Francisco de Morais will revisit the space and give it a new name, that of the
Isla Peligrosa or Dangerous Island as his protagonist spatially links his own
adventures to the prestige of Amadís in the Portuguese Palmeirim d’Inglaterra.
132 Shores of Fiction

This is not only testament to Amadís’s hold over the imagination, or of the
prestige the spaces he had created for the genre kept and generated, but also
of the change the marvelous in general had experienced, linked more to sur-
face, to spectacle. This description, of course, made the island available for
representation.
The tapestries depicting the Amadís de Gaula seem to refuse to repre-
sent all insular spaces. In the tapestries, islands are stripped of their relation
to the sea, adventures reduced to their territorial, promenading possibility,
pushing the very limiting qualities of the insular outside the frame of rep-
resentation, voiding, in a way, the essence of insularity, as in the Princeton
tapestry, which depicts the magic garden of the Ínsula Firme. In contrast with
the book illustrations, there is no reference here to the seascape that contex-
tualizes the island in the narrative, there are no boats, no horizon with other
islands. The tapestry selects the smallest, the innermost locus of the palimp-
sestic insular dominion of the hero, taking only the garden, the locus amoenus
and placing at its center the French invention of a labyrinth, while shedding
the political utopia, the possibility of relation to the other islands, the other
spaces of the Amadís fiction.
One of the reasons for this treatment of the representation of spaces is
that the vastness that surrounds the islands, the ocean, runs counter to the
rich elaborations and complex overlapping of episodes and detail the weav-
ing of tapestries seeks. The very nature of tapestry weaving made it much
more likely to represent the French translation, obsessed with textural detail
and description, than the more action-driven Spanish original. But there
are other reasons, as there are also other types of movement being opposed
in these representations. While the tapestries and the spaces depicted there
encourage courtly promenading, it is the closed, static space of the court
and its monumental, overpopulated, spectacular imitations of chivalric life
that frame the scenes. The most open of spaces represented in the tapes-
tries, in which the action of the knight liberating Oriana presents the forest
of their adventures, has as its image front and center one of staticity, of sub-
mission, of controlled, structured gestures.
Going back to the woodcuts and engravings, I want to underscore the
possibility of mobility between illustrations, or of wandering within a single
one of them, for many depict insular spaces with entire episodes represented
 Shores of Fiction 133

in sequence, a double movement that suggests the possibility of travel of

gaze and imagination located on a single island or between these islands of
illustration through the sea of words, inciting the mind to wander off—what
Buondelmonti stated in his dedication as possibility for his isolario. The
Spanish woodcuts, in their lack of specificity, in their coarse inability to illus-
trate, as Rothstein might characterize them, further highlight such fictional
possibilities for the reading, traveling subject. One might of course linger on
one particular island, but one might also err among them, even imagine the
possibility of inserting one’s own island fiction in the archipelago.
In maps that depict islands, even fictional islands, such extremes are not
so readily available for comparison, for, as Jacob suggests, in cartography
the lines that delimit an island “suggest the essence of insularity more than
any clear geographical identity.”30 This immediate trigger of imagination
limits the possibility of lingering upon one, singular island, for the relation
to the continent is always there. Perspective is crucial to these distinctions.
While representation in tapestry and the French engravings, and to a certain
point in the Spanish woodcuts, places the viewer as a potential protagonist,
the maps depicting islands offer a vertical view. In these maps, moreover,
the invention of a probable island by the casual spectator is impossible in the
way it is possible for the reader of books of chivalry. In these maps, the pos-
sibility of charting a new course that includes one’s own island is limited to
the cartographer, and even then, the recognition of these invented insular
spaces will not be available to the casual reader of the map.
Within cartography, however, isolarii offer the perfect format for the ex-
ploration of the entire spectrum of representation of insular fictions. The
curious symmetry of material space and represented space in the isolario,
that is, where the codex is the archipelago, and a folio is an island, a symme-
try developed later in the genre equating even the form of the text itself to
the island, making the text a sonnet, explains in part the enduring charm of
the genre, and even its demise, as the metaphorical expansion of the concept
of insularity into an ever-expanding space to be represented could no longer
be buttressed by the material support of its representation. The ambiguous
status of insular spaces between isolation and relation, between individual
representation and consideration as archipelago, is resolved in the isolario
through the very format, where the alternation of text and map allows for
134 Shores of Fiction

the transition between one space and the other. The text there serves as the
sea, in a way, as the time of travel between islands, or as the space that takes
one from the interior of the continent to arrive at the end of a paragraph and
disembark on a new beach traced in brown ink. A user of these manuscripts
would have, no doubt, held the volume and considered some form of total-
ization, of absolute power over a completeness, the satisfaction of a catalogue,
of an ordered logic contained comparable to the encyclopedia—or the atlas.
The experience of isolarii, however, also includes an opening to infinite repe-
tition, of multiple travels reproduced and restarted upon increasingly abstract
locations. That the space that provides this possibility of both totalizing ex-
perience and infinite repetition is an island is no coincidence, and the partic-
ular exhilaration one feels when perusing these manuscripts is one common
to the genre in general, that of both extremes of experience simultaneously
presented: the deserted singular island of self and the archipelagic, cosmopol-
itan relation of the unity of many islands, pure fiction and pure politics, with
the reading, traveling subject enacting possible itineraries between them.
In literature, Amadís de Gaula provided the same paradoxical set of pos-
sibilities, detailing singular island experiences that determine the construc-
tion of the hero, and providing the possibility of infinite repetition. The
emphasis on singularity offers the characterization of self through the emo-
tional construction of the protagonist, as in the Peña Pobre episode, and
through the archipelago, linking the episodes on the Ínsula Firme, the Ínsula
de Mongaça, the Ínsula de la Torre Bermeja, and so forth, Montalvo articu-
lates a particular political and ethical project that involves chivalric fiction
within a specific historical context. Books of chivalry took pleasure in explor-
ing the variatio that Amadís inaugurated and thus expanded the archipelago
into the New World, into the fantastic or the dystopian.
Between the encyclopedic thrust and a humanism related to a more real-
istic, protoscientific, objective attitude, and the emphasis on subjective expe-
rience as a guiding thread of narrative in all these variations of Amadisian
perspective, from the verbal to the visual, is the space of fiction. Fiction
understood as intrinsic to the experience of travel that separates Buondel-
monti’s Liber from the purely cartographic and links it to the travelogue.
Amadís is the literary version of the same operation: a marvelous periplus
that transforms elements from history, literature, and geography to build not
 Shores of Fiction 135

a scientific or rational archipelago but one linked through the experience and
fidelity of the knightly hero, an experience that the visual interpretations of
the book, whether in woodcuts or tapestries, transform into one readily
available for the viewer/reader. Each in its own way, focusing on the experi-
ence of space, book of chivalry, isolario, or tapestry, illustrate that specter
referred to by Bede, Diomedes the grammarian, Saint Isidore, or Jean de
Garlande as res ficta quae tamen fieri potuit (fictional deeds that nevertheless
could have been true), with different effects at the level of the political and
ethical projects underlying each specific project. This is the third course of
narration, astride between res gesta and res ficta, between the “done” and the
“imagined,” a frontier genre.31
The genres coincide in their spatial nature, bordering on cartographic
discourse and in their Homeric hybridity between the historical and the
poetic, both articulated through an impulse that finds expression in what I
have called an “insular turn.” This elaboration can be read from the point of
view of philosophy in terms of what I anticipated in the discussion of Badiou
in the introduction in terms of event. As complementary developments in
intimately related disciplines, isolario and book of chivalry supplement each
other’s thrust toward adventure, both bookish and military, humanistic and
colonizing, mercantile and imperial.
Amadís’s travels to the East—in the Aegean, in the Ínsulas de Romanía—
end in that paradoxical palimpsest of spaces: Constantinople. Frequently
represented as a peninsula, that is, as almost an island, Constantinople lies at
the extreme of the marvelous: as the urban, technological, wondrous other.
Amadís’s trip to Constantinople reworks a literary topos present already in
Chrétien’s Cligès, and follows a narrative tradition of the description of cities
inaugurated in twelfth-century romances with the description of Carthage
in the Enéas, followed by that of Babylon represented in the Libro de Alexan-
dre, or the Babylon of Flores y Blancaflor. With the added imaginary value of
wealth and magic linked to its Orientalism, Constantinople became a logical
site for the marvelous, and a staple of books of chivalry.
Historically, the 1453 fall of Constantinople to the Turks rekindled for
the city both the mystery and the will to penetrate that mystery. Half a cen-
tury later, peregrinations to Constantinople, the Holy Land, and the East in
general became very popular again, making the visit to Constantinople by
136 Shores of Fiction

Amadís one that can be traced back, once again, to historical travel accounts.32
Constantinople in Amadís is not only a place visited by the hero. In Amadís
de Gaula, the city’s marvelous thrust is distributed equally between protag-
onist and author. In the prologue we are told that the fourth book was found
in “a stone tomb, which was buried under a hermitage, near Constantino-
ple.” This not only complies with a motif, but also mirrors the historical
search for manuscripts that learned men undertook, either out of their own
interest or following someone’s request, as in the case of Buondelmonti. In
a sort of balancing of the marvelous, Amadís’s entrance into the city is tri-
umphant, and the human and the urban complement each other’s wondrous
nature. In Amadís’s battle against Lisuarte and the Roman Empire, the equa-
tion of Amadís’s kingdom, of Ínsula Firme and the City of Constantinople
will be complete, as the hero is acknowledged as an equal and those other
emperors send their support. Constantinople, at the extreme of the spatial
coordinates of the Amadís, is part of its archipelago (Figures 28, 29, and 30).

Figure 28. A queen on her knees bids farewell to a ship. Folio 15v, from Amadís de
Gaula: Los quatro libros de Amadís d’Gaula nueuamente impressos et hystoriados [Venice,
1533]. Houghton Library, Typ 525.33.138 F.
 Shores of Fiction 137

At the end of the Sergas de Esplandián, fifth book of the Amadís cycle,
which recounts the adventures of Amadís’s son (the word sergas means
“feats,” but also alludes to a tapestry with the story of a character),33 Urganda
la Desconocida, sensing the death of the heroes is near, gathers the characters
on the Ínsula Firme, rejuvenates them through magic herbs, and commands
the island to disappear magically into the depths of the earth, whence they
will return in the time of Arthur. With this sunken Atlantis as a legacy, books
of chivalry will multiply archipelagoes, their characters hoping for the reap-
pearance of the Ínsula Firme, reenacting forms of fiction (and politics) in their
itineraries. In its wake, authors of many interests and skills produce books
and cycles in the genre, texts that constitute a collection of places, an isolario
of the sort on which the itinerary of the modern novel might be traced.

Figure 29. Islands are places to seek solitude and salvation, as hermit or as lover in
penance. Folio 109r, from Amadís de Gaula: Los quatro libros de Amadís d’Gaula
nueuamente impressos et hystoriados [Venice, 1533]. Houghton Library, Typ
525.33.138 F.
138 Shores of Fiction

The numerous recurrences of marvelous insular spaces in the romances

that followed Amadís, from the new generations of the Amadisian family to
other families of chivalric heroes—Belianís, Palmerín, Clarián—bear wit-
ness to the success of the change from forest to island as a site for the mar-
velous. Islands are multiplied in the Spanish book of chivalry in the most
fabulous ways, sometimes finding a route to the New Continent, as in Mon-
talvo’s own Sergas de Esplandián (ca. 1496?).34 The French translation of
Amadís by Herberay des Essarts depicts this route to America as island in its
woodcuts; the Spanish romances, beyond the direct reworkings of islands
of the Amadís, such as the Ínsula Peligrosa and the Ínsula del Sepulcro of
Palmerín de Inglaterra (1511), 35 elaborate spaces such as the Ínsula Gigan-
tea and Ínsula Salvajina of Lisuarte de Grecia (1514), Ínsula Despoblada of

Figure 30. Cliffs and inaccessibility help frame islands that contain the most wonderful
adventures for the knight. Folio 165v, from Amadís de Gaula: Los quatro libros de
Amadís d’Gaula nueuamente impressos et hystoriados [Venice, 1533]. Houghton Library,
Typ 525.33.138 F.
 Shores of Fiction 139

Amadís de Grecia (1530), the Ínsula Solisticia of Belianís de Grecia (1535),

the Ínsula Nublada and Ínsula No Hollada of Policisne de Boecia (chapters 51
and 95, particularly plagued with marvelous beings such as dwarfs, unicorns,
and giants; 1602), among scores of others. The toponyms reveal the insis-
tent relationship between the insular and the marvelous, between books
and cycles, as well as an emphasis on the Aegean Sea as setting, mirroring
the genre of the isolario once again.36
In cartography, any new space would be initially designated as an island.
Álvarez Cabral set out after Vasco da Gama but, extending his turn too
far into the West, stumbled upon an island that he named Terra da Santa
Cruz and which later became Brazil. Islands literally serve as excursus or
stepping-stones in myriad places, as when Sebastián de Cobarruvias Orozco
digresses, in his definition of isla, to point out that “in the navigation be-
tween Portugal and Eastern India, that is, five thousand water leagues, there
is in the middle of the great Ocean (where they say no ground exists) an
uninhabited islet called Saint Helen, provided with fresh water, fish, game,
and fruits, which the same earth produces without effort, where sailors
rest, fish, hunt, and supply themselves with water.”37 Among this incessant
proliferation of islands in a variety of spatial meanings, Pantagruel’s fourth
book could be cited, with many others, as a comparative example, elegantly
studied by Lestringant in his book. As literal middle grounds between the
New and the Old Worlds, sailors, cartographers, and writers laid islands
like paths. Columbus spent the last days before he set out on his trip in the
monastery of Cartuja, upon an island, and sighted the New World for the
first time as an island as well—much like ancient geographers would have.
The islands drew itineraries to another terra firma.38
As I have argued, the genre of the isolario, anticipating the atlas in its
gestures toward totality, presents the medieval practices of collecting and
the idea of the encyclopedia that are accentuated in the Renaissance. It is not
difficult to see how cartography would become a preferred medium for the
compilation of “common places,” from fantastic islands to the depiction of
sea monsters and monstrous races or, as exploration pushed the latter off
the map, the depiction of native peoples or the symbolic representation of
places through the monuments that identified them. Literary works in the
wake of romances of chivalry and early modern cartographic developments
140 Shores of Fiction

mirrored both the gesture toward totality and the collecting practice, at
times connecting a marvelous and a geographical island through a historical
reality, like Tasso; at other times turning islands into a discursive metaphor.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, in a much quoted passage in his Historia ver-
dadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (ca. 1568, printed 1632) writes,
upon arriving at Tenochtitlan, that it all seemed a thing of enchantment
as those of Amadís.39 Stephen Gilman noted how Díaz’s descriptions of
these buildings in the water resemble constructions referred to in chivalric
romances, quoting a very similar passage from Amadís. But beyond these
similarities in the referent, the geographical subject matter, or even the land-
scape described, Gilman writes, “One of the fascinations of the Historia ver-
dadera de la conquista de la Nueva España for the lover of Spanish literature
is to encounter here and there along the slow broad current of the narra-
tive familiar islands of style and literary reference . . . those familiar islands of
style so refreshingly and expressively recreated amid the flow of exotic hap-
penings, islands which constitute a primordial anthology of Spanish letters.”40
Two interesting points in Gilman’s analysis bear on my purposes here. The
first is his acknowledgment of the confusion between historical and fictional
discourses in Bernal’s writing, something that seems obvious but neverthe-
less needed to be pointed out. The second is his metaphorical use of the
word island to refer to a discursive site for the enactment of a literary
reference, or for the invocation of a literary theme. Gilman describes the
sum of such references as a “primordial anthology of Spanish letters,” thus
making Díaz del Castillos’s chronicle a sort of commonplace book or iso-
lario, an archipelago of fiction.
“Islands of style” or of “literary reference” are commonplace in all literary
writing, and may bear the name of topoi in their most codified forms, such
as the recurrence of the inspirational landscape of the locus amoenus or the
repetition of a certain behavioral pattern in the case of the hero. However,
repetitions or representations that involve the work of a single author, or a
particular use of a collective impulse are not usually codified as fixed themes,
but their separateness remains functional to point to questions of poetics.
In discussing the difficulty of pinning down Cervantes’s autobiographical
references or even a clearly personal note from the author, Mary Gaylord
craftily terms Cervantine self-consciousness “islands of concrete self-reference.”41
 Shores of Fiction 141

Cervantes’s rewriting of the chivalric island in the Ínsula Barataria episode

is not only the most famous of reworkings of book of chivalry’s insular
fictions, but also one that has been linked most personally to Cervantes’s
own disenchanted vision of politics. In this episode, Cervantes, through the
prism of politics, highlights not only the multiple discourses that are at work
in the chivalric motif but its structural role in the production of fiction.

Barataria, or the Isolation of Language

Indeed Cervantes, in many of his long prose fictions but particularly in Don
Quixote, explores the potential of the “common place,” which the book of
chivalry as genre provides in hordes. In this, often labeled the first modern
novel, it is possible to trace how the repetition of a setting as a motif, privi-
leging certain contents, slowly metamorphoses into a fictional situation that
in turn triggers a discussion on poetics, finally to become a metaphor for
something else. That is, in Cervantes’s representation of chivalric insularity,
the island as setting becomes a literary reference, which in turn becomes a
structure, a metaphor, and an island of style.
As an exemplar of its kind and as a model for Cervantes’s protagonist,
the Amadís is the privileged pretext for the writing of Don Quixote, but it is
also a literary practice that flows through Cervantes’s writing. Reference to
other literary genres is made in many different ways in Don Quixote: inter-
polation of novellas, mention of a character and of either his name or his
profession, a setting, or a place visited by the knight. Some of the latter, hav-
ing to do with space, are also discussions on poetics, which Gaylord has
studied as “simultaneously defining the space of poetry and poetics, and a
poetics of space.”42 Gaylord concludes from her analyses of various episodes
that simultaneous presence of literal and figurative spaces can be detected
in almost all instances in Cervantes’s work where aesthetic questions are
addressed. These spaces are always plural and contradictory, but such oppo-
sitions are not to be understood as fixed binaries, but as the actualization of
tensions, as an ambiguous presentation of the play between them.43 Theresa
Ann Sears reaches similar conclusions on the role of space in studying
modernity in Don Quixote precisely from the question of space and place.
Arguing from the conviction that Cervantes’s narrative is more a continua-
tion than a rejection of romance, this critic studies the duplication of spaces
142 Shores of Fiction

in Don Quixote. She focuses on how the Sierra Morena episodes, where Don
Quixote and Sancho flee after freeing the galley slaves, work both as ideal
and as real, as both chivalric site of adventure and the despoblado in which
Roberto González Echevarría locates the absence of law.44
We have seen how the content of these spaces is not exclusive to a genre
or a theme, but in fact cumulative, palimpsestic already within romance, that
is, a floresta of the Spanish book of chivalry is both a space for the chivalric
adventure and a despoblado, and it may also be a locus amoenus if the adven-
ture is amorous, and it might be also reminiscent of a hortus conclusus, if
the characterization of the space so allows. Moreover, these spaces might be
located on an island, which would reinforce certain traits, such as isolation,
an edenic idea, a distancing. These series of developed motifs and relo-
cated contents emerge within a medieval system of space/place (with roots
in classical oppositions) to produce the space of the forest as the site for
adventure and, in the late Middle Ages, substituting it for the island in an
atmosphere that proposes a new way of interrogating the real.
Sancho himself speaks of the chivalric as a style when he refers to the
marvelous geography of Amadís and of books of chivalry in general as “errant
writings” (escrituras andantes). Perhaps once again in imitation of Amadís,
Don Quixote moves toward the Mediterranean; most of the interpolated
stories will take place there, as is the case of the Tale of Foolish Curiosity
and the Captive’s Tale (even if in this last one there is a brother who is on his
way to the Indies).45 In this movement, the knight follows itineraries that
resemble, to his mind, those of books of chivalry. These, of course, had to
include islands. The specific elaboration of Ínsula Firme in Don Quixote as
paradigm for the Ínsula Barataria episode, labeled by Augustin Redondo as
the most important of the second part, is not the first reference to an Ama-
disian insular space.46
In the Sierra Morena episodes, Cervantes reelaborates an insular space
related to Amadís for the first time. Fearful of the repercussions of liberating
the galley slaves, Sancho leads the knight into the stark landscape of Sierra
Morena.47 As Don Quixote enters the mountains, he is excited by what the
landscape suggests in terms of adventure/events. Don Quixote’s heart re-
joices, “for this seemed to him a perfect place for the adventures he was seeking”
(I, 23, 128; my emphasis),48 underscoring the relation between adventure
 Shores of Fiction 143

and location, between wandering or erring into the site of a possible event
that is characterized as coming from chivalric fiction (for to his mind come
“all the miraculous things that had happened to knights errant in such soli-
tary and rugged places” [I, 23]).
In the distance, they see a man jumping among rocks, half naked, wear-
ing the “hairstyle” of the well-known character of the “wild man,” whose
story will be explained later on by a goatherd.49 He is a young man named
Cardenio, carrying out a “penance” for love in that landscape, alternating
outbursts of raging love with those of a quiet melancholy. One of the many
interpolated stories within Quixote, Cardenio’s is specifically a parody of
sentimental fiction, whose plot will be slowly developed over the next few
chapters and picked up again in chapter 28 from a feminine perspective. In
chapters 26 and 27, Don Quixote enacts his own penance, inspired by Car-
denio’s “real” model, which he has just witnessed. But not only on Cardenio’s,
of course.
Penance was one of the fixed motifs for the true, long-suffering lover, a
protagonist shared by many genres and one that gave chivalry in Spain,
through Amadís, a model. Entering chapter 25, and well into the depths of
Sierra Morena, Sancho asks his master if it is good chivalric practice to be
lost in the mountains, without a path or road, searching for a wild man. Don
Quixote responds that he is not only in those mountains to search for a crazy
man but also to achieve a feat that will earn him eternal name and renown.
The feat consists in imitating a hero in his penance.50
Don Quixote hesitates, as we know, between imitating Amadís and imi-
tating Orlando, between the lamenting and sentimentality of Montalvo’s
Amadís on the Poor Rock and the craziness and fury of Ariosto’s Orlando:
that is, Quixote hesitates between the book of chivalry and the epic.51
Amadís’s penance on the Poor Rock, part of the Amadisian archipelago,
complements the hero’s subjectivity through the construction of emotion,
and was one of the most famous episodes of the book. As a result of a mis-
understanding, Amadís loses his lady’s favor and thus finds his chivalric
drive missing. Symptomatically, it is not fortune that leads him to his next
adventure, but arbitrariness, as he lets his horse err every other way, leading
him to happen upon the hermit Andalod. Amadís’s penance on the Poor
Rock also registers the reconfiguration of the identity of the knight in the
144 Shores of Fiction

change of name, as the hermit rebaptizes Amadís as Beltenebros.52 Sancho

intervenes immediately, comparing model and imitation, by saying that these
characters had a reason for their fury or their tears, unlike the Caballero de
la Triste Figura, the Knight of the Sad Face. Don Quixote’s answer is that
therein, precisely, resides the subtlety of his imitation: there is neither plea-
sure nor merit in going mad with a reason, as madness is only to be expected
in those occasions. If Don Quixote is to go mad without a reason, the in-
tensity derives from asking what he would do if he actually had a reason.
“Mad is what I am, and mad is what I have to be until you return” (I, 25,
144), he claims, and selects the foot of a mountain with a gentle stream and
a lush green meadow to go mad for love.53 A first setting, the Sierra Morena,
triggers a discussion on imitation that sends the knight in search of the
appropriate location for the subject of imitation he has chosen.
The place he chooses is a locus amoenus, laden with fixed meanings, where
the Caballero de la Triste Figura begins his lament, as if he were out of his
wits: “This is the spot, oh heavens, I choose and hereby take” (I, 25, 145) he
cries, as he destines a topos to be the place for imitation, which is also the
place for author and character to comment on literature and reality. It is
an active selection that stems from the character’s literary topographical cul-
ture, from his literary memory’s commonplaces, and Cervantes chooses
these places precisely for discussions on poetics.
Toward the end of the second part, there is a moment where different
emphases on the uses of space and place come together, ciphering in a way
the production of a new kind of space. This is the episode of Ínsula Bara-
taria, told in alternate chapters from chapter 45 on, when Sancho sets out on
his way to his governorship (even though the ínsula has been given to him in
II, 32), and until chapter 54, when he leaves the ínsula to fall into the pit, and
chapter 55, when Don Quixote finds him.
Sancho’s common sense and popular wisdom are constantly opposed to
Don Quixote’s literary, cultivated, mad knowledge. Sancho’s sensitivity to
practical matters, his ability to point out contradictions, is gradually mediated
by what is known as the “quixotification” of Sancho, which is corresponded
to the “sanchification” of Don Quixote.54 The progressive schizophrenic
development of both protagonists culminates in the structural separation of
the characters. In fact, the episode of Ínsula Barataria is the first time in Don
 Shores of Fiction 145

