Amadis de Gaule

The most successful chivalric romance in Renaissance France. Its origins are unknown for certain, but the first French version by Herberay des Essarts (1540) is based on Rodríguez de Montalvo's expansion of a fragmentary 15th-c. Spanish manuscript. It is a text of heroic and sensuous adventure centered on Amadis, the ideal knight, who encounters an array of giants, monsters, and enchanters in his loyal service of the princess Oriana. Its popularity in France (as in Spain) was extensive: by 1591 the four books of Des Essarts's original text had grown to 21 and had spawned countless imitations. In spite of a growing reaction, the work and the genre survived well into the 17th c. A further three books were added in 1615, and in the next decade interest was still evident, ranging from Du Verdier's massive seven-volume compendium of chivalric commonplaces, the Roman des romans (1626-9), to Marcassus's abridged (and bowdlerized) Amadis de Gaule (1629) of just 368 pages. By the 1640s, though, the vogue had all but disappeared, and La Calprenède, who was to develop a new, enormously popular style of quasi-historical fiction, could dismiss the genre as having ‘ni verité, ni vraisemblance, ni clarté, ni chronologie’.

[Jonathan Mallinson]