Quixote, as a technical innovation, that the narration of the adventures of

one character will alternate with the narration of the adventures of the other,
a reminder of interweaving in the book of chivalry as a way to tell stories
occurring in different spaces.
Monique Joly and Avalle-Arce note that among the resources that Cer-
vantes uses in order to underline the importance of this episode are two
interventions by Cide Hamete Benengeli.55 The first of these is a response to
the criticism the first part had elicited on the use of interpolated stories.56
The narrator relates that, in the original version, not translated exactly in the
manner Cide Hamete had written it, in contrast with the use of interpolated
novels in the first part, the Moor, “in this second volume, . . . had decided not
to introduce any separate, artful tales, but only such narratives as, to his
mind, emerged out of the strictly historical facts” (II, 44, 574). The topic
had already been discussed in the 1616 Quixote (II, 3). Joly writes that “the
development this theme receives, integrated into the supposed protests of
Benengeli against the difficulty of keeping his narration to the events related
with the main story” is particularly surprising: “It is of a certain importance
that such a significantly theoretical fragment, regardless of its humorous
tone, be located at the beginning of the chapter in which the technical inno-
vation of alternating one chapter devoted to Don Quixote with another one
referring Sancho’s or his family’s adventures is used for the first time.”57 The
separation of the characters occurs in fact only twice before this episode, sig-
nificantly in two moments of literary criticism: Sancho leaves Don Quixote
in Sierra Morena to pine away for his lady, and they are separated again
for the adventure of the Cave of Montesinos. In this case, the separation
is accentuated by Don Quixote’s sense of solitude: “We’re told, then, that
Sancho had hardly gone when Don Quixote became aware of pangs of lone-
liness” (II, 44, 576). It is also signaled structurally by a call to the reader just
a paragraph before the one just cited: “And so, my dear reader, we will let our
good Sancho make his departure in peace,” anticipating the technical use of
alternated episodes to narrate the adventures of the separated protagonists.
The arrival of Sancho at the Ínsula Barataria in chapter 45 is introduced
by yet another intervention of Cide Hamete. An invocation of Apollo to illu-
minate the darkness of his wits is enriched by a subtle cartographic refer-
ence: “Oh You who regularly explore the opposite ends of the earth, light
146 Shores of Fiction

and torch of the world, eye of the heavens, You who make men run to the
sweet, refreshing coolness of wine—You, known here as Thymbrius, there
as Phoebus Apollo, in this place a bowman, in that a physician, father of
Poetry, creator of Music—You who rise up forever and, appearances to the
contrary notwithstanding, never set!” (II, 45, 581). Apollo’s eye of heaven
is, in fact, the metaphor for a godly or imperial perspective, an overarching
view of the world, reinforced by a reference to Apollo as perpetual discov-
erer of the Antipodes, all of which seems to direct the reader to a geograph-
ical use of the insular setting.58 Previously, in chapter 42, the duke has also
described the island, in giving it to Sancho, as an “ínsula hecha y derecha,
redonda y bien proporcionada” (a whole island, round and well made),
adding to the sense that the ínsula, as much as we anticipate a parody, will
be a place, an insular space. The reader, thus, is not clued in as to what sort
of displacement will occur in spatial terms and might anticipate disruption
at the level of plot in what will happen to the squire in his term as governor.
In chapter 42 Don Quixote states his first series of recommendations to
Sancho in his new role as governor of the Ínsula Barataria. This first series
consists precisely of a collection whose sources can be traced to biblical
proverbs, to sententiae by Isocrates, and to Aristotle, Plutarch, Epictetus,
Seneca, the Catos, and the medieval tradition of advice to princes, with Iber-
ian examples in Alfonso X and Don Juan Manuel and even a chivalric one
in the Libro del cavallero Çifar, along with other sixteenth-century authors
such as Antonio de Guevara, Alfonso de Valdés, and Erasmus. Don Quixote’s
other personality comes to life in a second series of recommendations, in
chapter 43. Here, the knight gives up rhetorical, spiritual, and political in-
structions in favor of advice on appearance, courtly behavior, and manners.
This body of knowledge will be tested in the next chapters, as Sancho is
made governor of Ínsula Barataria.59
The split between knight and squire occurs between chapters 44 and
45, one thread of discourse following Don Quixote to the palace, the other
following Sancho to his island. Sancho proves to be an impeccable adminis-
trator, an insightful judge, and also very impatient with the jokes played on
his stomach and his fears. He is ultimately defeated not as administrator
or judge, but as soldier. The image of ideal governor comes to light in the
triangle of justice, administration, and courage, when the false threat of a
 Shores of Fiction 147

rebellion literally drives Sancho out of his wits, and he decides to give up the
governorship.60
The arrival at Ínsula Barataria is framed by Sancho’s use of popular say-
ings and proverbs. As soon as he is presented a series of matters, previously
arranged to test his wit, Sancho changes his linguistic register. The first of
these problems he solves in Solomonic form, a case whose source has been
traced to Hispanic folklore. The other two cases belong to a written tradi-
tion and have their origin in florilegia of juridical exempla, or collections of
such cases. Sancho’s use of high-culture tradition and language contrasts
with his use elsewhere of popular, traditional phrases. Later on, after finally
having eaten, Sancho decides to make the rounds of his gobierno, under-
scoring the roundedness of his insular government, by walking his territory.
His three encounters elaborate on popular tradition, except for the last one:
Sancho encounters a beautiful girl dressed as a man, which is the usual cue
for the beginning of a novelesque excursus, a motif amply used in sixteenth-
century theater and prose fiction.61 In this case, surprisingly, nothing hap-
pens. There is no story that follows the encounter.
What the language of Sancho frames and characterizes is a space, that
of the Island of Barataria. The ambiguity of etymologies and Cervantes’s
movement between referents and their metaphors have led to the wildest
geographical identifications of Ínsula Barataria, following leads toward a
geographical image of the island. Eduardo Saavedra, for example, suggested
that Cervantes had taken the word baratario from a diploma, called a bara,
given to Christian merchants in Turkey to allow them to work. Fermín Cabal-
lero locates Sancho’s governorship in the village of Alcalá del Ebro “which,
if not an island, is almost completely surrounded by the river, which is
why in the Succession War there was a project to isolate it completely, open-
ing up a ditch in the isthmus,” perhaps reminded of King Utopus.62 Diego
Clemencín, in his commentary on the episode, alludes to a series of hypothe-
ses ranging from the reference to insular spaces in the chivalric romance
to the identification of the village of Pedrola, to what is the common inter-
pretation of Barataria, that is, a place associated with the idea of a fraud,
a farce.63
The reference to romances of chivalry contained in Sancho’s ínsula is
immediate, as references to particular islands of Amadís throughout Quixote,
148 Shores of Fiction

such as the Ínsula Firme or the Peña Pobre, show. But this association is not
limited to books reelaborating or explicitly referring to the chivalric romance,
such as Don Quixote itself. The Diccionario de Autoridades obviates the rela-
tionship in its definition of ínsula by quoting book IV of Amadís de Gaula, as
does Joan Corominas’s Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana.
Both of these, as well as the 1791 Diccionario de la Real Academia, note the
persistence of an original meaning of the Latin insula, that is, as designating
a block or group of houses on land, and sometimes even referring to a small
area of land distinguished from the territory surrounding it, or a patch of trees
in the middle of a meadow.64 Going back in time to texts antedating Quixote,
one finds references to ínsula mainly in two types of contexts: either legal
ones, referring to government or prison, or in lapidaries, as places of origin
for marvelous stones. One can also find documents using the term to refer
to a discrete place on firm ground, in the sense of an isolated patch of land.65
As for barataria, many approximate definitions refer to deception, dissi-
pation, dilapidation, or fraud; to a word used among sea merchants; and to
barter or trade. The relationship between fraud and commerce is explained
by Corominas: “Semantically we go from the idea of ‘deceiving’ to the idea
of ‘trapping with good words to do business’ and from there to ‘trade’ or
‘traffic, negotiate,’” which he compares then to the German tausch (trade)
taken from täuschen (to deceive) and pointing to terms in Spanish with nega-
tive connotations such as cambalache (unfair trade), noted by Rubio García.66
This meaning of “barata” as a trading trick or deception is consistent with
the Diccionario de Autoridades, and Corominas explains in his article on
baratar that the term, originally a verb common to all Hispanic, French, and
Italian Romance languages, disappeared in the seventeenth century, leaving
behind derivations such as our modern adverb barato (cheap) and the noun
barata (sale).67 The verb had a commercial referent from the beginning
(Libro de Alexandre, Kalila e Dimna), and it could mean to win at chess, as
in Alfonso X’s Tablas Alfonsíes; but early on it acquired a shading of trickery,
of abuse, documented in Wace and Chrétien de Troyes, in Dante, and in
Alfonso X himself in his Partidas (VII, Tít. 16).
Ínsula, a term that was already old-fashioned at the time of Cervantes
in the sense of “island,” did not exclusively mean a geographical island as
opposed to mainland, as I have noted before. Evidently, however, this use
 Shores of Fiction 149

of the term ínsula already entails a transposition of meaning, a metaphorical

use, basing its coincidences with the original term on a series of ideas, among
them isolation, encirclement, delimitation, and, above all, distance, inde-
pendence from what lies beyond that limit, beyond that isolating frontier.68
In all of the wondrous events that take place on literary islands, from
Odysseus’s Ithaca to Amadís’s Ínsula Firme, the reference to a government,
to a certain form of politics, is already present, as it is in Sancho’s Barataria.
Cervantes’s ideas on power, framed by popular wisdom and regulated by lin-
guistic practices, brought to misery by way of mockery, are here carefully
framed in a particular space, and the episode is isolated, as it were, suggesting
even its independent status.69 Barataria occupies the place of a metaphorical
island in the middle of an otherwise verifiable rural Spain, but suspiciously
remains one of the few unmappable spaces in Quixote.
As the series of recommendations from the knight confirm, the episode
is an invitation to reflect on the nature and the exercise of power and how
it stands in contrast to eternal happiness, an antinomy referred to by both
squire and knight in chapter 43. “In truth,” writes Moner, “the idea that the
exercise of power is not very compatible with the health of the soul con-
stitutes a commonplace of political philosophy, which gave rise to many
a controversy, notably after the publication of the theses of Machiavelli
(The Prince, 1532), which we know to proclaim, precisely, the primacy of
the Reason of State in relation to virtue.” Virtue as a political value is then
one of the main thematic threads that are at play in this episode, much in
tune with the production of political space through the adventures of the
Ínsula Firme in Amadís.70
References to islands throughout Quixote are numerous: there are in fact
118 cases of the word ínsula in the text, and the plural ínsulas occurs another
28. Of these references, relatively few are to particular, named islands. The
more modern word isla is used only 6 times in the novel, 5 of these designat-
ing specific, existing islands.71 The only instances where the word isla is used
without a specific reference is by Sancho in part II, chapter 3, referring to his
promised governorship, and Sansón Carrasco’s reply to Sancho in the same
chapter with the plural islas. This is the only time Sancho refers to the space
of Barataria as an isla. Every other time that geography is invoked it is called
ínsula. Of the 146 times the word ínsula or ínsulas occurs, only 5 refer to a
150 Shores of Fiction

specific, named island. The first occurrence is in part I, chapter 1, as Don

Quixote imagines the giant Caraculiambro, lord of the Ínsula Malandrania;
the third is the ínsula governed by the giant Pandafilando de la Fosca Vista
(I, 30); the sixth is the Ínsula Barataria (II, 45). All of these places are Cer-
vantes’s inventions. The other 2 instances of named islands (I, 20; I, 50) are
references to Amadís de Gaula’s Ínsula Firme. This calls, I believe, for a com-
parison between the two islands Firme and Barataria as figures of the same
space, revisited from a Cervantine perspective.72
Comparison between Sancho’s island and that of Amadís brings out im-
mediate similarities and major differences. We have the infinite difference of
the characters, of the governors: Amadís is the world’s best knight, while
Sancho is a dubious squire. In fact, it should be Don Quixote who obtains a
territory, a kingdom; but he has been displaced to an activity more like that
of Galaor, enacting love adventures in the duke’s palace. Amadís is named
king of his island, and has a governor, Isanjo, to take care of administrative
matters. Sancho is the governor and must deal with all bureaucracy himself.
Both characters must go through a certain initiation ritual in order to be
accepted as rulers. In Amadís’s case, it is a highly elaborate process (the Arco
de los leales amadores), permeated with courtly meanings. Sancho’s trial con-
sists of a series of problems taken from popular tradition and solved with no
sophistication but pure common sense.
The Island of Barataria, as the Ínsula Firme, is the production of a space
for politics, though Cervantes collects a variety of genres and references
through the various filters of the mirror of princes, carnival mockery of village
ingenuity, philosophical reflection on the vicissitudes of power, and even a
call for a debate on the worthiness of earthly power when compared to eter-
nal happiness. Of those 146 occurrences of the word ínsula/s, 105 are situ-
ated very close to the words gobierno, gobernador, gobernar; only slightly
enhanced by the change from promise to possession, which occurs around
chapter 42 of the second part. Ínsula occurs in the same line with some word
relative to promesa 17 times, and with posesión only twice, which offers some
clues as to how this type of politics is emplaced in terms of time or possibil-
ity. Gobierno and promesa coincide with ínsula 5 times, all of them in the first
ten chapters; from then on and up to part II, chapter 41, they are almost
interchangeable. Ínsulas and gobierno coincide 14 times, the plural occurring
 Shores of Fiction 151

only once in the first part, the other 13 throughout the episode of Barataria
itself. To state the obvious, the word gobierno becomes so linked with the
word ínsula that one cannot be understood without the other, but what is
notable is the contamination of meaning. In this process of sharing of mean-
ing, the geographical significance of ínsula is displaced to government, and
government is locked in the time of promises.
Here one must note the imprecise ontological status of Sancho’s Barataria,
reminiscent of Urganda’s Ínsula No Fallada. Sancho, in order to revive his
master after the adventure with the goatherd and the penitents (I, 52), re-
calls the generosity of Don Quixote: “¡pues por solos ocho meses de servicio
me tenías dada la mejor ínsula que el mar ciñe y rodea!” (for only eight
months of service you would have given me the best ínsula the seas en-
circle and the waves wash upon!), where the squire reveals he knows what a
geographical island is and establishes that he expects one like that. By 1615
the geography of this island is crumbling down. In part II, chapter 2, the
meaning of ínsula is questioned. The knight’s niece curses Sancho with
the word and asks for a definition: “Malas ínsulas te ahoguen—respondió la
sobrina—, Sancho maldito. Y ¿qué son ínsulas? ¿Es alguna cosa de comer,
golosazo, comilón que tú eres?” (“Go choke on those damned ínsulas,”
answered Don Quixote’s niece, “you good for nothing Sancho. And what are
ínsulas? Something to eat, you greedy glutton?)73 The play on genre, impossi-
ble since the island is geographical, seems to be pointing to an ínsula that is
only a part of language and not part of a geography. Sancho responds that it
is not a thing to eat but to govern.74 Some lines later the word has become
synonymous with a trick, mirroring the other part of the island’s toponymy,
contaminated by the “barataria,” a deceit played on the squire (and his ambi-
tion), consciously or not, on the part of Don Quixote, when the barber
claims to marvel at the simplicity of the squire, “que tan creído tiene aquello
de la ínsula” (who has completely bought into that ínsula thing) anticipating
the idea of disenchantment that we have discussed in terms of the lesson
Sancho learns from the Barataria episode. All through the second part, there
is an insistent recurrence of the word ínsula voided of a geographical mean-
ing. The ínsula is delayed: “la dicha ínsula se entretiene, no sé dónde” (II, 3)
(this ínsula is diverted, I don’t know where); figured as an unforeseen ob-
stacle: “alguna ínsula de las muchas que su merced dice que se ha de topar”
152 Shores of Fiction

(II, 4) (one of the many ínsulas your grace says one shall stumble upon);
as having equivalents: “me deparase el cielo alguna ínsula, o otra cosa seme-
jante” (II, 4) (heaven might grant me an ínsula, or something like it), “se hal-
laban premiados con una ínsula o con otra cosa equivalente” (II, 7) (found
themselves rewarded with an ínsula or something equivalent); as voided of
all meaning: “ya ni habrá ínsula, ni ínsulos en el mundo que me conozcan”
(II, 41) (there will not be neither ínsula nor ínsulos in the world that know
me). Linguistic play destabilizes reference to the point where we read that
the word is in fact empty of its geography, of what we usually think of as an
island, of what Sancho himself in the beginning thought of as an island, that
is, a land surrounded by water: “Y así, llevando adelante sus burlas, aquella
tarde enviaron a Sancho con mucho acompañamiento al lugar que para él
había de ser ínsula” (And so, furthering their mockery, that afternoon they
sent Sancho with a great assembly to the place that for him was to be an
ínsula), the place that was to be for him an island. Once again, as in many
other moments in Don Quixote, language is perspectival, subjective. In the
end, it doesn’t really matter if it is an island or not, one of those situated in
the Mediterranean or one of those already metaphorical insulae, groups
of trees, or an isolated piece of land. Sancho’s island is a linguistic one; it is
one that exists in discourse, where its existence matters.75 It is an island of
style as well, in terms of the frames of linguistic registers it presents, and also
in terms of the sources used for the legal cases Sancho is presented with. It
is also generically something strange, as it seems to subvert the techniques
previously used by the author, who sets out with the explicit purpose of
not including interpolated stories in his text, exemplifying this effort in the
refusal to elaborate the story of the girl dressed as a man. As a new island of
discourse, however, the island has lost its fictional power with its geography,
and cannot as space produce new fictions.
Following the idea that Cervantes’s reelaboration of the insular episode
constitutes a technical innovation, Avalle-Arce analyzes the episode of Bara-
taria as a new form of amplificatio, digressio, and interweaving, which Cer-
vantes takes from two models, Ariosto’s Orlando and Montalvo’s Amadís:

His new masterful control of the technique of storytelling leads him to try to
surpass the concept and use of episode as the romance had been doing. In 1605
 Shores of Fiction 153

the interventions had been vertical, falling from outside on the lives of the
central characters, with whom they had no relation. Such is the case of the
lovers of Sierra Morena, “El curioso impertinente” and “El capitán cautivo.”
Ten years later, in 1615, the novelist has matured a new concept of episodio
(digressio), and with it its intimate relatives amplificatio and interweaving.76

The episode in question is Barataria. This critic attributes the change to

Cervantes’s new interest in modifying his manner of elaborating the main
thread of the story, but this elaboration depends strongly on the insular
character of the Barataria episode in particular. In short, Cervantes would
not have been able to make this innovation in technique had he not had the
insular model—and the structural, technical blueprint that comes with it—
provided by Amadís. The concern with the specific geography of that which
is an island reflects concern with narrative technique and poetics, just as
the prologue and Sierra Morena do. But this reflection on poetics occurs not
at the level of characters or plot, but at the level of technique, of the structure
of the novel itself. The introduction of interweaving—a technique char-
acteristic of chivalric fiction—in the separation of the characters, coupled
with Cide Hamete’s intervention, marks such reflection at the technical
level. Ínsula Barataria circumscribes a change in linguistic register, one that
has served as the main characterizing trait of Sancho, the protagonist of this
episode. The space of Ínsula Barataria provides the setting for a discussion
on the nature of power and for a discussion of virtue against worldly am-
bition or eternity versus fame. Within the text itself, however, this ínsula is
already a metaphor; it has already been displaced from geography to a space
in discourse. As both a thematic island and an “island of style,” the island
serves as a figure for a new kind of episode, and for a complex kind of ampli-
ficatio that suggests a new form for the narration of fiction.
As the words amplificatio and digressio both suggest, this technical elabo-
ration is a spatial one. Amplificatio, amplification, expansion; digressio means
literally to set at a distance, to separate. The motif of the island, with the
characteristics that I have enumerated, from limitation to reversibility, from
imprisonment to paradisiacal isolation, is explored within Sancho’s experi-
ence of his governorship. The uses of ínsula to designate a space are in fact
limited to the episode in Barataria: “You, Your Lordship,” replied the steward,
154 Shores of Fiction

“because the Panza now sitting on its throne is the only Panza who’s ever
come to this island” (II, 45); “and maybe here on this island you’ve got more
gifts than rocks on the ground” (II, 45);77 “after me there will not be a single
doctor left on the island” (II, 47); “andáis de nones en esta ínsula” (II, 49)
(no translation). In these instances, an ínsula is a lived space, a place.
Sancho’s encounter with the morisco Ricote is eloquent testimony to the
absolute emptying of geographical significance of the term ínsula: “And so
it happened, before he’d traveled very far from the island where he’d been
governor—though he’d never found out whether it was really an island, a
city, a town, or a village he was governing—he saw coming toward him
along the road a group of six pilgrims with staffs” (II, 54, 632–33). One of
them is Ricote; and after much drinking and eating, Ricote tells his story
and offers Sancho what, without knowing of the Barataria episode, seems
to him to be a good deal. Sancho responds that he has just left his governor-
ship on the island, and Ricote asks for the whereabouts of this island. After
Sancho responds that it is two leagues from where they are, Ricote admon-
ishes Sancho: “‘Shut up, Sancho,’ Ricote said, ‘islands are out there in the
ocean, not on dry land’” (II, 54, 636). As Ricote brings back the geographi-
cal meaning of the word ínsula and as Sancho emerges from his governor-
ship, the world is restored to its ostensibly “proper,” clear meanings. Knights
travel with their squires at their sides and islands float happily, surrounded
by water. Islands, now back in their proper domain, are available once again
for future mappings.
 QW
conclusion
Archipelagic Possibilities
The question of fiction is first a question regarding
the distribution of places.
—jacque s r a nciè r e , The Politics of Aesthetics

T hroughout this book I have been presenting different discourses that

in the late Middle Ages and the early modern world led up to an inti-
mate relation among insularity, fiction, and event: from voyages to maps to
literature, from romance to book of chivalry to novel. The cultural atmo-
sphere that in the late medieval period looks to insularity as a new way of
interrogating the real with tools that draw from the encyclopedic and the
singular, from bookish knowledge and humanist curiosity, allowed the emer-
gence of genres in literature and cartography that focused on insularity as
the space to explore those relations. In the book of chivalry and the isolario,
island and fiction are articulated as a structure that comes to function as a
stand-in for fiction itself, as the form of fiction where events will have taken
place. This shape is taken from a geography in late medieval texts, as in
Amadís and the Liber insularum archipelagi, then displaced to discourse in
seventeenth-century elaborations, as in the late isolarii and Barataria.
In the Amadisian archipelago, fiction is the set of possible itineraries
between islands, a probable constellation to be constituted by the relation
among islands; it is a grouping process among them that might emphasize
ontology, politics, or ethics. The relations are themselves underlined and
linked through the figure of a subject that ties them together as itinerary, as
narrative. Interestingly, Amadís does not point at any evolution in this itin-
erary of narrative: it does not present a development or progress (which is
what many, even today, find “primitive” in the book of chivalry), but leaves

155
156 Conclusion

it up to the reader to chart her own routes. Cervantes, by voiding the insu-
lar/the fictional from any particular geography, makes of any fiction that
is framed, circumscribed by language, the possible site for the production
of truths.
The status of truth within fiction in early modern Iberia has been studied
from many points of view, particularly within the Renaissance debate in
Italy surrounding Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and the chivalric romanzo in gen-
eral. In the Iberian Peninsula, the main attacks on chivalric literature were of
a moral nature; that is, criticism centered not on the structure of romance
but on its pretended moral implications and its effects on readers, with many
critics taking this criticism as Cervantes’s own. Among the zealous attackers
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were Luis Vives, Pedro Malón de
Chaide, Pero Mexía, Alonso de Fuentes, Arias Montano, Gaspar de Astete,
Gonzálo Fernández de Oviedo, and Miguel Sánchez de Lima, all cited by
the influential critic Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo who, four centuries later,
concurred that “the clamor of moralists against books of chivalry, which
they saw as perpetual incentive of idleness and a plague of customs, were old
and quite justified,” establishing a national-critical continuity in the judg-
ment of both the chivalric genre and its fictional core.1 The two best-known
Golden Age attacks on books of chivalry that argue for a structural reform
based on morality and verisimilitude in such texts are Juan de Valdés’s Diál-
ogo de la lengua of 1535 and Alonso López Pinciano’s Philosophia antigua
poetica of 1596.
Valdés’s criticism focuses on the way chivalric fictions fail to present their
“lies”—which is the nature of every fiction, according to Valdés—as believ-
able truths. The failure is due to the anachronisms that plague books of
chivalry, exemplified by Valdés with passages taken from Amadís de Gaula.
In this book, the critic argues, the problems with verisimilitude are wors-
ened by the unbelievable immorality of characters belonging to the nobility
(such as Elisena, Amadís’s mother), a criterion intimately tied to Valdés’s
political emphasis on the respect of the customs and habits of a social hier-
archy, on one hand, and to the use of “special effects,” that is, unconvinc-
ing illumination or sound references in the narration of passages on which
Valdés places a curious emphasis, on the other. In other words: Valdés’s
arguments lock together politics and poetics.
 Conclusion 157

López Pinciano, on his part, elaborates on the concepts of imitation and

verisimilitude to draw conclusions on genre:

Assí que las descripciones de tiempos, lugares, palacios, bosques y semeja(n)tes,

como sean con imitación y similitud, serán poemas, y no lo será(n) si de
imitación carece(n); que el q(ue) descriuiese a Aranjuez o al Escurial assí
como están, en metro, no haría poema, sino escriuir vna historia en metro, y
assí no sería hazaña mucha; porque la obra principal no está en dezir la verdad
de la cosa, sino en fingirla que sea verosímil y llegada a la razón.

[So that the descriptions of time, places, palaces, forests, and such, if this is
done with imitation and similitude, shall be poems, and they shall not be if
they lack imitation, for he who were to describe Aranjuez or the Escorial such
as they are, in verse, would not write a poem, but a history in verse, and that
would be no great feat, because the main work is not in saying the truth of the
thing but in pretending it verisimilar and close to reason.]2

Books of chivalry do not comply with these rules of verisimilitude, accord-

ing to López Pinciano. He remarks on the nature of art, dependent not on
its proximity to truth but in its pretense of it. Because López Pinciano does
not find the book of chivalry sufficiently artful in its pretense of truth, he
characterizes chivalric romance not as fables but as disparates, absurdities or
nonsense, similar to the immoral stories or fables he terms fábulas Milesias,
written under the sign of entertainment and without any didactic purpose.
Lope de Vega would use the same label, disparates, to characterize Colum-
bus’s cartographic fictions in El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón.3
Later in his poetic dialogue, López Pinciano will place chivalric fiction within
the concept of fable, setting it apart as pure fiction: “There are three kinds of
fables: ones that are pure fiction, and their ground and fabric is all imagi-
nation, such are Milesian tales and books of chivalry; others there are that
ground a truth on lie and fiction, as Aesop’s, called apologetic, which under
a fable reveal fine and truthful advice; others there are that, ground upon a
truth, fabricate a thousand fictions, as tragedies and epics, which always or
almost always are founded upon some history.”4
When turning to the concept of episode in order to distinguish it from
the concept of fable and argument, López Pinciano provides a series of
158 Conclusion

metaphors. The fable is compared to a “stomach,” a vientre, a bodily meta-

phor that can be read in spatial terms, before turning to the metaphor of an
open rose, and, finally, to space proper: “The episodes are the mountains,
lakes, and groves that, as ornament and without need, painters pretend to
surround that which is principal in their intention, as around a city, a castle,
or a walking army.”5 Space as metaphor in this discussion on poetics is
revealing, for here the fable resembles a collection of places, a map. López
Pinciano will then turn again to the question of verisimilitude. When Ugo,
one of the three characters in the poetic dialogue, argues that it is licit for the
poet to alter History but not the fable, Fadrique responds that this license
does not extend to Geography and Cosmography, or to Natural History.
The history of time may be altered, but not that of space or nature: “Because
past time is not evident to man’s sight as is the place, for this remains and
that vanishes.”6 Time’s ephemerality makes it malleable, open to change,
while space remains as evidence to the eye. The evidence of space is what
constrains the imagination that wishes to imagine it, invent it, and change it
in some way. The canon of Toledo in Don Quixote uses the same arguments
to censure chivalric marvels and spatiality, in his diatribe against the genre in
part I, chapter 47 (548): “Which brain, if not completely barbaric and igno-
rant can content itself reading that a great tower filled with knights goes into
the sea, as a ship with favorable wind, and that night fall upon it in Lom-
bardy and that tomorrow it dawns in the lands of Prester John in the Indies,
or in others that Ptolemy did not describe nor did Marco Polo see?” And yet,
just two paragraphs later, the canon revises his judgment and describes with
pleasure the variety of good things he has found in the largo y espacioso campo,
the “vast and spacious field” of which these fictions compose their worlds.7
Critics such as Juan de Valdés and Alonso López Pinciano establish a
direct link between the book of chivalry and the notion of fiction as false-
hood. This pejorative characterization affected the elements that were asso-
ciated with of the book of chivalry, principally among them the island. To
inquire then into the poetic contexts that made a place for the modern novel
and the taxonomy of fiction contemporaneous to it places the chivalric
genre and, particularly, its production of insular space at the center of the
modern philosophical articulation of “truth.” The separation of fiction from
reality in early modern poetics severed the link between fiction and truth,
since becoming a commonplace used sometimes for philosophical inquiry,
 Conclusion 159

but mostly as a tedious argument against fiction, and primarily, against liter-
ature. As a keyword in philosophy, however, the status of fiction, as I argued
in the introduction, has recently undergone some revision. Characterized
in terms of space, adventure, risk, self-denying language, but above all in
relation to truth and event, this concept of fiction in modern thought has
arresting parallels in the literary explorations of the book of chivalry and
the isolario.
There are certain truths that are tied to the production of the chivalric
archipelago, those tied to a politics and to an ethos. In the Ínsula No Fallada,
however, one might also read, in its ontological oscillation, a theory of fic-
tion in itself as pertaining to the entire archipelago. The archipelagic is cru-
cial to this production of insular spaces, it is what constitutes what I have
been calling the “insular turn,” for it is in the relational structure that these
events of fiction might be articulated through a subject. These island fictions
supplement, as I argued in the introduction through Badiou’s framework,
the “real” situation by forcing onto it hypotheses of truth that in a future
past, as adventure in its conjectural etymology suggests, change what is.
Books of chivalry and isolarii both stand in relation to the real political
conditions of the Mediterranean, but the way in which they produce a polit-
ical truth—for chivalry as class, for the humanist project, for the constitu-
tion of a modern subject—is in the production of spaces of fiction that have
the shape of an island and that supplement the historical itinerary to provide
it with a truth as if it were already part of history. This “as if ” is important in
the consideration of the genres that take up the insular, for it will be read as
the linguistic marker for insularity, and thus contaminated by its paradigms,
either in its enlarged metaphorical capabilities, containing all geography, or
in its consideration as singular entity, devoid of any political possibility.
Badiou, as I summarized in the introduction, considers fiction in relation
to truth through two variations, one called hypothetical reasoning, the other
labeled reasoning through the absurd. The first relies on the assertion of an
“unknown” to draw a conclusion about the truth of a relationship between
two points, two statements. The passage through a fiction is that which
makes possible the truth of the implication. The second variation is riskier,
for it does not know what the second term of the implication is, therefore
the assertion is over a void, and while the situation will be changed, it is
not foreseeable in which way this will happen. After close reading of three
160 Conclusion

insular adventures in Amadís, the parallels between the formulations of the

book of chivalry and the formulations of philosophy are now clearly visible.
Badiou himself describes fiction in the statements I have highlighted in
spatial terms, which I read here to be those islands and their marvels that
so enraged later moralists, and characterizes the movement of thought into
these fictional spaces as adventurous and uncertain. Crucial to the recon-
sideration here of fiction in relation to truth is a positive evaluation of the
absurd and the uncertain, of disparates, as necessary to change an existing
situation. It is precisely here, in this ambiguity, in the undecidability of the
fictional that moralists take a stand against the book of chivalry and rule in
favor of fixed, established meanings.
Don Quixote’s use of the family of words of maravilla is telling of how
the idea of fiction has been displaced by the time Cervantes writes. Uses
such as “And it would not be marvelous if it were so” (I, 27, 305) and “If I
am not understood—answered Sancho—it is not a marvel that my sen-
tences are taken for foolishness” (II, 19, 786) reveal that the marvelous here
is defined by negation, noted in its absence, or, at best, characterized as a
trick. The adventures at the palace of the dukes and specifically those having
to do with Altisidora are all presented as trickery, and even the reference to
technology in the “special effects” created by the dukes is tuned toward the
idea of deception.
A few references, though, link the word maravilla to pleasure, particu-
larly to the pleasure of reading: “any story of knights errant must provoke
pleasure and marvel to anyone who reads it” (I, 50, 571). What is note-
worthy here is that wonder has traveled from the book to the reader, and a
sixteenth-century print culture reader to boot.8 Related to that type of read-
ing, which eloquently summarizes the tradition that goes from medieval
chivalric romance to the printed novel, is the articulation of the marvelous
and silence.9 Quietness is described as marvelous in part I, chapter 16 (172),
and the masculine adjective for marvel serves almost exclusively to qual-
ify silence, the wonderful silence that holds in it knight, squire, and the
two shepherdesses in the pretended Arcadia of part II, chapter 58, and that
silence that Don Quixote and Sancho are forced into after their piggish
adventure in chapter 69—this time not a trick but a misinterpretation of
sounds that leads to the protagonists’ painful and humiliating state.10 Rather
than to the well-known spectacularity of sixteenth-century courtly, magical
 Conclusion 161

elaborations of chivalric wonder, such transformations in the use of the mar-

velous lead us to a rhetorical, readerly construction of fiction.
The metaphorical use of insularity for the episode of Barataria in Don
Quixote is radically different from any use of island spaces found before
Quixote or afterward, in the many reformulations of the Amadisian chivalric
paradigm. Tellingly, not a single time is the marvelous referred to during
the episode of Barataria. The fictional, in this sense, has been displaced, just
as the geographical meaning of insular has been relocated into metaphor.
Fiction has become something else than the marvelous geographies of
the knight. The debate on verisimilitude, present in Ricote’s dismissal of
Sancho’s location of his insular government, affects not only spatiality, but
also the very idea of fiction.
Fiction, built in as a structural space of the Spanish book of chivalry in the
Amadisian archipelago, goes further, for it not only presents the possibility
of apagogic reasoning (which includes both variations described above),
which I read in the Ínsula del Diablo and the Ínsula Firme episodes, but also
constructive reasoning. Constructive reasoning is for Badiou a statement
that starts from the fiction of a situation, characterized as incoherent in the
sense that it hazardously asserts itself as a contradiction of an established
situation. This is, in my view, the Ínsula No Fallada’s central role in the archi-
pelago, the direct consideration of a fiction as if it were already part of the
situation, which in itself, in its sole consideration as such changes what is.
This function of fiction as supplement, as mediation, as the detonator of
torsion that transforms a situation, thus laying a claim on truth, is what
Cervantes highlights in his use of the insular model of Amadís: it under-
scores only the function, translated as a metaphorization of the geography,
but retaining all its power, baring the political thrust of such a function to its
core, and rendering the subject of the event visible.
Quoting from George Simmel’s essay “The Adventure,” Stephen Gilman
used to declare, on the first day of his seminar on Don Quixote at Harvard
University: “Adventure is an island.”11 Simmel’s essay seeks a definition of
adventure through a series of approximations and nuances that capture its
sense of time, its boundedness, and its intuition of the extraordinary from
within. In looking for a way to express the affinity between artist and adven-
turer, Simmel finds in geography an especially appropriate analogy: “It
[adventure] is like an island in life which determines its beginning and end
162 Conclusion

according to its own formative powers and not—like the part of a conti-
nent—also according to those of adjacent territories . . . adventure does not
end because something else begins; instead, its temporal form, its radical
being-ended, is the precise expression of its inner sense.”12 It is telling but
not altogether surprising that the notable Hispanist Gilman would find in
adventure a parallel for the emergence of the novel in Cervantes’s master-
piece. More remarkable is the fact that the island would figure in his discus-
sion as the geography of adventure itself.
Atlas and novel use the structure of islands, of an archipelago—a struc-
ture that the book of chivalry and isolario produce and make work in a local
manner—in order to organize in a colonial manner, in an imperial manner,
all the geography and literature available for their assemblages.13 If the atlas
provides the stage of the world, the theatrum mundi, the novel provides all
possible parliaments.
I have thus argued that fiction as crucial to the production of truth—at
the core of Cervantine literary explorations—is tied in the Ínsula Barataria
episodes to a particular production of space. For Cervantes has so carefully
framed this episode to point to a question of poetics, but also to politics,
subjectivity, and the articulation of truths, a possibility he finds in the spatial
structure of the book of chivalry. In these “islands” in the middle of a con-
tinent, which are therefore unmappable, in islands of style, or foggy islands
of truth, a situation can be a stake, supplemented by fiction, for a subject to
articulate truths-to-come as being already there, in a future past that will
have been an event. Fiction as such, as a site for the articulation of truths, is
then not only at the core of literary investigation, but is precisely what, in the
insular form of a conjecture, constitutes critical theory.
Space and fiction, the map and the marvel, cartography and literature
are inextricably linked as tradition, technique, shared imaginary. Marvelous
insular spaces continue to inhabit Hispanic literary cartographies mapping
the poetical and the political, from Gracián on, coming home to America
with Colón, Cortés, and Bernal, to the shorelines of Inca Garcilaso de la
Vega. And they set anchor in the prose of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar,
Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Ricardo Piglia. If perhaps the Hispanic marvelous
has changed its effects through history, one can still find it within the limit
marked by the waves that ebb and flow around an island.
 Notes

Introduction
1. See Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, 5. The argument on
generic overlaps with geography is developed throughout the book.
2. The single most important book to have addressed the relations between
cartography and literature for the early modern period, on both sides of the colonial
Hispanic Atlantic and focusing on the sixteenth century, is Padrón, The Spacious
Word.
3. For the history of Homeric epic in Spain, from the Latin translations to the
romance versions, see Serés, La traducción en Italia y España durante el siglo XV.
4. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 116.
5. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 290.
6. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 123, 128–29.
7. Ibid., 79.
8. The subtlety of Certeau’s reading of causal links between stories and space
does not always make it easy for the reader to establish the limits of the parallel
between them, for if one is to make synonyms of them, there would be no difference
between architecture and literature, between urban planning and creative writing.
And, while there are similarities, one cannot reduce them to equivalents.
9. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 115, 117.
10. Certeau draws from another critic to support his distinction between space
and place: “Merleau-Ponty distinguished a ‘geometrical’ space (‘a homogeneous
and isotopic spatiality,’ analogous to our ‘place’) from another ‘spatiality’ which he
called an ‘anthropological space,’” Certeau summarizes. “This distinction depended
on a distinct problematic, which sought to distinguish from ‘geometrical’ univocity
the experience of an ‘outside’ given in the form of space, and for which ‘space is exis-
tential’ and ‘existence is spatial’” (117).
11. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 68–85. The example he gives is that of
maps. It is important to notice that here because cartography will inform our study
of medieval practices of space later on. Considering the map here, as an illustration
of Lefebvre’s theory of space, will find a deeper articulation later on in this chapter.

163
164 Notes to introduction

12. Ibid., 17.

13. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 34.
14. See, for instance, how Oscar Martín analyzes this change in sentimental fic-
tion in “Allegory and the Spaces of Love.”
15. Slowly/spacedly duplicates in the translation the meanings contained in one
word in the original. Translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.
16. Isidore, Etimologías, book 5, 29. “Time is divided in moments, hours, days,
months, years, lusters, centuries and ages. Moment is the minimal and most reduced
time, and has its name after the movement of the planets. . . . Hour is a limit of time,
just as edge is the limit of a sea, a river, or dress.” Admittedly, Isidore here confuses
two terms, but the idea is that time is but a limited space.
17. See Le Goff, La Naissance du purgatoire; also Gourevitch, “Le Marchand,”
especially 267–313.
18. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 59. Zumthor’s argument is here reminiscent
of Greek perceptions of limits, especially those related to the ocean and its ambigu-
ous denomination in ancient Greek, pontos, meaning, of course, bridge, passage,
or path, but as Romm, recalling Benveniste warns, as a bridge that has been traced
over an unstable medium, and therefore, more of a warning than a call to journey.
See Romm, The Edges of the Earth, 16 n.22.
19. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 18–24.
20. Le Goff, L’Imaginaire médiévale, 123–126, 134.
21. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 22 and ss.
22. Le Goff, L’Imaginaire médiévale, 137.
23. Le Goff, The Birth of Europe, 47–56, 89–90.
24. Isidore, Etimologías, book 5, 27. “That is why those who return are called
postliminium, for they return from exile where, ejected unjustly, they lived outside
the limits of their homeland.” Exilio, in Spanish, is taken from the Latin exsilium,
derived from exsilire, which means “to jump outside,” and appeared first in Spanish
between 1220 and 1250, but was rare, eloquently, until 1939 (Corominas, Breve dic-
cionario etimológico, s.v. exilio). Popular etymology takes us further: ex-ilio, “outside
the island” or “outside, upon an island,” “isolated.”
25. Geremek, “Le Marginal,” 384. Matvejevic, Mediterranean, mentions this as
well: “Leafing through the writings of a little-known historian of the fourth century,
Ammianus Mercellinus, I came upon the concept of poena insularis (island punish-
ment, 15.7), which seems to have entered Roman legal terminology before the deca-
dent period” (165), remarking on the popularity it has held up to our days, from
Napoleon to Trotsky to Ellis Island or even Alcatraz. See also Sassoferrato’s De Insula,
a fourteenth-century precursor of international public law on “island” legislation
and a renowned jurist linked to the discussion on nobility and virtue central to the
political argument of books of chivalry (1979); for a discussion on Sassoferrato’s
 Notes to introduction 165

role in chivalric discourse, see Rodríguez Velasco, “Teoría de la fábula caballeresca,”

343–58, and especially 354–57, with ample bibliography.
26. Geremek, “Le Marginal,” 400–401, 409. Geremek has devoted much of his
work to marginality, specifically in the area of Paris in the late Middle Ages. In this
typology of the margins, Geremek writes, beggars presented a difficult case. Their
functional role in the heart of society made them useful, necessary to the medieval
concept of charity, almost a way of life; but it also associated them with poverty,
with yet another ambiguous status in medieval society. From the thirteenth century
on, beggars began to be assimilated into the marginal, and their exclusion from the
community grew more visible. For an analysis of literary beggars in the frame of a
political economy, see Bosteels, “Beggar’s Banquet.”
27. In Le Goff’s words, L’Homme médiévale, 14.
28. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 184 and ss.
29. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 149. The spatialization of “Christianity”
occurs in a process by which the term evolves from the dissolution of the concept of
Romania, as in Orosius, through the ambiguity designating a community of believ-
ers, a faith, and the space inhabited by those believers, to the more geographical
(and less religious, though it may seem contradictory) sense of a spatial limit. For
more on Ocean as the outermost limit of the earth in ancient thought see Romm,
The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, esp. chap. 1, 9–44, in which he discusses
variations on the idea of the encircling or open river Ocean from boundary to cos-
mological disorder, from Homer to Herodotus, Aristotle and Ptolemy.
30. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 207. He argues that even if errancy does not
know where it will go, it however registers the space traveled as if in view of the
“establishment of a cartographic survey” [comme en vue de la rédaction d’une acte de
proprieté ou de l’etablissement d’une relevé cartographique], an idea that might be also
elaborated through Deleuze or even Paul Virilio. The idea echoes the discussion in
the introduction of the relation between site and event, or, between spatiality and
“what happens,” through the thought of Badiou.
31. Josiah Blackmore’s articulation in Manifest Perdition of the import of nautical
explorations not only in imperial imagination, but also as crucial to narrative devel-
opment, in a close reading of these early modern Iberian texts (mainly Portuguese,
but with close connections to a generally Iberian imperialist mind), is the obvious
reference here, though he has argued elsewhere for a sort of rhetoric of navigation
that runs along the lines of what I have argued via Certeau. His discussion of the
genre as enabling and, in a way, destabilizing imperial notions reveals the intimate
connections between science, writing, and politics, and his analysis of the produc-
tion of imperial space through the genre of historias trágico-maritimas is parallel to
the consequences my study bears on Spanish writing in the sixteenth century.
32. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 303.
166 Notes to introduction

33. Matvejevic, Mediterranean, 111.

34. Malkiel, “Old Spanish maraviella ‘MARVEL,’” 509.
35. This ambiguity is what constitutes the eeriness, the Unheimliche that Todorov
analyzed and which some critics take to be the marvelous in general. For an exhaus-
tive theoretical analysis of the differences (and the inventory of instances in French
medieval literature that follows) see Dubost’s voluminous Aspects fantastiques de la
littérature narrative médiévale. I disagree with him about the idea that the marvelous
as such produces specifically and, seemingly in some other critics’ opinions, exclu-
sively, terror, or at least fear. The verb itself retains to this day, in Spanish, English,
and French, its original undecidability: maravillar, to wonder, s’emerveiller does not
imply the single effect of fear, even if fear can be part of a more complex set of effects.
36. Harf-Lancner, “Merveilleux et fantastique,” 244.
37. For an extended discussion of this point, see Nykrog, Chrétien de Troyes.
38. Jordán Cólera, “The Etymology of Insula, Aestus and Aestuarium,” 353. Jordán
Cólera proposes a new etymology through a Paleo-European stem, meaning “to
move fast, with impetus,” in clear reference to the water, instead of the commonly
accepted etymology I refer to above. Given that we are dealing with texts that prob-
ably shared Isidore’s view, I use it as my etymology for insula.
39. Peyràs, “L’ile et le sacré dans l’Antiquité,” 27.
40. That is, this study does not consider any kind of metaphorical island, nor
geographic spaces that share some of the characteristics of the island (isolation or
limitation) nor poetic realizations of the same traits, because, by inverting the phrase
“no man is an island” one will inevitably arrive at the conclusion that everything
can become an island. Thus I do not consider poems as islands (even if through
Sonetti’s isolario a sonnet does become such a precious territory), nor islands of
texts (such as paragraphs or chapter titles or titles themselves), nor graphic islands
(such as images inserted in the texts, woodcuts, typography, marginalia), but sug-
gest how the genres move from geographic meaning to a metaphoric one.
41. I here summarize statements with slight variations, for example: “Thus Truth
draws its guarantee from somewhere other than the Reality it concerns: it draws it
from Speech. Just as it is from Speech that Truth receives the mark that instates it in
a fictional structure” (Lacan, Écrits, 684); or, referring to Jeremy Bentham’s theory,
“‘Fictitious’ does not mean illusory or deceptive as such. It is far from being trans-
latable into French by ‘fictif,’ although this is something that the man who was the
key to his success on the continent, Étienne Dumont, did not fail to do—he was also
responsible for popularizing Bentham’s thought. ‘Fictitious’ means ‘fictif ’ but, as I
have already explained to you, in the sense that every truth has the structure of fic-
tion” (Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 12).
42. See Gómez Redondo’s didactic exposition of the use of fiction for medieval
literature, Historia de la prosa medieval castellana, 2:1314–39.
 Notes to Chapter 1 167

43. Fuchs, Romance. Fuchs defines romance as a strategy that is used by genres
across periods and cultures in varying degrees (see n.41).
44. Gómez Redondo, Historia de la prosa medieval castellana, 1:181–82, 235.
45. Fuchs uses and adds nuance to this definition of romance throughout her
book, but specifies the technical definition on page 9: “The term describes a con-
catenation of both narratological elements and literary topoi, including idealization,
the marvelous, narrative delay, wandering, and obscured identity.”
46. Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? 14. Compare with Badiou’s paraphrasing
or commenting on Mallarmé further in the book: “The fiction of the political is a
funerary fiction, more so because it causes the true evaporation of politics. At its
center, this fiction is that of community, of links, of rapport. It articulates sover-
eignty over community” (15), and so on, particularly in the section entitled “Limi-
naire” (9–21).
47. Ibid., 272, 273.
48. This vocabulary is obviously tied to Badiou’s notion of the site and of the sit-
uation, which I do not address here since the emphasis I want to make is on fiction.
49. Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? 273, 278.
50. Ibid., 279.
51. Ibid., 412–13.
52. It is interesting to note that Badiou’s insistence in Peut-on penser on the fic-
tion of the social bond, in order to delink the truth of politics from the bond itself
so as to redirect it to the out-place of politics (“The truth of politics is in the point of
that which is, and not in its link . . . the space of politics as punctual horlieu of that
place” [20–21]), is put in similar, chivalric, terms: “The political errs between civil
society and the State. All sorts of concepts make up the metaphor of this hiatus” (15,
emphasis mine).
53. Ibid., 437.

1. Forest to Island
1. See Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.
2. On the relation between epic and romance see the classic studies by Köhler,
“Quelques observations,” and Jauss, “Chanson de geste et roman courtois.”
3. Auerbach, Mimesis. The chapter in question is the famous “The Knight Sets
Forth” (121–38), in which Auerbach demonstrates (in his way) the absolute lack
of reality of the roman courtois, a “fictitiousness” and “lack of finality” he sees in the
very motivation of the romance, its articulation on “adventure,” the absence of “real”
description and the general evasion from reality that courtly society instituted. His
analysis is extremely interesting in that it shows how criticism on the romance has
radically changed in just half a century. See also Zumthor, Essai de poétique médié-
vale, 352.
168 Notes to Chapter 1

4. Quoted in Le Goff, L’Imaginaire medieval, 181.

5. Fuchs, Romance, 42. Quoting Segre, who opposes “glorious deeds” to love,
Fuchs makes the opposition one between love and adventure, and later, one be-
tween eros and chivalry.
6. I do not consider here Classical romance, though in the chapter on Amadís
several of the polemics between Byzantine and French romance influences will be
noted. See Fuchs, Romance, 12–36, for an overview of Classical romance.
7. See Rodríguez Velasco’s Order and Chivalry, which addresses a variety of
chivalric discourses and practices, especially in relation to institutions, law, and
juridical discourse.
8. Extant fragments of at least two fourteenth-century Catalan versions of
Lancelot and one of a Quête (c. 1380) translated from the Vulgate indicate another
way of entry of Arthurian material into Iberia. See Rubio Pacho, “Reflexiones sobre
el desarrollo de la literatura artúrica castellana.”
9. Gómez Redondo, Historia de la prosa medieval castellana, 2:1462; see also the
itinerary of entry of Arthurian materials into the peninsula, 2:1459–78, with close
analysis of the texts in ensuing pages.
10. This is what led Frye to characterize romance as an archetype. Frye, however,
foregoes textual differences and offers this structure for all romance, avoiding the
pitfalls of genre by labeling it a “mode.” This approach, as Jameson noted, erases
historicity and makes romance self-identical (comparison in Fuchs, Romance, 5–7).
See Jameson, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre.”
11. Auerbach studies adventure as central to Chretién de Troyes’s Yvain and
makes his analysis extensive to all of Arthurian romance, the “parent genre” of the
book of chivalry. The quest for adventure is verified in narration as a series that thus
constitutes a constant test of the virtues of the knight that come both from birth and
from an adequate upbringing. Later, Auerbach remarkably refers to adventure as a
peculiar form of “happening,” as a sort of eventfulness that has nothing casual,
peripheral, or disordered about it. See Auerbach, Mimesis.
12. Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, 358. Nykrog also makes of this ambigu-
ity a structural element of chivalric romance, if in a different key, arguing that the
ambiguity surrounding many moments in the romance constitute, in fact, its own
objective, as the romance is destined to be discussed, elucidated outside itself: “Dis-
putable and not undetermined . . . with the practical intention to provoke a discus-
sion within the circle after the reading sessions. A court poet, he would have aimed
to furnish an entertainment that would not end with the text presented.” Thus,
Nykrog continues, “the first romances seem to be conceived to pose, episode by
episode, ‘cases’ of practical behaviors susceptible to evaluation and discussed on the
field. . . . From Lancelot onwards and culminating in Perceval, another practice joins
the first, one characterized by enigma. The cart is the first clear example of this, the
 Notes to Chapter 1 169

courtship of the Grail the most illustrious: the reader is mystified because the infor-
mation he needs to form an opinion of what is being told is not given to him until
much later—or never at all” (Nykrog, Chrétien de Troyes, 49, 50).
13. Auerbach’s insistence on the “magical” and the “fabulous” as having a radical
relationship with the earthly is curious, particularly in contrast with the emphasis
on the “ideal” contents of the chivalric romance (Auerbach, Mimesis).
14. Jameson, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre,” 143.
15. Resina, La búsqueda del Grial, 38–39.
16. This is Charles Méla’s endeavor as he writes on conjointure to translate the
effects of reality of the corpus, which he explains as follows: “What happens is that,
in the Grail romances, the itinerary of the hero mimes for the reader the trajectory
that the work makes him secretly accomplish on his own, that is, the trajectory that
he must accomplish as subject” (Méla, La Reine et le Graal, 76).
17. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 202.
18. In a thorough study of chivalric romance in Spain, devoted in particular to
presentation techinques relative to strategies of verisimilitude, Roubaud-Bénichou
offers striking parallels between historiography and the romance: “Historical narra-
tion is, in fact, subjected in principle to a strict temporal division in years, but it is at
the same time founded on the assemblage of undividable narrative units that imply
the abandonment of the chronological frame; the King [Alfonso X] and his collab-
orators are thus forced from time to time to justify . . . their method” (Roubaud-
Bénichou, Le Roman de chevalerie en Espagne, 120; see esp. chap. 10).
19. Alfonso el Sabio, Las Siete Partidas, Partida 1, Tít. 4, LXVIII, 45–46.
20. Ibid., 46.
21. See Romm, The Edges of the Earth, on oikoumenē, distant-world lore, and the
politics of its presentation (37–40); Romm’s characterization of the recurrence in a
group of texts as the “island oikoumenē” concept (122); reflections especially related
to India (83–84).
22. See Romm, The Edges of the Earth, 30–31, 31 n. 64, on catalogues of marvels
or marvel-collection; related to India or wonders of the East, of particular impor-
tance to the medieval marvelous, see 91–108.
23. The monstrous also appears in the Roman de Troie, as resembling a man
from the belly button up, but covered in hair everywhere else, like a beast, and in the
shape of a horse, its flesh black as coal and gleaming, fiery eyes (quoted in Szkilnik,
L’Archipel du Graal, 101).
24. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 258–72. See also Céard, La Nature et ses prodi-
ges, esp. 292–316.
25. Park and Daston, Wonder and the Order of Nature, 11, 14.
26. Corominas, Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, s.v. cura.
27. Park and Daston, Wonder and the Order of Nature, 16, 18–19.
170 Notes to Chapter 1

28. Ibid., 125–26.

29. Le Goff (L’Imaginaire médiéval) notices a diversification in the vocabulary
of the marvelous between the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries, which he clas-
sifies into three different domains: the mirabilis, the magicus, and the miraculosis.
Since Christianity created relatively little in the domain of the marvelous, which
has among its sources the Bible, Antiquity, Celtic traditions, Oriental heritages, and
folkore, it is pertinent to think of the medieval marvelous as a series of appropria-
tions from different fields. Only the miraculosis is proper to Christianity. The histo-
rian also establishes two other frontiers where the marvelous is appropriated; the
“everyday” marvelous and the political marvelous as forms of appropriation within
everyday life, as genealogy or origin.
30. See especially Daston and Park, Wonder and the Order of Nature, chaps. 2–4.
31. Le Goff, L’Imaginaire médiéval, 25–38.
32. In Münster’s Cosmography of 1544, cited in Park and Daston, Wonder and the
Order of Nature, 147.
33. Linehan, “The Beginnings of Santa María de Guadalupe,” 299; Dodds, “Hunt-
ing in the Borderlands.” For how these practices continue older ones, see Grabar,
“Programmes iconographiques a l’usage,” and Fernández Castro, Villas romanas en
España, 52.
34. See the discussion of Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages,
in the next section.
35. In Le Goff, L’Imaginaire médiéval, 21, 24–25.
36. For a general theoretical discussion in narrative, see Zumthor, La Mesure du
monde, 363–89, and Essai de poétique médiévale, 354.
37. Le Goff, L’Imaginaire médiéval, 231; see also “Lévi-Strauss en Brocéliande,” a
chapter in the same volume.
38. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 119, 139–40. See Gerli’s articulation of
Lefebvre’s theory for Rojas’s depiction of the city in “Precincts of Contention.”
39. The medieval descriptio urbis, an elaboration on the Horatian laus urbis, was
conditioned, above all, by the model established by the immensely popular eleventh-
century Mirabilia urbis Romae, which had enormous influence into the Renaissance.
Descriptions of cities in Iberian literature can be found as early as in the twelfth-
century Liber sancti Jacobi (written by a French cleric, but about Spain), and from
then onwards in almost every genre, from books of travel such as the Libro del
conoscimiento, to romances, cancionero poetry, and so forth. See the brief but inform-
ative Crivat, “El género de la descriptio urbis.”
40. Le Goff, L’Imaginaire médiéval, 229–40. The fourfold interpretive framework
of the urban imaginary in the Middle Ages was based on the Bible. In the Old Tes-
tament, the city appears initially, in Genesis, as a cursed space: the work of Cain, the
Tower of Babel, and Sodom and Gomorra. In the historical books, the image of the
 Notes to Chapter 1 171

city changes as Jerusalem becomes a more developed motif (introduced in Genesis,

gaining real importance in the second book of Samuel and the first book of Kings).
This positive presentation of the city is emblematized by David and Solomon,
which give the city a double image as the seat for religious and royal power. The
sapiential books but also the poetic and the prophetic ones continue this trend,
particularly in the Psalms. It is Isaiah who introduces the popular opposition of
Jerusalem to Babylon in chapter 13. In the New Testament, in typological fashion,
the image of the city returns, particularly linked to preaching, as in the letters of
Saint Paul, and in Saint John’s Apocalypse, where the opposition is played out again,
with Jerusalem triumphing in its celestial version. It is of special interest to my study
to note that in Judeo-Christian tradition there is a displacement, a relocation of
the image of Paradise from an ambigous time/place of origin or as golden age, to a
decidedly spatial garden (hortus conclusus) and then to a city. This image of the eter-
nal city is already in the Bible, and of the many who followed, Augustine sufficed to
suggest its importance in the medieval urban imaginary.
41. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 147.
42. Le Goff, L’Imaginaire médiéval, 174.
43. Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance. For Spain, a study of the references
to the forest in the many fueros (at the origin of the forest as a juridical dominion)
would provide such documentation. See Zumthor’s general remarks in La Mesure du
monde, 66–68; see also Dodds, “Hunting in the Borderlands.”
44. Menocal, “To Create an Empire”; Alfonso XI, Libro de la Montería. For a gen-
eral perspective on the visual representation of hunting, see Cummins, The Hound
and the Hawk.
45. See McGinn, “Ocean and Desert as Symbols,” for a detailed account of these
metaphors through the fourteenth century.
46. Guillaumont, “L’Enseignement spirituel des moines d’Égypte,” 82. The bib-
liography is considerable, but see especially the classic study, Chitty, The Desert a
City, and Gould’s introduction to his The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community.
47. Numerous reflections on “wild men” or salvajes come to mind, from legal
sources to literary characters to the type of the savage in popular festivities and its
role in Spanish Golden Age theater. The Primaleón (Salmanca, 1512), a book of
chivalry, articulates this idea of humanity at its limits in the figure of the Gran
Patagón, when the hero, comforting his lady at the sight of the “monster,” tells her
she should not be afraid, for it is a “human man” (“es hombre umano”) and will fol-
low her orders, submitting to her if she chooses to approach and flatter him (336).
See Bernheimer’s classic, Wild Men in the Middle Ages; and López-Ríos’s exhaustive
catalogue of the figure in medieval Castile, with references to artistic representation,
Salvajes y razas monstruosas. See also Pinet,“Walk on the Wild Side.”
48. Le Goff, L’Imaginaire médiéval, 61.
172 Notes to Chapter 1

49. Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance, 20.

50. See ibid., 19–24, for a detailed analysis of specific passages.
51. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 269.
52. Ibid., 275–76
53. Higounet, “Les Fôrets de l’Europe occidentale du Ve au XIe siècle,” esp. 371–
72, specific to Spain. See also various essays gathered by Corvol-Dessert in Les Forêts
d’occident du moyen âge à nos jours.
54. Higounet, “Les Fôrets de l’Europe occidentale du Ve au XIe siècle,” 324, 350.
55. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 62–67, esp. 62–63.
56. See Navarro González, El mar en la literatura medieval castellana, for a cata-
logue of scenes with seascapes in different genres up to the fifteenth century.
57. See the first chapter of Cátedra and Rodríguez Velasco, Creación y difusión de
“El baladro del sabio Merlín,” for a concise introduction to filiations and chronology
of Arthurian romance and its entry into the Iberian Peninsula.
58. Szkilnik, L’Archipel du Graal. I will refer to her work substantially in the next
pages, but an interested reader should consult her book for a full analysis.
59. Such a silence, Szkilnik notes, reminds us of a similar one in the Queste de
Saint Graal, when Galaad’s and Lancelot’s adventures of six months at sea and after-
ward on an island are left untold with the excuse that such a story would be too long.
60. Szkilnik, L’Archipel du Graal, 13–15.
61. Ibid., 17.
62. There are six islands in the Estoire: (1) the one where Mordrain is taken to
and where the pirate Forcaire used to “repaire,” (2) the Ile Tournoyante of Nascien,
(3) the island where Chélidoine and also King Label and his men come to, (4) one
where Nascien fights a giant using Salomon’s sword, (5) where King Label and the
messengers search for Nascien, and (6) the one in the interpolated story of Hip-
pocrates upon the island of the giant.
63. Szkilnik, L’Archipel du Graal, 23.
64. Ibid., 85. One finds in the Estoire either divine or demonic ships. Demonic
ones are all the same: black, full of earthly riches, often captained by a beautiful and
dominating woman, surrounded by flames and lightning, provoking storms and
whirlwinds in their wake, a motif that will be taken up in Spanish books of chivalry.
For Spain, see Beltrán, “Urganda, Morgana y Sibila.”
65. Szkilnik characterizes the islands of the Estoire alternatively as a “rediscov-
ered firm land for the Lancelot-Graal,” as a place where the character suffers “a con-
firmation of his excellence rather than a test,” as an episode, as a ritual place, a theme,
a metaphor of the narrative and as place of passage, and as an “archipelago.” She also
makes a very interesting observation on the inclusion of the island as a possibility
for excursus, for a secondary narrative that will be relinked to the principal narrative
but which retains a certain independence, serving as a counterpoint (Salomon and
 Notes to Chapter 1 173

Hippocrates) or as an illustration (Ile Tournoyante). These observations are very

close to my argument; however, the analysis of the island in Szkilnik’s study seems
to use “island” alternatively as a figure, a metaphor, a space, and a sign for something
else. The role itself of the island in the Estoire is varied and, within that variation,
contradictory (see Blumenfeld-Kosinski’s review in Speculum). As an overarching
argument, Szkilnik writes that the metaphor the Estoire “imposes” above all others
is that of the archipelago, through the basic anecdote the Estoire tells: one of multi-
ple ships traveling from island to island. She writes: “The image of the archipelago
preserves the independence of each episode, suggesting their taking place in a geo-
metrical or geographical configuration,” offering a nice but contradictory image
because the relationship between geometry and geography does not seem to settle
so easily. A few lines afterward, Szkilnik argues that the characters’ wish throughout
the book will be to set foot on the firm ground of a continent, Great Britain. Further
on, she writes, “Great Britain is to the seaworld, a harbor, a rediscovered mainland,
what the Estoire is to the cycle of the Lancelot-Graal.” This metaphor for the Estoire
contradicts the previous one as an archipelago. The Estoire is conveyed ambiguously
both as an archipelago and a continent, as an island and a mainland, opposing meta-
phors that, even beyond the literal, seem inaccurate, as they are forced to describe
both a content and a structure in the same terms. It may well be the case that the
structure is itself contradictory in the Estoire; I argue that the archipelago is cohe-
sively explored as structure later, in the Spanish book of chivalry.
66. In this sense islands in the Estoire are linked to Augé’s concept of the non-
place (as one different from Deleuze’s or Foucault’s notion, or Certeau’s hetero-
topias) in Non-lieux; for a comparative analysis of these conceptual differences, see
Bosteels, “Nonplaces.”
67. Gómez Redondo, Historia de la prosa medieval castellana, 2:1481.
68. Rubio García, “La Ínsula Barataria,” 644–47.
69. Zumthor, La Mesure du monde, 72.
70. Bognolo, La finzione rinnovata.
71. García Piqueras, “Posibles estructuras literarias en la Fazienda de Ultra Mar,”
361.
72. Ibid., 366–69. For a wide view of literary concerns with medieval travel nar-
ratives, see Beltrán’s edition, Maravillas, peregrinaciones y utopías; for a very gen-
eral account of medieval travel narratives, see Peebles and Zumthor, “The Medieval
Travel Narrative.”
73. Pérez Priego, “Maravillas en los libros de viajes medievales,” Popeanga, “Lec-
tura e investigación de los libros de viajes medievales,” and Beltrán, “Los libros de
viajes medievales castellanos,” complement one another for a survey of texts and
problems of the genre in the peninsula.
74. Reprinted as Repertorios de caminos.
174 Notes to Chapter 1

75. Braudel, El Mediterráneo y el mundo mediterráneo en la época de Felipe II, 12.

76. Ibid., 48; Tony Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Cen-
tury to 1500,” 415.
77. Olschki, Storia letteraria delle scoperte geografiche, 39.
78. See Piehler, The Visionary Landscape, 82 n.24, with bibliography.
79. See Olschki, Storia letteraria delle scoperte geografiche, especially 34–35, 39, 48.
80. Compare with Olschki’s summary: “Japan is imagined as a large island, located
near the sea of China in which another seven thousand, four hundred and fifty
islands are laid out, all rich in spices, pearls, precious stones, and gold, so abundant
that it could not be valued” (Olschki, Storia letteraria delle scoperte geografiche, 39).
81. Ibid., 48.
82. Pérez Priego, “Estudio literario de los libros de viajes medievales,” 235, 237.
83. Salvador Miguel, “Descripción de islas en textos castellanos medievales.”
84. The passage of the Çifar corresponds to the “Ínsulas dotadas.” The passage
from the Laberinto corresponds to the coplas 51–52, in which the protagonist is
taken to the abode of Fortune, where he can contemplate an allegorical vision of
the universe, which besides the traditional Isidorian tripartite world presents a
vision of the “islas particulares” (the description is inspired directly from chapters
34–36 of the De imagine mundi; see Lida de Malkiel, Juan de Mena, 34ff). Pero
Tafur’s text contains insular descriptions of his periplus through the Adriatic, while
in Breidennbach’s text Salvador Miguel stresses a description of Crete, already
referred to above. Salvador Miguel notes the differences between the texts: one is
the first chivalric text in the peninsula, another is a politico-moral poem, another is
a travelogue, and the last is an itinerary or pilgrimage guide. Salvador Miguel uses as
well the Libro del conoscimiento (mid-fourteenth century) to compile a list of mytho-
logical data in insular descriptions, for which Mena is particularly prolific (and pre-
cise in the definition by Salvador Miguel).
85. Salvador Miguel, “Descripción de islas en textos castellanos medievales,” 48.
86. Ibid., 54. The concept of the perfect island would be picked up by Saint
Anselm in the famous ontological problem known as the “Lost Island” debate—a
logical argument following the idea of the existence of a perfect island in the middle
of the ocean but never seen by anyone. This argument would be refuted, notably by
Gaunilon de Marmoutiers in his Liber pro insipiente adversus Anselmum in Prosologio
ratiocinantem (section 6 in Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 158, col. 246). See Back,
“Anselm on Perfect Islands,” and the discussion in chapter 3 on the Ínsula No Fallada.
87. The milestone interpretation of the episode is Wagner’s, who pointed out
the correspondences with the matière de Bretagne (in consonance with Gracia’s
analysis of the Sulphuring Lake episode, “Varios apuntes sobre el ‘Cuento del Cabal-
lero Atrevido,’” see esp. 24n.; see also Mullen, “The Role of the Supernatural in El
libro del Cavallero Çifar,” who emphasizes the Spanish Christian origin of these
 Notes to Chapter 1 175

episodes). Krappe (“Le Lac enchanté dans le Chevalier Çifar”) denounces what
he calls “Celtic mirage” as determining Wagner’s interpretation, in detriment to an
Oriental tradition whose motifs he grounds in the episode through an Arabic trans-
mission. Finally, Burke (“The Meaning of the Islas Dotadas Episode”) analyzes the
episode following a general interpretational scheme based on the struggle between
caritas and cupiditas. See as well Toledano Molina, “El elemento maravilloso en las
aventuras,” which attempts to establish, in consonance with Mullen, cited above, the
existence of a “native marvelous” of Spanish literature, revealed through the “folk-
loric fantastic.” It should be noted that these terms are defined following Todorov,
whose pertinence for the study of medieval texts has been much debated. For this
debate, see Dubost, Aspects fantastiques. For a general bibliography for Çifar, see
Cristina González, El Cavallero Zifar y el Reino Lejano, chap. 1, which can be supple-
mented with Harney, “The Libro del Caballero Zifar.”
88. See Burke, “The Meaning of the Islas Dotadas Episode,” 57–58, for the list of
motifs. Burke ends by arguing that the episode is an allegory—following French use
in the twelfth century—of the Augustinian “Caritas-Cupiditas conflict.” His radical
polarization of Fortuna and Christianity (Providence) is problematic, along with
analyses that evince a too-literal reading, such as in the parallel with the classic fig-
ure of Venus in Virgil and Ovid; of the confusion between terms, such as lujuria for
codicia, codicia for ambition, desire for savagery.
89. Cristina González, El Cavallero Zifar y el Reino Lejano, 95–110.
90. Gracia analyzes the episode of the Caballero Atrevido and the traditon of the
Sulphuring Lake in terms that can be related to these three characteristics. As
sources for the lake motif, she goes back to the Aeneid, where Lake Averno is located
in a deep cave, with rivers that boil and are inhabited by monsters and marvelous
beings, a motif that is taken up by Dante and that crosses over to Arthurian texts in
relation to the Beste Glatissant, a motif that would permeate the Spanish and Por-
tuguese Demandas and into chivalric peninsular material: “Echoes of this motif
reach the Amadís de Gaula: in the boiling lake where the giant Famangomadán,
before leaving, must always decapitate a damsel in front of his idol” (“Varios apuntes
sobre el ‘Cuento del Caballero Atrevido,’” 31 n.25). The lake, as was suggested before,
is a mirror image of the island, and in this sense its meaning, its sens, is likewise
inverted, even if most of the characteristics (limitation, exuberance, special sexuality,
lust versus chastity) are shared.
91. These are, evidently, related through the presence of water, which Ayerbe-
Chaux sees as a symbol of the travel to “an imaginary, extraterrestrial” space, how-
ever inappropriate (“Las islas dotadas,” 31).
92. Ayerbe-Chaux, “Las islas dotadas,” 37.
93. Ibid., 48. Numerous enigmatic aspects of this text remain unsolved, such as
the symbolism of the dog and the hawk, the still-problematic symbol of the horse as
176 Notes to Chapter 2

lust or willfulness, which still does not go well with the laughter of both emperor
and Roboán at the end of the episode. Ayerbe-Chaux analyzes this last element as
an indication that they accept the loss of a utopian ideal, that is, the idea of courtly
love, as opposed to love in the real world (ibid., 35–37).
94. For these and the texts in which they appear, see Alvar, Diccionario de mito-
logía artúrica, s.v. reino de las islas, isla de la alegría, isla de oro, isla giratoria, isla
perdida.

2. Islands and Maps

1. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 14.
2. Braudel, El Mediterráneo, 44.
3. For an analysis of the fear of drowning and shipwreck, from Greece and
Rome to romanticism, see Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator.
4. Braudel, El Mediterráneo, 46–47.
5. In Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 307.
6. Romm, The Edges of the Earth.
7. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 134, partly summarizing Lewis, “The Origins of
Cartography.”
8. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 100.
9. Strabo, Geography, II, 5.5, C 112–13, Plutarch, Parallel Lives, Life of Theseus,
paraphrased in Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 137.
10. In Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 50.
11. Romm, The Edges of the Earth, 27.
12. Ibid., 29–41.
13. In Dilke, “Itineraries and Geographical Maps,” 244.
14. Romm goes back several times to belabor the discussion in ancient thought
around this concept, but his focus is much more on the nature of the boundary, on
the character of the circumscription and the conceptual delimitation than on the
geography or metaphor of the island in itself.
15. Romm, The Edges of the Earth, 31.
16. Bouloux notes that Strabo and Ptolemy, and even Pomponius Mela, had
already given islands separate treatment, but other authors, better known through-
out the Middle Ages, such as Pliny and Solinus, discuss islands merely on the way of
describing seas or littorals (Bouloux, “Les Îles dans les descriptions géographiques,”
48–50).
17. An obvious exception is Ptolemy. He was mostly unknown throughout the
Middle Ages, and his rediscovery in the late Middle Ages led to the acceleration
in the development of what we know as modern cartography. For a summary of
existing scholarship and the cultural reception of Ptolemy, see Gautier-Dalché, “The
Reception of Ptolemy’s Geography.”
 Notes to Chapter 2 177

18. “Indenting the edge of the circular world are the prominent gulfs of the Red
Sea and the Mediterranean; the Caspian Sea is also often shown as a small gulf in the
northeast. The Gulf of Azov—the Palus Maeotis of Classical times, which becomes
Meotides Paludes on the mappamundi—also sometimes appears as a small gulf
of the surrounding ocean, as on the Corpus Christi College, Oxford, version of
Higden’s map of the world map of Guido de Pisa (1119)” (Woodward, “Medieval
Mappaemundi,” 328).
19. In Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 328 n.210.
20. Edson, Mapping Time and Space, 4–5.
21. See the classic studies by Yates, The Art of Memory, and Carruthers, The Book
of Memory. See also Jacob, The Sovereign Map, esp. 178–80.
22. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 132. Edson elaborates this idea structural to
Isidore’s thought in chapter 3 of Mapping Time and Space, entitled “The Nature of
Things.” She also succinctly expounds these ideas in the introduction and chapter 4
in the book coauthored with Savage-Smith, Medieval Views of the Cosmos. For a dis-
cussion of the subject of macro/microcosm specific to Iberia with examples in a
variety of texts, see Rico, El pequeño mundo del hombre.
23. See the detailed discussion of the representation of Paradise in medieval
cartography in Scafi, Mapping Paradise, esp. 84–124.
24. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 136.
25. Edson, Mapping Time and Space, 100, 116. The expression “geographical
framework” is taken from Woodward, “Medieval Mappamundi,” 326. Romm makes
a similar argument for ancient thought through the notions of limit and origin in
The Edges of the Earth, 20–26.
26. Tony Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to
1500,” 372.
27. In chapter 4 of his European Expansion in the Later Middle Ages, “Columbus
and the American Islands” (143–97), Chaunu draws a quick if careful itinerary of
Columbus’s cartographic imagination in the development of the project to search
a route to the East by sailing west. The relevance of an insular imaginary, in particu-
lar of the island of Saint Brendan and its juridical implications, and of the island
of Antillia as hypothetical horizon that would make the enterprise thinkable for
Columbus, is emphasized in this chapter. Mary Baine Campbell also writes, “The
‘island’ [note the potentially metaphorical use of the word, signaled by quotation
marks] was, as we have seen, the landform that functioned as a king of master tropes
of New World topography, and that characterized the focus of classic voyage litera-
ture, especially where it spoke most directly to private desire: Columbus finds
islands, as do André Thévet and Thomas More” (Wonder and Science, 135, my em-
phasis). Lestringant discusses insularity in the context of conquest and mapping of
the Americas in Le Livre des îles, especially chapters 3–6 of part 1. Padrón studies the
178 Notes to Chapter 2

island as master trope in Gómara in chapter 4, “Charting an Insular Empire,” of The

Spacious Word, 137–84.
28. Bouloux, “Les Îles dans les descriptions cartographiques,” 57.
29. Lestringant, “La Voie des îles,” 16. For information on islands in Roman
cartography, see Dilke, “Roman Large-Scale Mapping in the Early Empire,” esp.
217–23, where he talks of Roman plans depicting islands. For the most comprehen-
sive work on floating islands, see van Duzer’s Floating Islands, a Global Bibliography.
30. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 149. Jacob uses the Miller Atlas throughout his
book but devotes particularly pages 149–53 to the description of islands in the atlas.
31. See Romm, The Edges of the Earth, 106–9.
32. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 150.
33. See Finazzi-Agro, A invençao da ilha.
34. Tony Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to
1500,” 415.
35. Lestringant, “La Voie des îles,” 18.
36. Contrast Jacob’s chapter 2 (especially the sections entitled “Figures of deixis”
and “Hic sunt leones”; also the section “I Am Here” in The Sovereign Map, chapter 4)
with Émile Benveniste’s “Subjectivity in Language” for a common grammar between
language and cartography.
37. Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, 340–41.
38. Karamustafa, “Introduction to Islamic Maps,” 7.
39. Bearman et al., “DJazīra.”
40. I have left out passages from the Arabian Nights, and specifically those that
refer the travels of Sinbad, which refer to islands, as they are better known, and they
represent an oral tradition shared by the Islamic world. The islands and wonders
referred there appear as well in the texts compiled by Arioli; I merely present a
general inventory of their variety and some obvious links with the Christian insular
imaginary.
41. California is an island kingdom ruled by Calafia, queen of Amazons in the
Sergas, book V of Amadís, located to the right of India and near Paradise. See Cacho
Blecua and Lacarra, Lo imaginario en la conquista de América, and Javier González,
“Libros de caballerías en América,” with ample bibliography.
42. See van Duzer, Floating Islands, on this particular topic, with numerous
examples.
43. Arioli, Le isole mirabili, 31.
44. See Arioli, Le isole mirabili, 122–23, and Platts, A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical
Hindi, and English, 650.
45. See Hunsberger, “Marvels.”
46. See Oman, “Al-Idrīsī.” This is a very general sketch; for a detailed introduc-
tory article with bibliography, see Maqbul and Taeschner, “DJughrāfiyā” [geography].
 Notes to Chapter 2 179

47. Arioli, Le isole mirabili, 87, 90–91, 181–82. For a detailed account of continu-
ation of Latin geography into Arabic, see Vallvé Bermejo, “Fuentes latinas de los
geógrafos árabes,” and Molina, “Orosio y los geógrafos hispanomusulmanes.” For an
overview of Islamic cartography, see Maqbul, A History of Arab-Islamic Geography.
48. See Lewicki, “Ibn Ὰbd al-Munὶm al-H.imyarī.”
49. Ibn Wasif Sah and Al-H.imyarī in Arioli, Le isole mirabili, 70–72. See A. Sco-
bie, “The Battle of the Pygmies and the Cranes.”
50. Reproduced in Harley and Woodward, The History of Cartography, vol. 2,
Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, part 1, 391.
51. I present selected interpretations from a very complicated tradition sum-
marized in Viré, “Wāk. wāk. , Wak. wāk. , Wāk. Wāk. , Wāk. al- Wāk. , al- Wāk. wāk. (a.).” See
also Toorawa, “Wâq al-wâq.”
52. See Maqbul, “Cartography of al-Sharīf al-Idrīsī.”
53. Arioli, Le isole mirabili, 201.
54. Arioli writes: “One of the many flexions of this root, the word hadath, means
at the same time ‘novelty’ and ‘event.’ Yet another flexion of the same root, redupli-
cating the second radical, gives us the verb haddatha, which means ‘to narrate’; an
ulterior flexion produces the homograph and homophone hadith, from then on one
word, distinguishable only in their respective and different plurals, with the mean-
ing of ‘new’ and ‘narration’” (201n).
55. Clutton, “Isolarios.” This anthropological gaze is precisely what will begin to
dominate the isolario in later versions, such as in the writings of Sonetti, Bordone,
and particularly Thévet. Conley writes, “The perspectival distance that goes with
self-detachment becomes, thanks to the ethnographic matrix offered by the island-
book format, a space for anthropology” (The Self-Made Map, 178), a perspective
that would be progressively shared by writing in general. I would argue that, even if
Buondelmonti, whom I am about to discuss, does not make this perspective a gen-
eral one, he certainly anticipates it, making it part of the beginning and, maybe the
nature itself, of the isolario.
56. Tolias, “Isolarii, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century,” 264, 265.
57. For the manuscripts of the Liber, see Almagià, Monumenta cartographica
Vaticana.
58. Clutton, “Isolarios,” 482. Tolias writes: “There is nothing particularly remark-
able about the conception of isolario as a genre, for the practice of organizing knowl-
edge in thematic compartments is widely found in medieval and Renaissance
learned literature. Lengthy lists in chronicles, books of wisdom, bestiaries, books of
miracles, and later, collections of views of towns, harbors, costumes, battles, or mil-
itary formations had accustomed people to the thematic encyclopedic approach”
(“Isolarii, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century,” 281). What was original was the focus
on islands.
180 Notes to Chapter 2

59. Clutton, “Isolarios,” 483; Weiss, “Un umanista antiquario.”

60. The multiple redactions have been determined to be as follows: a first writ-
ten at Rhodes before 1420; a second also written at Rhodes, appearing in 1420; a
shorter version written in Constantinople in 1422; and a fourth around 1430, with
additional maps and information (Tolias, “Isolarii, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century,”
266n).
61. Legrand, preface, xxiv, xxv; but his list is incomplete. See Weiss, “Un uman-
ista antiquario,” esp. 110–11. There are only two editions of Christophoro Buondel-
monti’s most famous work, the Liber insularum archipelagi. The first was Ludovicus
von Sinner’s edition of 1824; the second, by Émile Legrand, was originally published
in Paris in 1897.
62. Legrand, preface, xiii.
63. In Tolias, “Isolarii, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century,” 266.
64. Buondelmonti, Description des îles de l’Archipel grec, 159.
65. Three copies I have seen follow these instructions quite closely: the Bib-
lioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, MS 18246; MS Latin 4825 in the Bibliothèque
Nationale de France (reproduced in Buondelmonti, Description des îles de l’Archipel
grec); and the one reproduced in History of Cartography, 1:483. The alternation
between text and map is the first trait of the isolario, a physical, visual one, which will
underscore the island-hopping nature of the genre. A fourth manuscript I have con-
sulted, Escorial f.II.17, begins by following these instructions for five islands, but
then puts them in an appendix.
66. Turner, “Christopher Buondelmonti and the Isolario.” See also Montesdeoca,
“Del enciclopedismo al isolario humanist” and Los islarios de la época del humanismo.
67. Turner, “Christopher Buondelmonti and the Isolario,” 13. Among owners
of copies of the Liber were merchants, doctors of law and medicine, and a bishop.
A shared bourgeois ideology with his readers might thus explain the incredible
success Buondelmonti had. See ibid., 24 n.29.
68. Though Conley writes about Bordone’s isolario, I think it appropriate for
Buondelmonti’s as well: “Equal importance is ascribed to text and illustration. A
sensible balance of verbal and visual material dictates the form of the book, each ele-
ment intended to complement the other. The map offers a spatial order of figures
that suspends the discursive itinerary. . . . The layout of language and image implies
that the one may be unlike but is also a necessary part of the other; that, too, each
can be figured as what defines its surrounding border or what it encompasses; that
heterogeneity is the basis of the genre; that as system of alterity is literally ‘written’
or ‘mapped’ into the relation between the island and the sea, between the illustra-
tion and the text. . . . Serving to produce totality and a mirror of matter familiar and
bizarre, or an archipelago of things, places and oddities, the isolario heralds a dia-
grammatic arrangement of knowledge. A sense of something ‘other’ is held in its
 Notes to Chapter 2 181

logic and execution and reveals its latent attraction to ethnography” (The Self-Made
Map, 179–80).
69. Buondelmonti, Description des îles de l’Archipel grec, 192.
70. This is the case of Samos (ibid., 227).
71. Buondelmonti in Turner, “Christopher Buondelmonti and the Isolario,” 19.
72. Buondelmonti, Description des îles de l’Archipel grec, 236.
73. Ibid., 180, 197, 212. For a full analysis of Buondelmonti as archaeologist, see
Weiss, “Un umanista antiquario.”
74. Cachey, “Print Culture and the Literature of Travel,” 14. Page numbers cor-
respond to my copy of this lecture, kindly provided by Prof. Cachey.
75. Ibid., 15.
76. Ibid.
77. Conley, The Self-Made Map, especially the chapter “An Insular Moment:
From Cosmography to Ethnography.” See also “Virtual Reality and the Isolario.”
78. Lestringant, “L’Insulaire des Lumières,” 89, and also “Fortunes de la singular-
ité à la Renaissance.”
79. Cachey, “Print Culture and the Literature of Travel,” 6.
80. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 67.
81. Tolias, “Isolarii, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century,” 271.
82. Comprising 111 maps, drawn ca. 1540, this isolario’s maps are more func-
tional than aesthetic, including scales of latitude and some of longitude. The book
is divided into four parts (North Atlantic, Mediterranean, Africa and India, and
the New World) and preceded by a brief cosmographical treatise. A historian and
builder of navigational instruments, royal cosmographer Santa Cruz probably in-
tended this work to be part of a Universal Geography that he never completed. The
Islario is kept at the Biblioteca Nacional de España (Res 38) and has been digitized:
http://bibliotecadigitalhispanica.bne.es:1801/. Among some traits of this isolario
are that it is a manuscript written on paper (a first, for these types of charts were typ-
ically drawn on parchment), and that it follows the map–text alternation but consid-
erably expands the text, perhaps as a result of its author’s historiographic interests.
See also Cuesta, Alonso de Santa Cruz y su obra cosmográfica.
83. It is curious that of the eleven compilations that constitute the genre (in
Lestringant’s exhaustive study), there is a Portuguese author (Valentim Fernandes,
De Insulis et peregrinatione Lusitanorum), a German (Henricus Martellus Germanus,
Insularium illustratum Henrici Martelli Germani—produced in northern Italy), a
Dutch (Olfert Dapper, Naukeurige Beschryving der Eilanden, in de Archipel del Midde-
lantsche Aee, en ontrent dezelve, gelegen: Waer onder de voornaemste Cyprus, Rhodus,
Kandien, Samos, Scio, Negroponte, Lemnos, Paros, Delos, Patmos, en andere, in groten
getale . . . Door Dr. O. Dapper), a French (André Thévet, Le Grand Insulaire et
Pilotage), and a Spanish one (Alonso Fernandez de Santa Cruz, Islario general de
182 Notes to Chapter 2

todas las Islas del Mundo por Alonso de Santa Cruz Cosmógrafo mayor de Carlos I de
España, which was dedicated to the monarch but never published). The remaining
six isolarii are by Italians.
84. Cachey, “Print Culture and the Literature of Travel,” 22.
85. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 127.
86. Conley, The Self-Made Map, 195, 196.
87. Tolias, “Isolarii, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century,” 283–94.
88. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 76.
89. Conley, The Self-Made Map, 197.
90. Braudel, El Mediterráneo, 37.
91. Ibid., 38.
92. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 286.
93. Conley, The Self-Made Map, 169.
94. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 297, esp. the section entitled “Cartographic Fic-
tions” in chap. 4.
95. This can be exemplified in the image of insularity conveyed in the Imago
mundi, which, particularly in its French version, was disseminated from 1250 on. See
Dubost, “Insularités imaginaires et récit médiéval,” 49.
96. Examples are legion, from marginalia—both literary and cartographic—to
bestiaries and travelogues.
97. Avalon submitted to the authority of fairies is the best example anteceding
the Spanish book of chivalry. Mixed with the ideas of strangeness and the other
world, the supernatural presence of evil on an island can be attested in the Arabic
imaginary in the island of The Evil One, or in the Roman d’Alexandre, where the
hero imprisons the Devil on the deserted island of Urion.
98. Another, among many, important example of islands associated with the
other world is the Island of Saint Brendan, which I have referred to before. In the
Iberian Peninsula, related to the Celtic imram to which the Voyage de Saint Brandan
relates, we can refer to the Conto de Amaro (fourteenth century), a tale of a journey
through a series of islands, populated by beasts, hermits, and marvels, culminating
with the arrival onto the island of Paradise. See Lida de Malkiel, “La visión de tras-
mundo en las literaturas hispánicas,” esp. 377–78. Indeed, the insular other world
makes reference not only to the world of the dead, Hades or the Elyseum Fields, but
to Purgatory and, of course, Paradise. While there seems to be a general impression
that the medieval insular imaginary has more negative connotations (as opposed to
a more “utopian” or positive modern archipelago, see Dubost, “Insularités imagi-
naires et récit médiéval”) in the Islamic insular imaginary briefly reviewed above, in
cartography, in the recuperation of versions of the other world and in their Chris-
tianized forms of paradise, utopian and even “robinsonesque” islands can be found.
See Le Goff’s history of Purgatory, La Naissance du Purgatoire, and Lida de Malkiel,
 Notes to Chapter 2 183

“La visión del trasmundo en las literaturas hispánicas” (she provides specific bibli-
ography on the Spanish versions of the Tractatus de Purgatorio on page 377). For a
general account of the medieval imaginary of the other world, see Patch’s classic
work on the subject, The Other World. The best known Spanish examples are prob-
ably the Exemplo 49 of El conde Lucanor (“De lo que contesçió al que echaron en la
ysla desnuyo quándol tomaron el señorío que tenié”) and the “Insolas Dotadas”
episode of Libro del caballero Zifar, which has been discussed in chapter 1.
99. See Peyràs, “L’Île et le sacré dans l’Antiquité,” esp. 27–32. Mysterious and
prominent births in medieval literature are also often staged on islands, such as
Clinevent’s in the Chanson de Gaydon, and Bayar’s, the horse of the “quatre fils
Aymon,” in the Chanson de Maugis (Dubost, “Insularités imaginaires et récit médié-
val,” 50).
100. Dubost writes that “the devil appears as the figure of insularization par
excellence, whether in terms of doctrine or as a structure of representation. In a
series of encirclements, the islands of evil, of temptation, of perversion, of Morgan-
ian imprisonment surround the devil and the traps of desire. All these arrangements,
all these plays of insularity are in conformity with the theological, Augustinian idea
that evil does not exist in itself. It is perceived as a lack in ontological space, as an
island of non-being, an obsession that can be captured only in the image of an island
that does not exist”(“Insularités imaginaires et récit médiéval,” 57).
101. Peyràs, “L’Île et le sacré dans l’Antiquité,” 32.
102. Lestringant, “L’Insulaire des Lumières,” 90.
103. Ibid., 91. For a politically and philosophically informed, if opaque, study on
the archipelago as figure, see Cacciari, L’Arcipelago.
104. Minerva distinguishes two types of island: the atoll-island and the island-
island. The first she relates to the idea of monstrosity, sterility, desert, stasis, and
solitude; the second to notions of center, refuge, paradise, and happiness (Minerva,
“Le Cercle magique,” 152, 153, 156).
105. On the subject of utopia, one can conjecture that for postmodernity the
utopian island cannot be drawn on a map anymore, and it is not even imagined in
its possibility. For these texts, the most beautiful island will be that which cannot
be found or may not exist, the island of nowhere (or of the day before), the truly fan-
tastic island. Dystopia consists thus in this receding of a floating or mobile island, in
the impossibility of fixing it to specific coordinates, in the chase after a mirage. See
Minerva, “Le Cercle magique,” 157.
106. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 201. I will look closely at two examples of insu-
lar toponymy in the next two chapters. For more on naming in the Renaissance,
see Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, especially 52–85. For intelligent criticism of
Greenblatt’s use of the term wonder see González Echevarría’s review, “Europeans
in Wonderland.”
184 Notes to Chapter 2

107. In considering the toponymy of islands, it is particularly important to

remember that “one of the paradoxes of toponymical nomenclature, and, for that
matter, all inscriptions contained on the surface of a map, means occupying a por-
tion—even infinitesimal—of the space that it claims to name. We might then con-
sider the letters of the toponym as elements integrated into the cartographic design
(that is, as geographical sites, islands, set out in a linear archipelago), that can gener-
ate meaning when one follows the other” ( Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 202–3). Jacob
emphasizes the relationship between a name and a geography as elements of cartog-
raphy, but one can also emphasize here the particular equivalence between language
and insularity, between letters and islands that can lead to a syntax, the idea of a
structure and a grammar.
108. Lestringant, “L’Insulaire des Lumières,” 91.
109. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 286.
110. Lestringant, “L’Insulaire des Lumières,” 95. It is in this sense, in the opposi-
tions singularity/diversity and purity/hybridity, that Peyràs opposes the Greek and
the Roman insular imaginary. In Greek mythology the island is not only a recon-
quering of self, or the search for a home, that is, the return to a form of singularity,
of a “personal autarchy,” but neither is it a site of passage, nor only a refuge: “it is also
the deepening of an ethnic and cultural méttisage. . . . The island constitutes in
Greek culture a privileged space of experiences that pose and seek to solve the prob-
lem of the human condition. . . . Romans, on the contrary, due to their religious
ideology in the time of empire, conceived only of a politically closed group in which
each was subjected to his place. The island, inasmuch as it represented the possi-
bility of alterity, did not have a reason for being” (Peyràs, “L’Île et le sacré dans
l’Antiquité,” 32, 35).
111. Buondelmonti, Description des îles de l’Archipel grec, 241. Buondelmonti also
briefly describes another city, Gallipoli, stating that that description obviously
anticipates the longer one of Constantinople. For more on Buondelmonti’s descrip-
tion of Constantinople, see Gerola, “Le vedute di Constantinopoli di Cristofor
Buondelmonti.”
112. Turner, “Christopher Buondelmonti and the Isolario,” 22.
113. Braudel in El Mediterráneo en la época de Felipe II writes of the role the
construction of wood boats had in the destruction of the Mediterranean forests.
Thickets and bushes take the place of pinewoods, leaving extensive spaces nude.
Victim of its own exploitation, the ship suffered due to the difficulty of obtaining
wood, and to the high prices that had to be paid for it. Braudel reminds us that
Carmelo Traselli, historian of Sicily, attributed to this, among many other reasons,
the decadence of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century, which intensified in
the seventeenth: Venetian sailors bought their ships then from Holland. The Vene-
tian crisis coincided with a similar one in the Islamic world that had been occurring
 Notes to Chapter 3 185

since the eleventh century, surrendering the control of the inner sea to English and
Dutch sailors.
114. Tolias, “Isolarii, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century,” 272.
115. Ibid., 279.
116. Braudel, El Mediterráneo, 264.

3. Adventure and Archipelago

1. Two recent publications, not available to me when I wrote this book, gather
the latest lines of thought on chivalric literature and evaluate the considerable atten-
tion the genre has garnered in the last few years: Amadís de Gaula, 500 años después:
Homenaje a Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua, and the catalogue of the exhibit in the Bib-
lioteca Nacional, Amadís de Gaula: 1508 (quinientos años de libros de caballerías).
2. See Gómez Redondo, “La literatura caballeresca castellana medieval.”
3. See Infantes, López, and Borrel, Historia de la edición y de la lectura en
España. I will refer to Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo as Montalvo.
4. See Roubaud-Bénichou, Le Roman de chevalerie en Espagne, 73–84, for an
overview. I will not enter debate on the “Amadís question.” Portuguese and French
theories for the original Amadís were silenced by Rodríguez Moñino’s mid-twentieth
century discovery of fragments of a primitive Amadís, dated 1420, in Spanish. Within
the complex set of references to Amadís in Spain and hypotheses on the structure of
the “primitive” version in three books, this discovery placed Amadís firmly in the
Spanish literary tradition. For a concise summary of the debate, see the chapter de-
voted to it by Pierce, Amadís de Gaula, 39ff; for an exhaustive and up-to-date study
presenting the estado de la cuestión see Roubaud-Bénichou’s “Annexe” in Le Roman,
237–305. On the matter of the primitive Amadís, see Lida de Malkiel, “El desenlace
del Amadís primitivo,” and Avalle-Arce’s controversial monograph, “Amadís de Gaula.”
5. Williams, “The Amadis Question”; Lida de Malkiel, “El desenlace del Ama-
dís primitivo.”
6. One proposal is the equation of Vindilisora to Windsor. For other cases,
see González, “Realismo y simbolismo en la geografía del Amadís de Gaula,” and an
extreme in Suárez Pallasá, “La ínsula Firme del Amadís de Gaula.”
7. Place, “Amadis of Gaul, Wales or What?” 106–7. I summarize here Place’s
careful tracing of the debate around the term “Gaul,” part of the “Amadís question”
debate: “Bernardo Tasso’s equation of Gaula with French Gaule (English Gaul,
Spanish Galia) as evidenced by the title, Amadigi di Francia” in his versified redac-
tion (1560) of the Amadís, caused J. C. Dunlop (1814) to identify the two without
question. Only later, in 1849, would George Ticknor state that “Amadís is the son of
a merely imaginary king of the imaginary kingdom of Gaula,” while suggesting a
connection between Gaula and Wales. Baret identified Gaula and Wales in 1853.
Place notes that it is interesting that it should be a French Hispanist who would
186 Notes to Chapter 3

categorically deny the claim of Herberay des Essarts, translator of the Amadís into
French, that Gaula meant France and that Amadís was a redaction of a Picard origi-
nal. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo in Orígenes de la novela followed the identifica-
tion with Wales. Grace S. Williams in 1909, in her “The Amadís Question,” wrote
that “in the beginning Gaula is undoubtedly France or a part of it, later, on the
same kind of evidence, it is Wales, and then in the third book we have a return to
France . . . and finally, when Amadís sets out for Germany, the inference would be
the same.” Place notes Williams also relates the mingling of geographic fact and
fancy in the Amadís with Arthurian romance in general (100–101). Place further
examines the use of the term in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae
and Wace’s Brut, and its absence in the Tristan versions, recalling that “in the second
half of the twelfth century France usually meant merely the Ile de France area
around Paris plus the French Vexin and French Gâtinais” (103). He continues his
search through Chrétien, Robert de Boron, and the prose Vulgate, finding interest-
ing parallels with Amadís’s Roman episodes (105). He extends this all the way to the
Perlesvaus, to conclude that “the Vulgate ‘Gaule’ is a fictional region on the continent
not far removed from Brittany. Furthermore, it can be established that according to
the Vulgate, in the two regions, la petite Bretagne and Gaule, were four so-called petty
kingdoms—fictional of course—of which one, Benoic or Benoich, was originally
ruled by Lancelot’s father, King Ban, who was later deprived of his territory by a cer-
tain Claudas described variously as ‘king of the Deserted Land’ and ‘a liege man of
the king of Gaul, nowadays called France’” (105–6).
8. Avalle-Arce, “El arco de los leales amadores en el Amadís,” tries to establish
an influence of the Tirant lo Blanc on the Amadís in terms of space, and of the Ori-
entalism denoted by the Constantinople episodes. Sea travel, however, was already
present in French romance, as we have seen, and the reference to Constantinople is
there a topos, as will be discussed later.
9. For López Estrada the sea is simply another dimension of adventure, and he
writes that while the island appears “occasionally” as a setting for combat, the pre-
ferred space of the author of Amadís is the mainland. López Estrada also claims the
islands of Amadís are not “islands”: they are ínsulas, he insists, a term that for him
stresses the “utopian depth” of these spaces in the Spanish romance (“El Tirante
castellano de 1511,” 457). I devote a long discussion to this aspect of insularity in the
book later on.
10. See Lastra Paz, “Tipología espacial,” 189, who studies these spaces in terms
of their “trial” quality.
11. Olschki, Storia letteraria delle scoperte geografiche, 51–52.
12. Cacho Blecua, introduction, 158.
13. Lastra Paz (“Tipología espacial”) rationalizes the spaces of the Amadís in thir-
teen categories, while Fogelquist summarizes the book into events. See Fogelquist,
 Notes to Chapter 3 187

El Amadís y el género de la historia fingida. Another term commonly used to describe

these events is as rite of passage (Cacho Blecua, Amadís), or what Maier considers
the “forging of a reputation . . . of structural importance in the work” (“Golden Age
Imagery,” 58).
14. Lastra Paz’s essay is useful, but has theoretical and terminological flaws. For
example, the definition of area (ámbitos) is confusing, and within the classification
itself, the systematization shows inconsistencies: the difference between feminine
areas and masculine space calls for an elaboration that is not present in the arti-
cle, and the difference within the classification between spaces and areas is not
explained. A footnote explains that by area she means the locus: a space character-
ized by its permanence, while space is to her “space proper,” spatium. Even within
this frame, the distinction is unclear (Lastra Paz, “Tipología espacial,” 174, 172 n.1).
15. “In this way, one of these places may be tinged with violence and be an area
appropriate for adventure (Castle of Dardán the Proud, Ínsula Triste of the giant
Madarque, the Malaventurada glade, etc.), and it can also be a place of refuge and
happy encounters” (Lastra Paz, “Tipología espacial,” 180).
16. Sieber, “The Romance of Chivalry in Spain,” 209.
17. Lastra Paz, “Tipología espacial,”188.
18. Fogelquist, El Amadís y el género de la historia fingida, 128.
19. Cacho Blecua, Amadís, 240. See Fogelquist, El Amadís y el género de la historia
fingida, esp. 113–23, where he summarizes and disagrees with Durán’s analysis.
Fogelquist relates Weber de Kurlat’s study (“Estructura novelesca del Amadís de
Gaula”) on the structure of Amadís to techniques of medieval historiography
that constitute the core of his hypothesis. This argument is extended in Roubaud-
Bénichou, Le Roman de chevalerie. Cacho Blecua takes Weber de Kurlat’s references
and refines her terminology; his is the most exhaustive look at Amadís from a formal
point of view.
20. Of the latter kind, “in the Amadís, especially in book IV and in the Sergas, the
syntagm ‘dexa la historia’ predominates over ‘dexa el cuento,’ used more in Arthur-
ian tradition. This might imply a connection with historiography, as Alfonso’s
Primera Crónica General de España uses similar links to resolve space-time prob-
lems,” bearing witness to the shared motifs of these two genres. See Roubaud-
Bénichou, “La General Estoria,” in Le Roman de chevalerie, 115–28.
21. Cacho Blecua identifies ten diverse techniques of interweaving in the Amadís,
four of them dealing with questions of space specifically (Amadís, 250–56).
22. Cacho Blecua, Amadís, 258–59.
23. See Avalle-Arce’s synopsis of book II in Amadís de Gaula, 185–92.
24. Whenever possible, quotations from Amadís include book numbers in Roman
numerals, followed in Arabic numerals by chapter and page number of the Spanish
edition, Rodríguez de Montalvo, Amadís de Gaula. For example, “IV, 129” refers to
188 Notes to Chapter 3

the 129th chapter of book IV; and “II, Prol, 658; 420” indicates the prologue to book
II, on page 658 in the modern Spanish edition and page 420 in the English transla-
tion. English translations refer to page numbers in the Place and Behm translation.
25. See Cacho Blecua’s “name index” at the end of the second volume to his
edition of Rodríguez de Montalvo, Amadís.
26. Here, fiction is considered generally as that which is outside the “real,” in
its possibility suggested through the recurrent presence of the marvelous rather
than in specific content. Specific instances of marvelous events in Amadís have
been studied in detail by Mérida Jiménez (“Fuera de la orden de natura”), in the
variations of the marvelous, the magical, the supernatural, and the miraculous.
This exceptional study does not, however, give any particular attention to spatial
configuration.
27. See Morreale, “Sobre algunas acepciones de ‘extraño’ y su valor ponderativo.”
28. See Mérida Jiménez, “Fuera de la orden de natura,” 129–136.
29. See ibid., esp. 146–59 and 165–70 for Arcaláus; and Bognolo, La finzione
rinnovata, for complementary analyses. See Neri, “Lo maraviloso arquitectónico,”
for an overview of architectural marvels.
30. The Ínsula Gravisanda is introduced in chapter 41 of the first book, along
with Galaor, Amadís, and Agrajes himself. By the end of chapter 40 Amadís and
Agrajes leave Galaor to search for this valorous knight by himself, as they continue
on to fulfill Amadís’s promise given to Briolanja a year before. At the beginning of
chapter 41 we meet Galaor being led by a damsel. Galaor finds a series of adven-
tures, marked by his moodiness and his sexual volubility, until he confronts a most
valorous knight who turns out to be his brother, Florestán. Insular spaces also stage
amorous and sexual encounters, at times constituting adventures, others merely
providing the possibility for genealogy to continue, as heroes of later cycles are con-
ceived as result of these encounters.
31. Authorship is the first of the many issues debated around the Ínsula Firme
episodes. Many critics coincide in believing that this prologue, along with the
fourth book and as confirmed by the related events in the fifth book, written entirely
by Montalvo, the Sergas de Esplandián, are products of Montalvo’s pen. I refer the
reader to the “Amadís question” and register my agreement with Cacho Blecua who,
correcting a radical affirmation made in his doctoral dissertation, the classic Amadís,
declares it is practically impossible to discern which paragraphs or words have been
revised by Montalvo and which are products of his own invention. The opposite
position is represented by Avalle-Arce’s Amadís de Gaula, in which he dissects the
Amadís and finds evidence of four different redactions prior to Montalvo’s version.
32. Maier, “Golden Age Imagery,” 61. “Psychoanalytic interpretations,” such as
those by Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Otto Rank, are common in this type
of approach, in formulations that lead to predictable analogies and repetitiveness.
 Notes to Chapter 3 189

Mérida Jiménez analyzes the episodes in terms of the specific nuances the marvel-
ous receives in the various elements that configure the episode (Mérida Jiménez,
“Fuera de la orden de natura,” esp. 175–276).
33. The particular name of the island is interpreted by Avalle-Arce to be evi-
dence of the episode’s late addition to the romance. That is, it would not have been
a part of the primitive Amadís for a cartographic reason: “because terra firme is a
name set in circulation by Rodrigo de Bastidas in 1502 to designate the American
coastline from Margarita Island to the Darien River, in contrast with the Caribbean
islands, where the Spanish had first arrived.” For Avalle-Arce the name would remit
to geography and the discoveries in particular. The syntagm “Islas y Tierra Firme,”
characteristic of the Spanish Golden Age, was formed, and the term was most often
used to distinguish the coast from adjacent islands; the term might also be used to
designate large islands. For Avalle-Arce, both the Ínsula Firme of Amadís and the
island of California in the Sergas de Esplandián are a definite sign of the influence of
the discovery of the Americas on Montalvo’s refurbishing of the romance (Avalle-
Arce, “Amadís de Gaula,” 195–96). Emilio José Sales Dasí, however, has demon-
strated that the syntagm was in use already in the last third of the fourteenth century
(in Mérida Jiménez, “Fuera de la orden de natura,” 187). Javier González summarizes
the many aspects in which books of chivalry conditioned, filtered, and responded
to the Americas in “Libros de caballerías en América,” 369. See also the classics Leo-
nard, Books of the Brave; Rodríguez Prampolini, Amadises de América; and Cacho
Blecua and Lacarra, Lo imaginario en la conquista de América.
34. Maier, “Golden Age Imagery,” 66–67. This political reading assumes a re-
ordering of the material corresponding to the Ínsula Firme episode with the goal
of effecting a comparison between Apolidón and Grimanesa on the one hand
and Amadís and Oriana on the other: “In this manner, Montalvo draws a direct
analogy between the past and the future of the Ínsula, on the one hand, and estab-
lishes a dialectical relationship between the Ínsula and the court at London, on the
other” (60).
35. Ibid., 63.
36. Ibid., 60. See also Romm, The Edges of the Earth, 51.
37. Harney, “Economy and Utopia,” 395.
38. Ibid., 396.
39. Ibid., 399.
40. Ibid., 397.
41. Rodríguez Velasco, “Para una periodización de las ideas sobre la caballería en
Castilla,” 1336.
42. See Fuchs, Romance, 40.
43. I refer the reader to Rodríguez Velasco, “Para una periodización de las
ideas sobre la caballería en Castilla,” for a full discussion of these periods, 1338–42;
190 Notes to Chapter 3

compare with Gómez Redondo’s periodization of chivalric literature in Historia de

la prosa medieval castellana.
44. In Sieber, “The Romance of Chivalry in Spain,” 205–6.
45. Ibid., 216.
46. Harney, “Economy and Utopia,” 393. Harney quotes Marin.
47. Ibid., 394.
48. Maier, “Golden Age Imagery,” 54.
49. Harney, “Economy and Utopia,” 388. Harney continues to analyze this his-
torical incongruity of the economy represented in the romances through Bourdieu’s
concept of the habitus, and concludes that this incongruity only creates an effect
when “the practices generated by the habitus appear as ill adapted because they are
attuned to an earlier state of the objective conditions,” something that the romance
will defer until Cervantes. Then, this incongruity will become apparent in what
Bourdieu himself terms the “Don Quijote effect” (388–89).
50. See ibid., 383–84, which quotes Weber for this argument.
51. See Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne, and Claeys and Sargent, The Utopia Reader,
among many others.
52. The striking differences between these adventures and Lancelot’s val des faux
amants or val sans retour make their kinship remote, both in nature and meaning,
though there is a similarity in their being trials of love even when Paris and later
Williams identified the arch as an imitation of French romance (Paris’s edition of
the Romans de la Table Ronde, Williams in “The Amadís Question”). Avalle-Arce
details these differences, for the Arch of Loyal Lovers goes further into a complex
process of trial, reward, and punishment for both ladies and knights, and identified
the arch as an imitation of French romance. In the same article in which Avalle-Arce
discusses these differences (“El arco de los leales amadores en el Amadís”), he sug-
gests we consider the influence of the Byzantine novel in this particular episode, for
the trial of chastity and/or fidelity is commonplace in this genre. Menéndez Pelayo,
recalls Avalle-Arce, wrote of the similarity of the Arch of Loyal Lovers to an episode
in La historia de Leucipe y Clifonte, by Achilles Tatius (Menéndez Pelayo, Orígenes de
la novela, via Avalle-Arce, “El arco de los leales amadores en el Amadís,” 151–54),
and Avalle-Arce takes on the task of reviewing numerous texts to prove the similar-
ity of the Amadisian episode with the same motif in the Byzantine novel. While a
series of elements from the episode in the romance can be found in the Byzantine
novel (such as the palace or temple, the statues, the musical element, the smoke and
flames, the inscriptions, the punishment, and the permanence of the enchantment),
their direct relationship with the Amadís remains to be traced. The Arthurian model
as a general one had itself absorbed elements from many traditions, which were
given special attention in the Amadís and developed in its peninsular context. See
Fuchs, Romance, 12–36.
 Notes to Chapter 3 191

53. Campos Rojas, “Centros geográficos,” 10, points out the hortus conclusus
aspect of the garden. For him, it is not only that the place itself is linked to the topos
of the garden and its relations to a locus amoenus, but also that the arch suggests a rite
of passage into a sacred place. His take on the character of the place, labeling it
“sacred,” seems exaggerated, as it is simply a space for an elite. He further associates
the arch with the Roman triumphal arch, which is much more suggestive.
54. See Piehler, The Visionary Landscape, 99, for a summary of traits related to
the hortus conclusus.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 79. For a study of architectonic marvels in other romances, see Campos
Rojas, “El Mediterráneo como representación de un imperio,” 7–8. See also Neri,
“Lo maravilloso arquitectónico.”
57. This cycle, defined as the possibility of recurrently establishing a parallel
hierarchy, is what Harney considers the chivalric utopia (“Economy and Utopia,”
399).
58. For an analysis of the episode as one of the most gratuitous and fantastic of
the entire romance, see Cacho Blecua, Amadís, 281. For the contrary argument in
terms of its conception as a key episode in Montalvo’s recantation, see Avalle-Arce,
“Amadís de Gaula,” chap. 7, esp. 290–95.
59. See Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, and also my “Where One Stands,”
where I analyze the figure of shipwreck in Claribalte as central to the changing role
of fiction in sixteenth-century writing.
60. See Cuesta Torre, “Las ínsolas del Zifar y el Amadís,” and Lucía Megías,
“Sobre torres levantadas, palacios destruidos, ínsulas encantadas y doncellas sedu-
cidas.” Cuesta Torre is especially interesting, as she periodizes the use of islands in
books of chivalry; however, consideration of space is subordinated to the types of
characters that inhabit them.
61. For the Castilian Tristan as a source for the Ínsula Triste, see Riquer, “Agora
lo veredes, dixo Agrajes.” See also Ramos, “El Amadís de Juan de Dueñas,” which
argues that the Ínsula Firme “pudo tener en algun momento de su ajetreada vida
textual el nombre de ínsola del Ploro” (852), based on the analysis of Juan de
Dueñas’s verses.
62. I write on giants and the Tower of Babel in the Spanish tradition in “Babel
historiada.”
63. For wild men, see Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: Study in Art,
Sentiment, and Demonology; also Deyermond, “El hombre salvaje en la novela
sentimental.”
64. Cacho Blecua, “La génesis del monstruo,” in Amadís, 31–37; Delpech, “Frag-
ments hispaniques d’un discours incestueux”; and Gracia, “La bestia ladradora,”
put the Endriago in relation to the Arthurian motif of the Barking Beast, the Beste
192 Notes to Chapter 3

Glattisant from the Suite du Merlin to the Castilian Baladro del sabio Merlín and the
Castilian and Portuguese Demandas.
65. Cited in Goldberg, “The Several Faces,” 81.
66. Ibid., 84; Gracia, “El ‘Palacio Tornante,’” 92.
67. Quoted in Gracia, “El ‘Palacio Tornante,’” 75.
68. Ibid., 93–94.
69. Goldberg, “The Several Faces,” 82.
70. The title for chapter 74 remarks how it is through honor and service to the
emperor that Amadís can free this island, previously lost, restoring it to the emperor.
The historical mirrorings with conflicts in the eastern Mediterranean and, in the
other direction, with the conquest of the Americas emphasize how Amadís brings
together the edges of the map to coincide at the center of the Mediterranean world.
71. Dubost, “Insularités imaginaires et récit médiéval,” 57.
72. Ibid., 47.
73. See Back, “Anselm on Perfect Islands.”
74. See chapter 1 for a discussion of portolan charts. The survey of represen-
tations I present here is not an exhaustive inventory of cartographic representations
of the Canary Islands. I have selected those materials of special interest to the theme
of the marvelous and for the depiction of Saint Brendan’s island.
75. Lemarchand, introduction, xv.
76. “Indeed, the charts themselves were to play an important part in broadcast-
ing knowledge, or theories, about the Atlantic archipelagoes and the western coast
of Africa. Because the islands depicted on the charts were stepping-stones for later
voyages to America or have been treated as evidence of pre-Columbian discoveries
of the new continent itself, this aspect of the subject has attracted more comment
than any other. It would require an entire volume to summarize the complex and
contradictory arguments about the apparently imaginary islands of Man, Brazil,
Antilia, and others” (Tony Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth
Century to 1500,” 410). See chapter 2.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid., 372.
79. Quoted in Tous Meliá, El Plan de las Afortunadas Islas, 12.
80. Ibid., 13, 18.
81. Contrary to what Cro argues in “Las fuentes clásicas de la utopía moderna.”
82. Benedeit, El viaje de San Brandán, 58.
83. Quoted in Tous Meliá, El Plan de las Afortunadas Islas, 18.
84. Ibid., 22.
85. Covarrubias remarks in parentheses, under “isla,” still another version of the
story: “En la navegación que ay de Portugal a la India Oriental, que son cinco mil
leguas de agua, está en medio del gran Occéano (donde dizen no hallarse suelo) una
 Notes to Chapter 4 193

isleta despoblada llamada Santa Elena, abastada de dulces aguas, de pescados, de

caça y frutas, que la misma tierra sin labor alguna produce, donde los navegantes
descansan, pescan caçan y se proveen de agua.”
86. The island cannot be found unless Urganda allows it, it is in fact not
described but merely alluded to in the first five books of Amadís, though Juan Díaz
describes it in chapter 7 of Lisuarte de Grecia (1514), the eighth book of Amadís, and
Francisco de Morais, in Palmeirim de Inglaterra, a different cycle, also finds the island
again and names it Isla Peligrosa (Marín Pina, “Palmerín de Inglaterra,” 82–84).
87. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.”
88. Olschki, Storia letteraria delle scoperte geografiche, 42. He writes: “One is
reminded that Columbus followed the example of the sovereign, in a more positive
way, conceding as territories to his navigation companions certain islands of the
Antilles. In one of these ceremonies (if it is true) Michele da Cuneo took purely the-
oretica possession of one of them which, to remember his homeland, he baptized
‘La Bella Saonese’” (42 n.60).
89. See Marín Pina, “Palmerín de Inglaterra,” for an account of the rewriting (and
devoiding of this fiction’s structural/political function) of the Ínsula No Fallada into
the isla peligrosa, thus “finding it,” and for a revisiting of other insular spaces of
Amadís in other texts.

4. Shores of Fiction
1. Cachey, “Print Culture and the Literature of Travel,” 10–11.
2. Gautier Dalché, “The Reception of Ptolemy’s Geography,” 297.
3. Cachey, “Maps and Literature in Renaissance Italy,” 456. My argument here
derives from Cachey’s conclusions on this topic.
4. See Baranda, “El Guarino Mezquino [1527]” and La “Corónica del noble caval-
lero Guarino Mezquino.”
5. Amozurrutia Nava, Guía de lectura del Guarino Mezquino, 7–12.
6. Nebrija specifically states his admiration for Ptolemy in terms of the preci-
sion his method allows for the location of places, even if, Gautier Dalché notes, like
many of his contemporaries, Nebrija considered Ptolemy needed supplementation
and correction through the information provided by navigation (342). See also
Rico, “El nuevo mundo de Nebrija y Colón.”
7. Cachey, “Maps and Literature in Renaissance Italy,” 456, 458.
8. For an elaboration of these tensions in Italian literature in relation to the
origins of the novel, see Quint, “The Boat of Renaissance Epic.” See also chapter 5
of Padrón, The Spacious Word, on Ercilla’s epic poem La Araucana, and particularly
225ff, for use of chivalric language within epic. For books of chivalry and courtly
spectacle, see the panorama by del Río Nogueras, “Libros de caballerías y fiesta
nobiliaria,” and Cátedra, “Fiestas caballerescas en tiempos de Carlos V.”
194 Notes to Chapter 4

9. Santana Paixão, “Ficção e realidade,” 1422.

10. Ibid., 1421. Santana Paixão develops this idea not only for Amadís, but also
for the book of chivalry as a genre, looking especially closely at the prologues. Her
ideas support my argument on subjectivity and, through it, the idea of an ethical
utopia argued above (1424).
11. Marín Pina summarizes the process, which highlights an emphasis on the
East and particularly related to Greek islands, as follows: “If the fourth book of
Amadís de Gaula and the Sergas were found in a tomb in a hermitage near Constan-
tinople, the rest are found in the most unusual places. Feliciano de Silva discovers
the whereabouts of the second part of Amadís de Grecia (1530) dreaming of a cave
called the palaces of Hercules; Páez de Ribera claims Florisando (1510) as a book
from Petrarch; and Juan Díaz locates Lisuarte de Grecia among the possessions of
the master of the order of Saint John, on the island of Rhodes. Gonzalo Fernández
de Oviedo confesses to finding the Claribalte (1519) during a trip to Tartary, and
Beatriz Bernal finds the Cristalián de España (1545) through prayer. On almost all
occasions the discovery is a marvelous adventure in itself meriting admiration and
wonder” (Marín Pina, “El tópico de la falsa traducción en los libros de caballerías
españoles,” 544).
12. Other authors of isolarii followed this singular mode of self-inscription,
emphasizing the trip as heroic trial. Such inscriptions are almost a motif in chivalric
literature, from Ariosto’s heroes to Don Quixote himself.
13. Cachey, “Print Culture and the Literature of Travel,” 12.
14. See ibid., 12–13. Gaylord has pointed out a parallel in Lucian’s Vera Storia,
where inscription is carved on a tree. Gaylord studies Lucian’s influence in Renais-
sance writing, particularly in relation to Don Quixote’s engagement with historiogra-
phy: “Cervantes incorporates many of the same tricks into the Quixote [self-references
of a first-person author–witness, geographic detail, physical description, etc.], largely
through such surrogate authorial figures as Cide Hamete Benengeli and the ‘second
author.’ The last ploy finds its way into the episode in which the novel has its closest
brush with historical reality: the interpolated tale of the Capitán cautivo. . . . In the
Araucana Ercilla, too, appropriates the Lucianesque motif of writing on trees to
certify his presence in the South American places he describes” (Gaylord, “The True
History of Early Modern Writing in Spanish,” 90–91).
15. Lina Bolzoni in Cachey, “Print Culture and the Literature of Travel,” 5–6.
16. Ibid., 6.
17. See Diez Borque, “Edición e ilustración,” for a list of these “traditionalist”
characteristics of the printed book of chivalry, in imitation of the manuscript.
18. Ibid., 37–38.
19. Rothstein, “The Commemorative Images of Amadís de Gaula,” 101. Gilman
remarks on another version of this commemorative use of the Amadís in a well-known
 Notes to Chapter 4 195

article, when he writes on the influence of our romance in the writing of Bernal
Díaz del Castillo: “The Amadís in those days was . . . as it was for its most celebrated
reader, intensely perused and intensely present, sharply visual. Hence, its suitability
to this particular moment. The first long-awaited sight of lake and city—after the
unsatisfactory descriptions of the Tlaxcalans and the distant glimpse that Diego de
Ordaz and his comrades had of it from the summit of Popocatépetl—is the apogee of
marvel and so of memory, visual memory: ‘Agora que lo estoy escribiendo se me repre-
senta todo delante de mis ojos como si ayer fuera cuando esto pasó’” (Gilman, “Bernal
Díaz del Castillo and Amadís de Gaula,” 112, my emphasis) (and now that I am writ-
ing about it, it all comes before my eyes as if it had happened but yesterday).
20. Rothstein, “The Commemorative Images,” 100. On Amadís’s normative role,
see Baret, De l’Amadís de Gaule et de son influence sur les mœurs et sur la littérature au
XVIe et au XVIIe siècles.
21. See Lacarra Ducay, Aportación al estudio de la pintura mural gótica en Navarra,
92–93. The desire for the representation of simultaneous events, related by Cacho
Blecua to the technique of interweaving, is not frequent, however. Nevertheless,
painting generally makes free use of time and place order, juxtaposing the events, as
Francastel points out in La figura y el lugar, 141.
22. See Les “Amadis” en France au XVIe siècle.
23. The plan follows that of the palace–castle of Chambord, which was first
drafted in 1519 and redrawn in 1526 on the return of François I to France from his
imprisonment after being defeated by the Spaniards in the battle of Pavia.
24. This was suggested by Foulché Delbosc, “Sergas.”
25. See Desprechins de Gaesebeke, “À la gloire d’Amadís” and “Une Tenture
d’Amadis de Gaule,” and Buijs, “Works Related to the Princeton Tapestry.”
26. The catalogue of the 2001 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit contains
articles by several authors, among them the curator, summarizing the scant work on
the tapestries, reduced to the cited article by Rothstein (and another, repeating
most of the information, by the same author) and unpublished material by Hans
Buijs, curator of the small exhibit at Princeton in June of 2001, when the tapestry
was exhibited. The articles in the catalogue lack information on the romance or mis-
read it, and do not establish an interpretive comparison between text and textile.
27. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 42.
28. Ibid., 338.
29. Ibid., 42. I summarize the latest information on the tapestries in “Los tapices
de la Historia de Amadís de Gaula,” and develop the ideas on the Princeton tapestry
in “The Knight, the Kings, and the Tapestries” and earlier, in “La traducción de lo
visible.”
30. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 150.
31. López Estrada, “El Tirante castellano de 1511,” 450.
196 Notes to Chapter 4

32. In this sense, Avalle-Arce (“Tirant lo Blanc, Amadís”) has said that the Con-
stantinopolitan phase of the romance is due to Montalvo, as a way of anticipating his
own novel, the Sergas de Esplandián. His argument is, however, that the episode is
inspired by Tirant lo Blanc. See Paloma Gracia, in “El ‘Palacio Tornante,’” based on
an analysis of the Turning Castle, one of the buildings of Apolidón on the Ínsula
Firme. Regardless of the numerous Oriental elements and precisely because of
them, Gracia concludes that the Orientalism of the Amadís is nothing but a reflec-
tion of the Orient in the various mirrors of Western literature, particularly texts from
the matière de Bretagne, which had previously incorporated Oriental elements in
their constructions. Thus, Gracia concludes, once again, that the Ínsula Firme epi-
sode is a “reading” of the valley of false lovers, the dangerous valley or forest of
French Arthurian romance, while the arch and the chamber are just reworkings
of the perilous castle motif, contradicting Avalle-Arce’s theories, particularly his
arguments around the Arch of the Loyal Lovers: “The difference is that Amadís
refashions the adventure in Byzantine dress, which does not imply neither a rupture
nor a radical change in model, for the Byzantine universe was present in Romance
literatures at its beginnings, as much as the Celtic atmosphere had become a distinct
trait of the matter of Britain” (453). Gracia explains the gradual displacement of the
Celtic landscape in favor of an Oriental one as a consequence of history, as the fight
against the infidel substituting for the shady evil forces of the Celtic world, in short,
a “realness” that took over the ambiguous Arthurian marvels, for which the Tirant lo
Blanc is a case in point (453–54).
33. See Foulché-Delbosc, “Sergas.” Cacho Blecua remarks that for Montalvo’s
“linguistic awareness” the term means feats, moving from the representation to the
events represented in his interpretation of the term (see Rodríguez de Montalvo,
Amadís de Gaula, 1171 n.64).
34. See Javier R. González, “Libros de caballerías en América.”
35. Marín Pina specifically discusses how the rewriting of this space—Urganda’s
Ínsula No Fallada—both creates an important genealogical link between books,
and at the same time undoes the marvelous that characterizes the space by “finding”
it and locating it, which explains the need to rename it (“Palmerín de Inglaterra,”
83–84).
36. The first “catalogue” of islands in chivalric romance is Diego Clemencín’s
footnote to his edition of Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo (part 2, chapter 45, n.7);
see another in Cuesta Torre, “Las ínsolas del Zifar y el Amadís.”
37. Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, s.v. isla.
38. Vergès remarks on the ambiguous pause between discovery and posession:
“If at the very moment of this discovery the tropical island has not yet acquired its
full phantasm composition as a paradisiacal place in Western discourse, the story of
Columbus and those who will follow him announces this representation. In this
 Notes to Chapter 4 197

process of mastering that which seems foreign but at the same time familiar—because
in these voyages, it is also the similar which is discovered—close to the Freudian
Unheimlich, this disquieting strangeness, Columbus and his successors build a dis-
course that seeks to inscribe again this reality in a codified discourse. The discourse
of the marvelous will integrate these spaces, tropical islands, into the familiar con-
fines of European imagination” (“Merveilles de la prise de posession,” 213).
39. “Y otro día por la mañana llegamos a la calzada ancha y vamos camino de
Estapalapa. Y desde que vimo tantas ciudades y villas pobladas en el agua, y en tierra
firme otras grandes poblazones, y aquella calzada tan derecha y por nivel cómo iva a
México, nos quedamos admirados, y decíamos que parecía a las cosas de encanta-
miento que cuentan en el libro de Amadís, por las grandes torres y cúes y edificios
que tenían dentro en el agua, y todos de calicanto, y aun algunos de nuestros solda-
dos decían que si aquello que veían si era entre sueños, y no es de maravillar que
yo escriba aquí de esta manera, porque hay mucho que ponderar en ello que no sé
como lo cuente: ver cosas nunca oídas, ni aun soñadas, como veíamos” (Díaz del
Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista, chap. 87, p. 159). (During the morning
we arrived at a broad Causeway and continued our march toward Iztapalapa, and
when we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on
dry land and that straight and level Causeway going toward Mexico, we were amazed
and said that is was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadís, on
account of the great towers and cues and buildings rising from the water, and all
built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we
saw were not a dream. It is not to be wondered at that I here write it down in this
manner, for there is so much to think over that I do not know how to describe it, see-
ing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed
about [Díaz del Castillo, The History of the Conquest, 156].)
40. Gilman, “Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Amadís de Gaula,” 99, 100, emphasis
mine.
41. Gaylord, “Cervantes’ Portrait of the Artist,” 93, emphasis mine.
42. Gaylord, “Los espacios de la poética cervantina,” 358. Cervantine poetics in
Don Quixote has been the focus of a number of studies. For an analysis concerned
with space, see Hutchinson, Cervantine Journeys, which studies different spaces in
Cervantine writing and devotes the chapter entitled “Cervantine Worlds” to the
chronotope and the experience of different realms. Spatial analysis is, as I advanced
in the introduction, subordinated to time (as in the chronotope) or other consider-
ations. Martínez-Bonati, Don Quixote and the Poetics of the Novel, also considers
space in an opposition of idealism to realism and in the juxtaposition and hybridi-
zation of fictive realms in terms of poetics. Casalduero establishes a spatial opposi-
tion between the first and the second parts, concerned with “roads” and “houses”
respectively that emphasize the static nature of the social order in contrast with the
198 Notes to Chapter 4

dynamism of the knight’s activity (Sentido y forma, esp. 218–22). María Caterina
Ruta, “La descripción de ambientes,” continues this analysis, but excludes the
Barataria episode. See also Selig, “Don Quijote and the Exploration of (Literary)
Geography,” esp. 341–57. Gaylord summarizes debates on theory and poetics in
Don Quixote, writing that “the acknowledgement of a well-read Cervantes has not
revealed in him a rare inventor of literary precepts but a knowledgeable man, a sort
of used-book dealer who limits himself to quoting—or to having his characters
quote—other thinkers more concerned with theory and more original in their
exposition of it” (“Los espacios de la poética cervantina,” 358). Her analysis of space
as poetics looks at the 1605 prologue, where the space of the prison works as a
negative, as an implicit contrary to the space of literary creation, an inspirational
commonplace of lyrical and pastoral poetry. The spaces simultaneously overlap and
contradict each other, ciphering in a way the poetics of Cervantine composition
(358). Moreover, these spaces are invoked by way of an entirely different space. As
the narrator tells us of his efforts to write a proper prologue, that is, one that includes
an endless succession of sonnets, epigrams, eulogies, marginalia, endnotes, maxims,
and sententiae, he does so from a literal, if poetic, common place, the writing studio.
In chapters 47–50 of the first part, Gaylord shows how the closed space of the prison
not only overlaps or coincides once again with that of the locus amoenus but actually
coexists physically as part of the plot: the knight, caged, is carried across the same
green meadows where the Priest and the Canon of Toledo reflect on the poetic val-
ues of the chivalric romance (359–64).
43. Gaylord writes: “Cervantes’ work cultivates a more ambivalent represen-
tation of the play between open space and limitation” (“Los espacios de la poética
cervantina,” 361).
44. Sears, “‘Lighting Out’”; González Echevarría, in Love and the Law in Cervantes,
looks at legal institutions and practices as a discourse that invades and shapes the
novel.
45. References to a geography of empire are not to be overlooked especially
through the presence of America in the text, elegantly studied by Diana de Armas
Wilson in Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World. The implicit mediation of cartog-
raphy is interesting because of its near absence in Quixote: the word “map” appears
only twice. The Indies themselves, to be exact, are referred to directly only on nine
occasions. So the America of maps is there, and it is not: its value seems to be a sign
of something else, as metaphor.
46. Redondo, Otra manera de leer el Quijote, 192.
47. Interpretations of these episodes are numerous. Herrero (“Sierra Morena as
Labyrinth”) explores the biblical subtexts and analyzes the space as labyrinth both
topographic and psychic. On labyrinths see also Fajardo, “The Sierra Morena as
Labyrinth in DQ, I.”
 Notes to Chapter 4 199

48. Quotations from Don Quixote are from Rico’s edition and are marked by
part and chapter number only; for English versions, modified to reveal what I am
emphasizing in the original Spanish, I have consulted both Raffel’s and Grossman’s
translations.
49. See Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, for a general study of the figure
of the wild man.
50. The concept of mimesis in Cervantes has received considerable attention; for
a philosophically informed study, see Cascardi’s differentiation of imitation and
representation in “Genre Definition and Multiplicity in Don Quixote.”
51. Numerous critics have commented on this debate. See de Armas, “Cervantes
and the Italian Renaissance,” esp. 43–56, for a discussion of epic versus romance in
terms of mimesis and genre. For Amadís’s penance as model for Don Quixote, see
Burton, “Peña Pobre to Sierra Morena”; Márquez Villanueva, Personajes y temas del
“Quijote,” esp. 35–51; Gregorio C. Martín, “Don Quijote imitador de Amadís”; and
Riley, “Don Quixote and the Imitation of Models.”
52. See Avalle-Arce, “La penitencia de Amadís en la Peña Pobre,” and the more
general Aguilar Perdomo, “La penitencia de amor caballeresca.”
53. Adrienne Martín underscores the links between fiction and a marvelous power
at stake in the gratuitousness of imitation: “Don Quixote’s poetic madness, as funny
as it may be, ultimately illustrates the enchantment of the written word, the power
of literature and its capacity to move us” (“Humor and Violence in Cervantes,” 167).
54. Madariaga first elaborated this idea in chapters 7 and 8 of his Guía del lector
del Quijote.
55. Joly, commentary to pt. II, chap. 44, pp. 185–87, of the second volume of
Rico’s edition (Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha); Avalle-Arce, “La Ínsula
Barataria: la forma de su relato,” notes that, besides the “authorial intervention,” the
presence of a letter from Sancho to his wife is the beginning of a series of letters that
also serve to characterize the episode and that set it generically aside not only within
the second part, but also from the use of letters in general in the first part.
56. The second intervention refers to Don Quixote, which is why I do not look
at it here.
57. Joly, commentary to pt. II, chap. 44, pp. 185–86.
58. See Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, esp. 1–28.
59. On Quixote’s advice, see Percas de Ponseti, “Los consejos de Don Quijote a
Sancho.” Sources for this advice appear in Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo, ed.
Rodríguez Marín, 6:229–65, 7:149–61.
60. Critical interpretations of Sancho’s governorship range from the idea of a
triumph of the utopia of natural reason to the emphasis on the carnival scenes to
political and social criticism to parody and mere mockery of the ambitious squire.
For the topos of arms and letters in the episode, see Pelorson, “Le Discours des
200 Notes to Chapter 4

armes et lettres et l’épisode de Barataria.” For an interpretation related to carnival,

see Durán, “El Quijote a través del prisma de Mikhail Bakhtine”; Joly, “D’Alberto
Naseli, dit Ganasse”; and Redondo, “Tradición carnavalesca y creación literaria” and
“El Quijote y la tradición carnavalesca.”
61. For folkloric motifs and stories in the novel, see Barrick, “The Form and
Function of the Folktales in Don Quixote.”
62. Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo, ed. Rodríguez Marín, vol. 7, chap. 45, pp. 8–9
n.8; Fermín Caballero discussed in Rubio García, “La Ínsula Barataria.”
63. In Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo, ed. Diego Clemencín, 404–6.
64. Rubio García, “La Ínsula Barataria,” 644–45.
65. Ibid., 644–47, cites the following: “Ínsulas nascen à las vegadas en los rios, et
contienden los homes sobre el señorío dellas” (Partidas III, tit. 28) (Islands some-
times appear in rivers, and men fight for lordship over them); “E cuemo quier que
lo aquel dixiesse por losenía, cuydo el que assy orauan por su muerte los que él des-
terrara, et fizo los todos atar por las ínsulas o estauan” (Primera Crónica General de
España) (And even though he said so because of his youth, he saw that those he had
exiled prayed for his death, and had them tied in the places they were); “La ínsula de
Topaza engendra piedra desse mismo nombre” (“Lapidario,” ed. Vollmöller) (The
island of Topaz engenders stone of the same name); “Habitatores qui sumus de villa
que vocant Ínsula Langovardi, id est, Malagneigo, Argeleva, Odorico, Loba Teude-
miro, Elisabeth, Martino, etc, etc.” (Archivo Condal de Barcelona, IX–X centuries)
(We inhabitants of the town called Island of the Langobars, that is, Malagneigo,
Argeleva, Odorico, Loba Teudemiro, Elisabeth, Martino, etc., etc.).
66. Ibid., 649–50.
67. The verbs abaratar (“to cheapen”) and malbaratar (“to sell for a cheap
price”) are in common use in Latin America, which Corominas does not note.
68. López Estrada draws the links toward political criticism through More’s
influence in the peninsula, in Tomás Moro y España, esp. 75–79; the main reference
to the concept of utopia in Cervantes is Maravall, Utopía y contrautopía en el Quijote;
see also Montero Reguera, El “Quijote” y la crítica contemporánea, esp. 35–38.
69. Eisenberg judges it a probable independent novella through a number of
linguistic markers in “‘Sancho Gobernador.’”
70. Moner, “Sancho à Barataria,” 90, 89. Moner argues that, in addition to the
tradition of Saturnalia and the concept of carnival as a satire of village ingenuity and
old Christian prejudice, there are also obvious references to the menosprecio de corte
y alabanza de aldea theme, as well as to the idea of dissipating the illusions of the
simple man rather than chastising the vanities of power. Chiong Rivero studies the
political ideas of the episode as a “palimpsest” of Guevarian political thought, de-
tailed in “Ínsula de buen gobierno,” with ample discussion of other political analyses
of the episode.
 Notes to conclusion 201

71. Isla Trapobana (I, 18), isla de Chipre (I, 39), isla de Modón (I, 39), isla de
Malta (II, 1), isla de Sicilia (II, 1).
72. In order to transition from the model of knight to the model of conquistador,
de Armas Wilson reads the episode of Barataria in tune with a historical cession of
islands by conquistadors to vassals: “The gift of a governorship . . . serves needless
to say as a literary parody of the books of chivalry, in which knights occasionally dis-
pense islands as gifts to their squires” (“Cervantes and the New World,” 217–18).
Reference to books of chivalry, however, is direct, while the allusion to the imperial
project in the Americas is phantasmatic.
73. The passage cannot be fully translated. In Spanish, the joke is played on the
niece’s inability to understand the meaning of an uncommon word such as ínsula.
She shows this misunderstanding through a play on the word by giving it the pos-
sibility of gender differentiation, masculine and feminine, which the word in its
geographical meaning does not allow for, ínsulas and ínsulos.
74. The play with ínsulas and ínsulos occurs three times, in I, 26, II, 2, and II,
41.
75. These conclusions from space are related to Lezra’s analysis of Don Quixote
as the laying bare of language’s failure to reconcile act and representation. His dis-
cussion of naming and representation, shape, form, and body is interesting as paral-
lel to this discussion of insularity (Unspeakable Subjects, see esp. chap. 3).
76. Avalle-Arce, “La Ínsula Barataria,” 42.
77. The play here is on dones, which means gifts or talents but also plays on Don,
as a title.

Conclusion
1. Menéndez Pelayo, Orígenes de la novela, 1:440. For the relationship between
quixotic poetics and the romance of chivalry, see Mancing, The Chivalric World of
Don Quijote, among many others. The change in evaluation of books of chivalry
can be easily assessed in the many publications devoted to the genre, some devoted
to links with Cervantine writing, but most now independent of it. See Eisenberg
and Marín Pina’s Bibliografía de los libros de caballerías castellanos, and the ongoing
and expanding editorial project of the Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, especially the
editions of books of chivalry and the “guías de lectura” (reading guides).
2. López Pinciano, Philosophia antigua poetica, 1:265.
3. See my “Literature and Cartography in Spain.”
4. López Pinciano, Philosophia antigua poetica, 2:12.
5. Ibid., 2:12. For the metaphor of the body in López Pinciano and in Cer-
vantes, see Orozco Díaz, “Sobre los elementos o ‘miembros’”; and Gaylord, “The
Whole Body of Fable.” For a general Golden Age perspective see Redondo, ed., Le
Corps comme métaphore dans l’Espagne des XVIe et XVIIe siècles. For a theoretically
202 Notes to conclusion

tuned reading of bodily metaphors in relation to language, see Lezra, Unspeakable

Subjects, esp. chap. 4, “Cervantes’s Hand.”
6. López Pinciano, Philosophia antigua poética, 2:80.
7. For a rigorous study on poetics and space in Don Quixote, see Martínez-
Bonati, Don Quijote and the Poetics of the Novel. For López Pinciano as a source (later
debated) for Cervantes’s theory of the novel, see Canavaggio, “Alonso López Pin-
ciano y la estética literaria de Cervantes en el Quijote.” For the Aristotelian argu-
ments in these chapters in Quijote, see Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the Persiles,
esp. 91–130.
8. Reading practices in Don Quixote include reading out loud as well. For the
transitions, see Frenk, Entre la voz y el silencio.
9. Egido has looked at the role of silence in both La Galatea and the Persiles: “El
sosegado y maravilloso silencio de La Galatea” and “Los silencios del Persiles.” For
Don Quixote, see Trueblood, “El silencio en el Quixote.”
10. Other cases are: “all the others there kept a marvelous silence” (I, 13, 144),
“so quiet, that to declare us the excellence of its marvelous silence, only once its
name is named in that as great as truthful story” (I, 20, 221), “all the damsels watch-
ing him serve, keeping a wonderful silence” (I, 50, 571), and “what pleased Don
Quixote the most was the marvelous silence that there was in the entire house” (II,
18, 776).
11. Gregory Hutcheson kindly allowed me to use this anecdote from his life as
a graduate student and provided a copy of the handout Gilman circulated in this
seminar.
12. Simmel, “Das Abenteuer,” 4.
13. For an insightful overview of generic appropriation and reelaboration as
theory of the novel in Cervantes, see Cascardi, “Don Quixote and the Invention of
the Novel.”
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 Index

Abydos, 65 (fig.) Amadís, 78, 82, 83, 85, 86, 92, 94, 95,
adventure, 11, 13, 64, 70, 101, 143, 149, 111, 113, 115 (fig.), 129 (fig.), 150,
161–162, 167n3; absolute, 95; 156; adventures of, 101, 102; as
chivalric, xxxii, 79; etymology of, Beltenbros, 144; Gandalín and, 98;
xxxiii; geography of, 162; heroes Īnsula Firme and, 90, 91, 97, 149; as
and, 117; insular, 78, 159–160; Knight of the Green Sword, 100;
knights and, 80; notion of, 3; legend of, 197n39; Lisuarte and, 91,
romance and, 2; unpredictability 136; penance and, 199n51; Urganda
of, 4, 5 and, 102
“Adventure, The” (Gilman), 161 Amadís de Gaula, xxv, xxviii, xxx, xxxiii,
Aegean Sea, 109, 139 xxxiv, xxxv, 3, 5, 22, 27, 28, 77, 79,
Aeneas, 16 82, 85, 86, 89, 90, 94, 95, 96, 100,
Aeneid (Virgil), 16, 17, 68, 103, 102, 106, 107, 110, 111, 113, 114,
175n90 131, 136, 137, 141, 142, 143, 153;
Aesop, 157 archipelago of, 88; Arthurian models
al-Dimashqī, Shams al-Din, 42 of, 80; audience of, 75–76; chivalry
al-H.imyarī, 42, 43, 44 and, 78; famous episodes of, 120;
al-Idrīsī, 35, 43, 44, 45 folio from, 136 (fig.), 137 (fig.),
al-Kazwīnī, 43 138 (fig.); geography and, 155;
al-Khwārizmī, 42 imagination and, 132; Ínsula Firme
al-Zuhrī, 44 and, 84, 150; islands of, 78, 81, 147–
Albadançor, 96 148, 160, 161; space and, 79, 112,
Alberti, Leandro, 62 132; success for, 125; title page of,
Alcina, 28 115 (fig.), 121 (fig.); variatio in, 134
Alexander, 16, 38, 68, 110, 125 Amadís de Gaule, 142; engraving from,
Alfonso X (the Wise), xxviii, xxix, 3, 6, 118 (fig.), 119 (fig.); folio from, 116
7, 9, 10, 26, 35, 43, 146, 148, (fig.), 122 (fig.), 123 (fig.), 124
169n18; kingly literary culture and, (fig.), 126 (fig.), 127 (fig.)
14; legal discussion of, 88; Orden de Amadís de Grecia, 139, 194n11
la Banda and, 89 Amadisian archipelago, 73, 78, 81, 106–
Alfonso XI, 14, 89 107, 125, 143, 155

223
224 index

Amazons, 42, 68, 70 Avalon, 67, 182n97

Ammianus Mercellinus, 164n25 Ayerbe-Chaux, Reynaldo, 27, 175n91,
Amplificatio, xxxiv, 152, 153 176n93
Andanças e viajes de Pero Tafur, 25 Āzādānī Is.fahānī, 44
Andanças e viajes por diversas partes del Azores, 24, 38, 39
mundo avidos (Tafur), 25
Andandona, 97–98, 100 Babel, xix, 97
Antillia, 37, 39 Babylon, 135, 171n40
Antipodes, Apollo and, 146 Bacchus, 53
antiquity, xxiii, 1, 12, 68 Badiou, Alain, xxx, xxxv, 135, 159, 160,
Apolidón, 85, 86, 87, 91, 92, 130 (fig.), 161, 165n30, 166n46, 167n48,
189n34, 196n32 167n52; generic extension and,
Apolidón’s Tower, 93 xxxiii; reasoning and, xxxi; situation
Apollo, 53, 68, 145, 146 and, xxxii
Arabian Nights, 178n40 Balán, 96
Arcadia, 10, 68, 160 ballads, xxix, 114
Arcaláus el Encantador, 82, 83, 92, 125 Barataria, xxxiii, 141–154, 155, 161,
Arch of Loyal Lovers, 87, 92, 93, 94, 198n42, 201n72
122 (fig.), 129 (fig.), 190n52 , Barberino, Andrea da, 110, 111
196n32 Barsinán (lord of Sansueña), 96
archipelago, 61, 70, 106; chivalric, 159; Basagante, 96
metaphor of, 73 (fig.); Bastidas, Rodrigo de, 189n33
scientific/rational, 135 Beatus of Liébana, 24, 37–38
Ardián Canileo, 96, 100 Beaujeau, Renaut de, 28
Arioli, Angelo, 41–42, 178n40, 179n54 Beauvais, Vincent de, 17
Ariosto, 111, 143, 152, 194n12 Bede, 135
Aristotle, xx, 15, 16, 38, 44, 47, 146, Belianís de Grecia, 138, 139
165n29 Benedeit, 42
Arthur, 28, 107, 137 Benengeli, Cide Hamete, 145, 153,
Astete, Gaspar de, 156 194n14
Athens, 56 (fig.) Bentham, Jeremy, 166n41
Atlante Veneto (Coronelli), 73 Benveniste, Emile, 164n18, 178n36
Atlantis, 39, 105, 137 Berceo, Gonzalo de, 8, 9, 26
atlases, 134; isolario and, 45–47, 52–53, Bernal, Beatriz, 140, 162, 194n11
60–64 Bernard of Breidenbach, 25
Auerbach, Erich, 2, 4, 167n3, 168n11, Bernardus Silvestris, 16
169n13 Bible, 23, 35, 99
Augustus, 64, 68 Blackmore, Josiah, 165n31
Avalle-Arce, Juan Bautista, 77, 80, 145, Blaeu, atlas of, 73
188n31, 189n33, 190n52, 196n32 Boccacio, 46
 index 225

Bognolo, Anna, 22 archipelago and, 52; isolario and, 61,

Book of Animals (Aristotle), 44 133; travels of, 109
books of chivalry, xi, xxviii, xxix, Burke, James, 26, 175n87, 175n88
xxxiv, xxxv, 8, 17, 19, 23, 24, 25, 27,
28, 42, 61, 63, 67, 68, 70, 78, 85, 91, Caballero de la Triste Figura, 144
97, 113, 114, 133, 135, 137, 142, Caballero, Fermin, 147
161, 162; archipelago of, 84; first, Cabral, Álvarez, 139
75, 76; historiography and, 80; Cachey, Theodore J., 60, 62, 109, 111,
insularity in, xvii, xxxi; interlacing/ 181n74
narration and, 111; interweaving Cacho Blecua, Juan Manuel, 78, 79, 80,
in, 145; literary explorations of, 98, 125, 187n19, 187n21, 188n31,
159; modernity of, xxix–xxx; 195n21
philosophy and, 160; relationships Campbell, Mary Baine, 7, 36, 103,
among, 117; reworkings of, 141; 177n27
romance and, 66; structure of, xii, Campo de Montiel, 18
22, 79, 107; success of, 90; Canary Islands, 24, 39, 103, 111,
toponymy and, 86; traits of, 89; 192n74
variatio in, 134 Cantigas de Santa María (Alfonso), 9,
Bordone, Benedetto, 60, 61, 62, 71, 82, 10, 26
180n68 Cantimpré, Thomas de, 7
Borges, Jorge Luis, 1, 162 Captive’s Tale, 142
Boron, Robert de, 186n7 Cartadaque of the Defended
Bosch, Hieronymus, 7, 17 Mountain, 96
Boschini, 62 cartography, xi, xiii, xxvi, xxviii, 5, 11,
Bosteels, Bruno, 165n26, 173n66 14, 17, 31–32, 40, 41, 42, 60, 66, 70,
Bouloux, Nathalie, 37, 176n16 133, 139, 145; ancient/modern, 33;
Bourdieu, Pierre, 190n49 author-traveler and, 112; chivalry
Brangemor, kingdom of, 28 and, 109, 111, 113; development of,
Braudel, Fernand, 23, 29, 64, 74, 30, 63; fiction and, 67; geography
184n113 and, 110; Greek, 38–39; history and,
Bravor, 96 32, 61; insular, xvii, 30; Islamic, 38–
Brazil, 37, 39, 104, 139 39, 179n47; literature and, xii, xvii,
Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua 67, 109, 155, 162, 163n2; marvels
castellana (Corominas), 148 and, 38; medieval, xxxiv; narration
Brocéliande, 18 and, 30, 34; remote regions and, 31;
Brut (Wace), 186n7 romance and, xvii; toponymy in, 70;
Buondelmonti, Christophoro, xxxiv, vocabularies on, 41
46–47, 53, 54, 55 (fig.), 58, 60, 62, Casares, Adolfo Bioy, 162
70, 71, 110, 113, 114, 134, 136; Catalan atlas, 104
descriptions by, 47; Greek Cephalonia, 51 (fig.)
226 index

Certeau, Michel de, xvi, xviii, xix, Cildadán, King, 97, 102
165n31, 173n66; analysis by, xv; Circe’s island, 44, 68
causal links and, 163n8; on Clemencín, Diego, 147, 196n36
metaphors, xiv; practiced/lived cliffs, 57 (fig.), 58 (fig.), 138 (fig.)
space and, xxvii; space/place and, Cligès (Chrétien de Troyes), 94, 135
163n10 Clutton, Elizabeth, 46
Cervantes, Miguel de, xviii, xxxii, xxxiii, Columban, 19
71, 75, 98, 140, 142, 144, 147, 148, Columbus, Christopher, 9, 10, 61, 139,
150, 153, 162; Amadís and, 161; 162, 177n27, 194n88, 196n38,
chivalric insularity and, 141; fiction 197n38
and, 156; Insula Barataria and, xxxv; Columns of Hercules, xxiii, 44
insular episode and, 152; maravilla Commentary on the Apocalypse of Saint
and, 160; mimesis and, 199n50; John (Beatus), 37–38
power and, 149; space/limitation community, xiii, 2, 79; individual and,
and, 198n43 27; outside and, xiv, xvi
Chaide, Pedro Malón de, 156 Conley, Tom, 61, 62, 66, 179n55,
Chalchidius, 16 180n68; on atlases, 63–64; isolario
Chansons de geste, 1, 110 and, 63
Charles V, 111 Constantinople, 35, 46, 53, 71, 72
chivalric fiction, xxix, 5, 10, 22, 107, (fig.), 76, 79, 80, 85, 100, 101,
110, 143, 156; cartography and, 109; 110, 180n60, 194n11; fall of,
culture and, 3; deforestation and, 135–136
18–19; ethical/political project of, Conto de Amaro, 182n97
114 Corfu, 52, 54 (fig.)
chivalry, 5, 14, 87, 106, 110, 114, 117, Corominas, Joan, 148, 200n67
158, 161; cartography and, 111, 113; Coronelli, Vicenzo, 62, 73, 81
changes for, 78; configuration of, 85; Cortázar, Julio, 162
imitations of, 132; institution of, 89; Cortés, Hernán, 162
marvelous and, 25; nobility and, 85; Cosa, Juan de la: map of, 37
oral narratives of, 89; origin of, 88; cosmography, 41, 61, 64, 158
romance and, 139; society and, courtiers, 116 (fig.)
90; space and, 25; symbolic Crates of Mallos, 32
representations of, 89 Cresques Abraham, 104, 105
Chrétien de Troyes, xxxii, 4, 19, 27, 94, Cristalián de España, 194n11
135, 148, 168n11, 186n7 Critias, 67, 105
Christianity, xx, xxv, 10, 14, 68, 98, 100, Cuadragante, 96
101; Fortuna and, 175n88; leaving, culture, 12; absence of, 15; chivalric
xxiii; spatialization of, 165n29 fiction and, 3; Islamic, 69; literary,
Cicero, 32, 47 14; print, xii, 62, 75
Çifar, 3, 27, 67, 90, 174n84, 175n87 Cuneo, Michele da, 193n88
 index 227

Curtius, E. R., 10, 17 Domesday Book, 13

Cyclades, 29, 47, 50 (fig.) Don Juan Manuel, 88
Don Quixote, 91, 141, 145, 150, 160,
Da Gama, Vasco, 139 194n12, 199n56; chivalric practice
Daedalus, labyrinth of, 48 (fig.) and, 143; effect, 190n49; generosity
D’Ailly, Pierre, 17, 105 of, 151; penance and, 199n51;
Dalché, Gautier, 110, 111, 193n6 personality of, 146; poetic madness
Dalli Sonetti, Bartolomeo, 60, 61, 71, of, 199n53; Sancho and, 142, 144
166n40 Don Quixote (Cervantes), xviii, xxxv,
Dandasido, 96 71, 75, 106, 141, 142, 149, 158, 161,
Dante, 148, 175n90 194n14, 197–198n42; Amadís
Dasí, Emilio José Sales, 189n33 island and, 147–148; language and,
Daston, Lorraine, 7, 8, 9 152; maravilla and, 160; reading
De Bruyne, Edgar, 100 practices in, 202n8; space/poetics
De imagine mundi, 104 in, 202n7
De insulis (Silvestri), 46 Donzel del Mar, 83
“De montibus, silvis, fontibus” Doria, Prince, 24
(Boccacio), 46 Du Val, Pierre, 105
De natura rerum (Cantimpre), 7 Dubost, Francis, 102, 166n35, 182n98,
De Republica (Cicero), 32 183n100
Del Encina, Juan, 86 Duby, Georges, 99
Demosthenes, 47 Dulcert, 39, 103
Des monstres et prodiges (Paré), 7 Dumézil, George, 35
Descriptio mappae mundi (Hugh of Dumont, Etienne, 166n41
Saint Victor), 74 Dunlop, J. C., 185n7
desert, 14, 68; forest and, 15; sea and,
42–43; spirituality/purity of, 15 Ebstorf map, 35–36, 104
Devil’s Island, 100, 101 Echevarría, Roberto González, 142
Devisement du monde (Polo), xxv Eclogues (Virgil), 16
Diálogo de la lengua (Valdés), 156 Eden, 10, 14, 87, 103
Díaz, Juan, 117, 131, 193n86, 194n11 Edson, Evelyn, 35, 40, 177n22
Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 140, 195n19 Egerton map, 44
Diccionario de Autoridades, 8, 148 Egidius Romanus, 89
Diccionario de la Real Academia El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por
Española, xxvii, 148 Cristóbal Colón (Lope de Vega),
Diez Borque, José María, 114 xxxi, 157
Diomedes, 135 Elucidarium (Beauvais), 17
Dionysius, 33, 46 Embajada a Tamorlán (González de
disparates, xxxi, 157, 160 Clavijo), 23
Dodds, Jerrilyn, 10 Embracing Sea of Ocean, 43
228 index

encyclopedias, 10, 36, 52, 69, 134; Fish Island, 42

travelogue and, 64 Flores y Blancaflor (Beauvais), 17, 135
Endriago, 77, 96, 98–99, 100; battle Florestán, 83, 102,188n31
with, 124 (fig.) florestas, 77, 78, 94, 142
Enéas, 135 Fogelquist, James D., 79, 89, 187n19
epic, 24, 89, 91, 110, 163n3; romance forest, 18, 19, 29, 78, 127; cultivated,
and, 1, 12, 13, 111, 167n2 13; desert and, 15; engulfed, 74;
Epictetus, 146 islands and, 21; as place for
Erasmus, 146 knowledge, 15; royal privilege
Eratosthenes, 32 and, 14; seascapes and, 20; as space
Escala de Mahoma, translation of, xxix of isolation, 18; spirituality/purity
Esplandián, 28, 111, 121 of, 15
Essai de poétique médiévale (Zumthor), Fortunate Islands, 33, 39, 90, 103, 104,
xxxiii 105, 111
Estoire, 3, 19, 20, 21, 77, 172n64, Fra Mauro 1459 mappamundi, 35
173n65, 173n66 François I, 76, 120, 195n23
Estoire de Saint Graal, 19 Fuchs, Barbara, xxviii, xxix, 2, 89,
Estoria del Cavallero del Çisne, xxviii, 167n43, 167n45, 168n5
xxix Fuentes, Alonso de, 156
Etymologies (Isidore), xxi, xxvi–xxvii, 7,
17, 25, 33, 34 Gadancuriel, 96
etymology, 18, 45, 147, 159 Galahad, 20
Galaor, 82, 83, 84, 97, 102, 125, 150,
Fábulas Milesias, 157 188n30
Famongomadán, 96 Ganadalín, 115 (fig.)
Felix (Llull), 7, 8 Gandalaz, 96, 97
Ferdinand and Isabella, 75 Garcia, Rubio, 148
Fernandes, Valentim, 71 Garden of Earthly Delights (Bosch), 17
fiction, 11, 40, 45, 78, 157, 161, Garden of Loyal Lovers, 93
188n26; alternative possibilities for, Garlande, Jean de, 135
22; archipelago of, 140; cartography Gasquilán, King, 97
and, 67; chivalric, xxix, 3, 5, 10, Gaul, 80, 97, 185n7
18–19, 22, 107, 109, 110, 114, 143, Gaunilon de Marmoutiers, 102–103
156; geography and, xvii, 66, 109; Gaylord, Mary, 140, 141, 194n14,
historicity and, 26; historiography 198n42, 198n43
and, 64; islands and, xiii, xiv–xv, 66, General estoria (Alfonso X), 35
133, 155; narrative, 8, 76; reality Genesis, xx, 10, 14, 93
and, 158; space and, xxviii, 30, 162; genres, xxvi, 120, 135, 199n51
theory of, xxx, 82, 107, 159; truth Geoffrey of Monmouth, 3, 186n7
and, xxviii, xxx, xxxi, xxxiv Geographies (Strabo), 32
 index 229

geography, xii, 27, 31, 35, 52, 95, Heredia, Juan Fernández de, 26, 35
152, 158, 163n1, 175n14, 177n25; Hereford map, 35, 74
Arabic, 43; cartography and, 110; Hermes, 68
concern with, xiii, 41; fantastic, hermit, 137 (fig.)
77; fiction and, xvii, 66, 109; Herodotus, 32, 33, 165n29
fragmentation of, 35; framing past heroism, xix, 64, 114, 117
and, 40; history and, xi, xxiv; Hesiod, 86, 87
humanist, xi; insular, 41; literature Higden, map of, 37, 177n18
and, xi; romance and, 79; as Higounet, Charles, 18
spirituality, 22; writing and, 109 Hippocrates, 20, 172n62, 173n65
Gerusalemme liberata (Tasso), 111 Historia Regum Britanniae (Geoffrey of
Gervasius of Tilbury, 9 Monmouth), 186n7
Gilman, Stephen, 140, 161, 162, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la
194n19, 202n11 Nueva España (Díaz del Castillo),
Goldberg, Harriet, 99, 100 140
Gómez Redondo, Fernando, xxviii, Historias trágico-marítimas, xxiii,
xxix, 3, 190n43 165n31
González, Cristina, 27 Histories (Herodotus), 32
González de Clavijo, Ruy, 23 historiography, 1, 3, 5, 64, 80, 89;
Gorgias, 47 romance and, 6, 169n18
Gospel According to Mark, The history, 31; cartography and, 32;
(Borges), 1 geography and, xi , xxiv; literature
Gracia, Paloma, 99, 175n90, 196n32 and, xi
Gran conquista de Ultramar, xxviii, 76 Holy Land, xxii, 22, 23, 135
Grand Insulaire et pilotage (Thévet), Homer, xiii, 17, 44, 53, 165n29
61, 70 homo viator, concept of, xxii
Greek islands, 47, 52, 60, 64 Honorius of Autun, 35
Green Island, 39 hortus conclusus, 14, 92, 95, 127, 142,
Grimanesa, 85, 91, 92, 189n34 171n40, 191n53, 191n54
Gromadaça, 96 Hugh of Saint Victor, 74
Guarino Mezquino, 110, 111 hyle, 15–16
Guevara, Antonio de, 146
Guido de Pisa, world map of, 177n18 Ibn al-Wardī, 41, 44
Guillaume de Conches, 16 Ibn Wasif Sah, 42
Il Guerrin Meschino (Barberino), 110
Harney, Michael, 87, 88, 90, 91, Ile Tournoyante (Nascien), 21, 78,
190n49, 191n57 172n62, 173n65
Henry the Navigator, 24 Iliad (Homer), 44
Herberay des Essarts, Nicolas D’, 76, images, 31, 44, 68, 117
120, 127, 138, 186n7 imaginary, 18, 39; insular, 25, 43, 178
230 index

imagination, 37, 132, 133 Ínsula Triste, 81, 191n61

imago mundi, 35, 52, 105, 182n95 insular turn, xxxiv, 25, 26, 135, 159
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, 162 insular wonder, 22–28
ínsula, xxvi–xxvii, xxviii, 41, 77, 81, insularity, xxxi, xxxiv, 45, 70, 83, 107,
85, 146, 147, 148–149, 149–150, 155, 186n9, 201n75; concept of,
152, 153; etymology of, 22; 69–70, 133; discourse on, xvi;
interpretation of, 125; Sancho and, metaphorical use of, xxxv, 161;
154; as temple, xxvii perceived/transformed/refigured,
Ínsula Barataria, xxxii, xxxv, 106, 141, xvi; production of, xvii, xxxiv, 25;
142, 144, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, representation, 114
153, 162 Ínsulas de las Landas, 81
Ínsula de la Torre Bermeja, 81, 134 Ínsulas de Romania, 80, 81, 135
Ínsula de Mongaça, 80, 81, 96, 134 Ínsulas Dotadas, 26, 27, 67, 174n84
Ínsula de Santa María, 81, 112 Ínsulas Luengas, 81
Ínsula del Diablo, 80, 81, 84, 95–101, interweaving, 79, 80, 111, 153
107, 112, 113, 161 Isidore of Seville, xxi, 7, 17, 33, 34, 105,
Ínsula del Infante, 81 164n16, 166n38; maps by, 24; on
Ínsula del Sepulcro, 138 space, xviii
Ínsula Despoblada, 138–139 Isla Peligrosa, 131, 138, 193n86
Ínsula Firme, 28, 80, 81, 84–95, 105, Island of Candia, 48 (fig.)
107, 112, 113, 125, 128, 132, 134, Island of Gold, 28
136, 137, 142, 148, 161; Amadís and, Island of Happiness, 28
90, 91, 97, 149, 150; ethical utopia Island of Hell, 95
of, 131; garden in, 86; realm of, 91, Island of Little Ones, 44
93; tapestry of, 131 Island of Malakan, 44
Ínsula Fuerte, 81 Island of Masfahan, 43
Ínsula Gabasta, 81 Island of Paradise, 103, 104
Ínsula Gigantea, 138 Island of Reason, 44
Ínsula Gravisanda, 81, 83, 188n30 Island of Saint Brendan, 39, 103,
Ínsula Leónida, 81 182n98
Ínsula Liconia, 81 Island of the Boiling Lake, 81
Ínsula Malandrania, 150 Island of the Devil, 84
Ínsula No Fallada, 28, 81, 84, 101–107, Island of the Heroes, 87
117, 131, 150, 159, 161 Island of the Red Tower, 96
Ínsula No Hollada, 139 Island of the Seven Cities, 39
Ínsula Nublada, 139 Island of the Waq-Waq, 44
Ínsula Profunda, 81 Island of Women, 42
Ínsula Sagitara, 81 islands, xi, 34, 57 (fig.), 62, 70, 74, 127,
Ínsula Salvajina, 138 132, 148–149; adventure and, 78;
Ínsula Solisticia, 139 depiction of, 37–38, 38–39;
 index 231

entrance to, 86; fiction and, xiii, Jean de Meun, 16

66, 155; forests and, 21; genres Joaõ II, 106
centering on, xii; geographical, xxvii; John the Baptist, 14
legendary, 37; literary, 26, 149; lost, Joly, Monique, 145
67; mapping, 40; metaphor of, 73 Jordano de Ursinis, Cardinal, 113
(fig.); political situations and, 73; Joseph of Arimathea, 19, 20
presentation of, 125; real/imaginary,
39; ships and, 20; stories of, 53; Kalila e Dimna, xxix, 148
theory of, 30; topography of, 125; king, 116 (fig.)
travel and, 30 Kingdom of the Islands, 27–28
Islario de todas las islas del mundo Kitāb al-yawārih (Baghdadi), 14
(Santa Cruz), 84 Kitāb-i Bah.riyye (Re’īs), 71
Isle of Man, 24, 104 Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq fi ikhtirāq
isles, theses on, 64, 66–71, 73–74 al-āfāq, 44–45
Isocrates, 146 knighthood, 4, 89, 91, 97
isolarii, xxxiv, 26, 45, 46, 47, 60, 62, 70, knights, 8, 11, 12, 82, 86, 87, 89, 91, 93,
74, 82, 113, 133, 134, 155, 159; end 98, 100, 107, 110, 126 (fig.), 131,
of, 63; model for, 61 143, 149, 154, 158; adventure and,
Isolario dell’Atlante Veneto (Coronelli), 80; model of, 201n72; squires and,
62 146; virtue of, 94
isolario, xi, xii, xvii, xxxiv, 70, 73, 82, Köhler, Erich, 2, 10
109, 112, 113, 133, 135, 137, 139,
140, 162, 180; atlases and, 45–47, La Araucana (Ercilla), 193n8
52–53, 60–64; books of chivalry La Celestina (Rojas), 12
and, 155; fragmentation of, 66– La Cosmographie universelle (Thévet),
67; literary explorations of, 159; 62, 63
topical, 71 La Fazienda de Ultramar, 22–23
Isolario (Pigafetta), 62 La Mesure du monde (Zumthor),
isolation, 18, 22, 24, 27, 69, 95, 133, xxvii
141, 142, 149, 153, 166n40 La mort le Artu, 19
Isole appartenenti alla Italia (Alberti), Laberinto de Fortuna (Mena), 25,
62 174n84
Lacan, Jacques, xxviii, xxx
Jacob, Christian, 40, 63, 131, 133, Lancelot, 28, 168n12, 172n59,
178n36; on archipelagos, 38; on 190n52
atlas, 61; cartography and, 67; on Lancelot, 19, 76, 77, 168n8, 172n65,
maps, 31; Miller Atlas and, 173n65
178n30 landscapes, 11–17, 21, 128; Arthurian,
Jameson, Fredric, 4 28; changing, 19; symbolic, 16;
Jardin amoureux (d’Ailly), 17 uniform, 13
232 index

language: cartography and, 178n36; Libro de Buen Amor, 125

isolation of, 141–154; maps and, 39; libro de faltriquera, 23
self-denying, 159; translation and, Libro de Josep de Abarimatía, 3, 19, 21
120 Libro de la montería (Alphonse XI), 14
Languines, King, 83 Libro de las animalias que caçan, 14
“L’Archipelago del Mexico” (Coronelli), Libro de las maravillas (Polo), 23
73 (fig.) Libro del Anticristo, 99
L’Arcipelago (Boschini), 62 Libro del caballero Çifar, 13, 25, 26, 75,
Las sergas de Esplandián, 75 146
Las siete partidas (Alphonse), 6 Libro del conoscimiento de todos los
Lastra Paz, Silvia, 79, 187n14 reinos, xxiv, 23, 104, 170n39,
Lazarillo de Tormes, 91 174n84
Le Goff, Jacques, xviii, 7, 8, 10, 11–12, Libro del infante don Pedro de Portugal,
38, 170n29 23
Lefebvre, Henri, xiv, xix, 11, 29, Libro di Benedetto Bordone nel qual si
170n38; literary criticism and, xv; ragiona de tutte l’isole del mondo
study by, xxvii ; theory of space of, (Bordone), 60
xvi, 163–164n11 L’Île mysterieuse (Verne), xii
Lefkada, 55 (fig.) Lilliput, 44
legends, 52–53, 70, 109, 113 Lima, Miguel Sánchez de, 156
Legrand, Émile, 47, 180 limitation, xviii–xix, 69, 166n40,
Lemarchand, Marie-José, 103 198n43
Léry, Jean de, xxiii Lindoraque, 96
L’Escoufle (Renart), 12 Linehan, Peter, 10
Lestringant, F., 39, 61, 70, 139, 177n27, L’Isole piu famose del mondo (Porcacchi),
181n83; mapping islands and, 40; 62
panoptism and, 69 Lisuarte, King, 91, 102, 125, 136
L’Etre et l’événement (Badiou), xxx Lisuarte de Grecia (Diaz), 84, 85, 131,
Li beaux inconnu (Beaujeau), 28 138, 194n11
Liber de monstrosis hominibus Orientis, literature, 11, 25, 42; architecture and,
68 163n8; cartography and, xii, xvii, 67,
Liber insularum archipelagi 109, 155, 162, 163n2; chivalric,
(Buondelmonti), 46, 47, 52, 60, 61, 185n1; geography and, xi; history
71, 109, 113, 134, 155, 180n67 and, xi
Liber monstruorum de diversis generibus, Livre d’Artus, 19
7 Livy, 47
Liber sancti Jacobi, 170n39 Llibre de meravelles (Llull), 7, 8
libro de a bordo, 103 Llull, Ramon, 7, 8
Libro de Alexandre, 125, 135, 148 Locus amoenus, 14, 16–17, 86, 93, 95,
Libro de Apolonio, 19 127, 132, 140, 142, 191n53, 198n42
 index 233

Lope de Vega, Félix, xxxi, 157 marvelous, 12, 22, 30, 42, 43, 69, 82,
López de Ayala, Pero, 89 83, 92, 134, 138, 139, 160; changing,
López Estrada, Francisco, 186n9, 132; as fiction, 41; inventory of, 81;
200n68 land policy and, 10; reflection on, 6;
López Pinciano, Alonso, xxxi, 156, 157, relocation of, 25; romance and, 5,
158, 201n5, 202n7 97; space and, 25; transformation of,
Lost Island, 28, 102, 104, 105, 174n86 9; vocabulary of, 170n29
Loyola, Ignacio de, 76 marvels, xxvi, 5–11, 22, 41, 43, 160,
Lyotard, Jean-François, 109 162; cartography and, 38; chivalric,
25, 158; objectivity and, 38
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 149 Matière de Bretagne, 27, 174n87,
Macrobius, Ambrosius Theodosius, 32 196n32
Madarque (giant of Sad Island), 96, Mediterranean Sea, 33, 43, 66,
97, 98 177n18
Madásima, 96 Méla, Charles, 169n16
Maier, John R., 84, 86, 87, 88, 91, Meliadus (Rusticiano), xxv
187n13 Mena, Juan de, 25
Malkiel, Lida de, 76 Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino, 156,
Mandanfabul, 96 190n52
Mandeville, John, xxiv, 23, 37, 45 Meneses, Alonso de, 23
Manifest Perdition (Blackmore), 165n31 Menocal, María Rosa, 14
Map of America, 105 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 163n10
Mappe de Les Isles Canaries (Du Val), Merlin, 3, 19, 28, 76, 77
105 metaphors, xxxiii, 2, 22, 38, 61, 71, 73,
maps, 11, 47, 128, 154, 155; encyclope- 141, 157, 158, 161, 176n14; meaning
dic, 37; fictive, 66; inclusion of, 52; transposition and, xv; referents and,
Isidorian, 24; language and, 39; leg- 147; spatiality and, xiv; metonymy,
ends and, 109; mappaemundi, 33, x, 3, 39
35, 37, 40, 46, 61; mappamundi, 24, Mexía, Pero, 156
36, 37–38, 62, 69, 104, 105; marvel Middle Ages, xix–xx, 12, 15, 23, 36, 43,
and, 162; materiality of, 35–36; 104, 142
medieval, 37, 40; schematic, 34; as Miguel, Salvador, 26, 174n84
symbol of sacrifice/salvation, 34; Milagros de Nuestra Señora (Gonzalo de
T/O, 34; texts and, 46, 66; zonal, 34 Berceo), 9, 26
Maria de Molina, Queen, 75 Milione (Polo), xxiv, xxv
Marin, Louis, 88, 90 Miller Atlas, 38, 39
Marín Pina, María Carmen, 194n11 mimesis, 67, 199n50, 199n51
Martín, Adrienne, 199n53 mirabilia, xxv, 9, 26, 36, 42, 68, 70,
Martín, Oscar, 164n14 170n39
Martines, Joan, 39 Montaigne, Michel de, 63
234 index

Montalvo, Garci Rodríguez de, 70, 75, Odysseus, 149

76, 80, 89, 94, 105, 107, 113, 114, Odyssey (Homer), xiii, 17, 24, 46, 68
131, 134, 138, 143; Amadís and, 112; oikoumenē, xxi, 31–32, 37
chivalric program of, 106; Oikoumenēs Periegesis, 46
intervention by, 77, 84; linguistic Olschki, Leo, 24, 78, 106, 174n80
awareness of, 196n33 On Poetry (Swift), 29
Montano, Arias, 156 Ordaz, Diego de, 195n19
Morais, Francisco de, 117, 131 Oriana, 83, 92, 93, 100, 129 (fig.), 132,
More, Thomas, xii, 91, 200n68 189n34
motifs, 5, 10, 17, 22, 24, 25, 26, 42, 67, Orlando Furioso (Ariosto), 28, 111, 112,
68, 69–70, 77, 80, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 114, 152, 156
104, 127, 136, 147, 153, 171n40, Orosius, 33, 35, 165n29
172n64; Arthurian, 191n64; Orozco, Sebastian de Cobarruvias, xvii,
chivalric, 141, 142, 143; forest as, xviii, 139
16; heraldic, 114; hunting, 14; lake, Orsini, Cardinal, 46, 47
175n90; literary, 140; narrative use Ortelius, Abraham, xi, 63, 105
of, 11; nautical, 19, 20; recasting, 11 Other, xxi, 67, 91, 95, 96
Münster, Sebastian, 9 Otia Imperialia (Gervasius of Tilbury),
Mykonos, 50 (fig.), 53 9
mythology, 29, 31, 32, 53, 69, 113 Ovid, 47, 175n88
Oviedo, Gonzálo Fernández de, 156,
narration, xiv, xv, 62; cartography and, 194n11
30, 34
narratives, xi, xiv, 21, 78; Arthurian, Páez de Ribera, 194n11
79; itinerary of, 155; medieval, 40; Palmerín d’Inglaterra, 120, 131, 138
techniques, 78, 80 Pantagruel, 28, 139
Nascien, 20, 21, 172n62 Paradise, 24, 26, 35, 39, 68, 69, 94, 104,
Natural History (Pliny), 38 127 (fig.), 171n40, 182n98
nature, 6, 12, 135 Paré, Ambroise, 7
Nava, Karla Amozorrutia, 110 Park, Katharine, 7, 8, 9
Navigatio Sanctii Brendanni Abbati, 42, Partidas (Alfonso), 88, 148
103 Paulus Festus, xxvii
Negroponte, 56 (fig.) Peles, King, 28
Nobleza, kingdom of, 27 Pélops, 68
Not Found Island, 84, 102, 105, 106 Peña de Galtares, 81, 83–84
Novae Franciae, 42, 105 Peña de la Doncella Ecantadora, 81
Peña Pobre, 80, 81, 107, 134, 148
ocean, 43; boundaries/boundlessness Perceval, 28, 168n12
of, 32 Pérez Priego, Miguel Ángel, 25
Octavia, 68 Perion, King, 95
 index 235

Petrarch, 109, 194n11 Prester John, 103–104, 158

Peut-on penser la politique? (Badiou), Primera Crónica General de España
xxx, 167n52 (Alfonso), 187n20
Philip the Second, 64 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 149
Philosophia antigua poetica (Pinciano), Princeton University Art Museum,
156 tapestries from, 127, 128, 128 (fig.),
Physics (Aristotle), 47 129 (fig.), 130 (fig.)
Pigafetta, Antonio, 60, 62 Production of Space, The (Lefebvre),
Piglia, Ricardo, 162 xv
Pillars of Hercules, xxiii Prometheus, 53
Piraeus, 64 Ptolemy, 32, 53, 111, 158, 165n29,
place, xv, 163n10, 185n7, 188n24; 176n16, 193n6; scholarship/cultural
images of, 114, 117, 120, 125, 127– reception of, 176n17
128, 131–141; isolated, 45; space Purchas, Samuel, xi
and, 114, 142, 163n10; static, xxi
Place, E. B., 76 Queen, farewell by, 136 (fig.)
Plague of Fantasies, The (Žižek), xxx Queste del Saint Graal, 3, 19
Plato, 15, 16, 67
Pliny, 37, 38, 43, 44, 47, 103, 105, Rabelais, 61, 63
176n16 Rancière, Jacques, 155
Plutarch, 32, 47, 146 reality, 2, 66, 166n41, 169n16; chivalric,
Poem of the Cid, 13 78; economic/political, 74; fiction
poetics, xiii, xvi, xxvii, xxviii, 22, 26, and, 158
135, 140, 144, 153, 156, 158, 162, reasoning, xxxi, xxxii
201n7; politics and, xxxiv; romance Redondo, Augustin, 142
and, 201n1; space and, 141, 197– Re’īs, Pīrī, 71
198n42, 202n7 Renaissance, xi, 1, 23, 63, 110, 139,
Policisne de Boecia, 139 183n106
Politics (Aristotle), xx Renaissance atlas, 39
Politics of Aesthetics, The (Rancière), Renart, Jean, 12
155 Repertorio de caminos (Meneses), 23
Polo, Marco, xxii, xxiv, xxv, 23, 24, 37, Resina, Joan Ramon, 4, 5
45, 158 Rhodes, 47, 68, 180n60, 194n11
Pomponius Mela, 103, 176n16 Rih.la, xxiv
Porcacchi, Tommaso, 62, 71, 73 Rih.la (Ibn Bat.t.ūt.a), xxv
Portolan charts, 36, 37, 39, 52, Rivero, Chiong, 200n70
192n74 Rodríguez Velasco, Jesús D., x, 88
Post-Vulgate, 3, 19, 76 Roger II, King, 45; map for, 35
Postmodern Condition, The (Lyotard), Rojas, Fernando de (Celestina), 12, 17,
109 170n38
236 index

Roman d’Alexandre, 182n97 Sancho, xxxiii, xxxiv, 91, 98, 142, 146,
roman d’antiquité, 1, 16, 19 152, 160, 199n55; Barataria and,
Roman de la Rose, 94 149; chivalric practice and, 143;
Roman de Troie, 169n23 governorship of, 153, 199n60; island
romance, xxix, 10, 19, 30, 38, 40–41, of, 147, 150; location of, 161;
77, 92, 125, 142, 155; adventure and, popular sayings/proverbs and,
2; Arthurian, 1, 2, 3, 16, 22, 75, 76, 147; quixotification of, 144; Ricote
94, 97, 172n57; cartography and, and, 154
xvii; Catalan, 90; chivalric, xxvi, Sancho IV, xxviii
xxxii, xxxiv, 4, 5, 11, 17, 90, 109, 110, Santa Cruz, Alonso de, 61, 62, 63, 84
139, 148, 156, 169n13; descriptions Santa Teresa de Jesús, 76
in, 11; development of, 8–9, 12, 66, Santana Paixão, Rosario, 112, 194n10
79; economy of, 91; epic and, 1, 12, Santiago de Compostela, xxii, 110
13, 111, 167n2; geography and, 79; Saronic islands, 56 (fig.)
grotesque nature of, 120; historiog- Saunders, Corinne J., 13, 15
raphy and, 6, 169n18; landscape of, sea: desert and, 42–43; shaping/
21; marvelous and, 5, 9; radical defining, 30
effect on, 3; rise of, 2; sea and, 19; Sears, Theresa Ann, 141
spatial ideology of, 11, 12, 13; seascapes, 17–22, 119 (fig.), 132
structure of, 11–12, 17; types/styles Segre, Cesare, 2, 168n5
of, 1 Semejança del mundo, 36
Romance (Fuchs), xxviii Seneca, 146
Rome, xxii, 85, 136 Sergas de Esplandián (Montalvo), 80,
Romm, James S., 38, 164n18, 169n21, 107, 121, 137, 138, 189n33, 194n11,
176n14, 177n25 196n32
Rothstein, Marian, 117, 133, 195n26 Servius, 16, 17
Ruiz, Juan, 8 ships, 116 (fig.)
Russell, Bertrand, xxvii Sieber, Harry, 79, 90
Rusticiano de Pisa, xxv Sierra Morena, 142, 143, 144, 153
silva, 15, 16, 18
Saavedra, Eduardo, 147 Silvestri, Domenico, 46
Sad Island, 96, 97 Simmel, George, 161–162
Saint Anselm, 102, 174n86 Skopelos, 58 (fig.)
Saint Anthony, 14, 68 Somnium Scipionis (Cicero), 32
Saint Augustine, 101, 102, 106, 171n40 Song of Songs, 93
Saint Brendan’s Island, 104, 105, Sovereign Map, The ( Jacob), 40
177n27, 192n74 space, xv, xviii, 21, 43, 91, 112, 159;
Saint John, 49, 171n41, 194n11 building, 11; cartographic, 70;
Salomon, 20, 21, 172n62, 172n65 chivalric and, 25; deserted, 14;
Salvador Miguel, Nicasio, 25 dialectical, 29; discourse on, xvii; of
 index 237

everyday existence, xxi; experience Tablas Alfonsíes (Alfonso X), 148

of, 45, 135; fiction and, xxviii, 30, Tafur, Pero, 25, 26, 174n84
162; function of, 79; historical, 41, tapestries, 125, 127, 128, 128 (fig.), 129
67; images from, 66; insular, xvii, (fig.), 130 (fig.), 131, 132, 133, 135
xxxiv, 39, 162; marginal, 67; Tasso, Torquato, 111, 140, 185n7
marvelous and, 25, 41–42; meaning Tenochtitlan, 140
and, xvi; as metaphor, 158; neutral/ Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española
pure, xxii; organization of, 131; of (Covarrubias), xvii
penitence/sanctity, 81; place and, xv, texts, xiv, 62, 68, 166n40; chivalric, 27,
114, 142, 163n10; poetics and, 90; illustrations and, 109; image and,
198n42, 202n7; practiced/lived, 117; maps and, 46, 66
xxvii; production of, xv, xvi, 29, 43, Theatrum orbis terrarum (Ortelius),
66, 74; relationship with, 45; 63, 105
representation of, 132; romance Thevet, André, xxiii, 61, 62, 70
and, 11; rural, 22; social, xx–xxi; Ticknor, George, 185n7
spirituality of, 14; theory of, xvi, Timaeus (Plato), 15, 67, 105
163–164n11; time and, xviii, xxviii, time, 41, 160; space and, xviii, xxiv,
xxiv, 80; travel and, xxii; unknown, xxviii
11; of world, 30 Tirant lo Blanc, 186n8, 196n32
spatiality, xv, xxiii, 6, 11, 17, 27, 64, Tolias, George, 46, 61, 73, 179n58
158, 161, 165n29, 165n30; isotopic, topography, 18, 125, 144, 177n27
163n10; limits on, 164n16; toponymy, 86, 110, 112, 139
metaphors and, xiv; motifs for, topos, xiv, xxxv, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 37, 42,
69–70; political implications of, 70, 95, 97, 113, 135
xxxiii Toscanella, Orazio, 114
Spiering, François, 127, 128, 130 Tower of Babel, 12, 170n40, 191n62
spirituality, 2, 15, 35, 36 Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea
Stevenson, Robert Louis, xii (Rojas), 12
Story of Amadís de Gaula (tapestry), Traselli, Carmelo, 184n113
128 (fig.) travel, xxiii, 52, 62, 63, 64, 109, 110;
Strabo, 18, 30, 38, 176n16; on imagination and, 37; islands and, 30,
cartographers, 31–32 134; literature, 25, 42; Renaissance,
subjectivity, 31, 66, 109 23; space and, xxii
Sulaymān, 41, 42 travelers, xxii, 46, 52, 53, 113, 131
Summo Bono (Ulrich of Strassburg), travelogues, 10, 41, 95; encyclopedia
98–99 and, 64; fiction and, xxiv
Swift, Jonathan, 29, 44 Treasure Island (Stevenson), xii
symbolism, 16, 20, 175n93 Treaty of Alcáçovas (1479), 103
Szkilnik, Michelle, 19, 20, 21, 172n59, Tristan, 16, 76, 77, 114, 186n7
172n65, 173n65 Trotsky, Leon, 164n25
238 index

Troy, 59 (fig.) Vita Merlini, 67

truth, xxxiii, 112, 156, 157, 166n41; Vivas, Juan, 3
fiction and, xxviii, xxx, xxxiv; Vivas, Luis, 156
political, 159; value, 5 Von Sinner, Ludovicus, 180n61
Turner, Hilary L., 52, 71 Voyage de Saint Brandan, 42, 103, 104,
Turning Castle, 92, 196n32 182n98
Turning Island, 28 Voyage to the Holy Land (Bernard of
Breidenbach), 25
Ulrich of Strassburg, dictum of, 98–99 Vulgate cycle, 19, 76, 186–187n7
Urganda la Desconocida, 82, 84, 107,
137, 193n86, 196n35; Amadís and, Wace, 148, 186n7
102; Ínsula No Fallada and, 151; ship walled city, 118 (fig.)
of, 123 (fig.); space for, 105 Weber de Kurlat, F., 187n19
utopia, 10, 69, 87, 90, 91, 131 “What Is a Map?” ( Jacob), 40
Utopia (More), xii Williams, Grace S., 76, 186n7,
Utopus, King, 91, 147 190n52
Wonder and Science (Campbell), 7
Valdés, Alfonso de, 146 Wonder and the Order of Nature (Park
Valdés, Juan de, 156, 158 and Daston), 7
Van Mander the Elder, Karel, 125, 127, woodcuts, 120, 132, 133, 135, 166n40
128, 129, 130 Works and Days (Hesoid), 86
Venice, 60, 61, 71, 74 writing, 11, 38; geography and, 109
Vera Storia (Lucian), 194n14
Verne, Jules, xii Yvain (Chrétien), 4, 19, 27, 168n11
Viaje a Tierra Santa (Bernardus of
Breidenbach), 25 Zeus, 68
Viajes (Mandeville), 23 Žižek, Slavoj, xxx
Virgil, 16, 47, 54, 86, 175n88 Zumthor, Paul, xvii, xix, xxvi, xxvii,
Virilio, Paul, 165n30 xxxiii, 18, 40, 164n18
Simone Pinet is associate professor of Spanish and medieval studies at
Cornell University. She is the author of El baladro del sabio Merlín: Notas
para la caracterización del personaje en España and coeditor of Courting the
Alhambra: Cross-disciplinary Approaches to the Hall of Justice Ceilings.