Amadis of Gaul
Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo
Lifespan | b. c. 1450 (Spain), d. 1505
First Published | 1508
First Published by | Jorge Coci (Saragossa)
Original Language | Spanish
On the title page of a 1588 edition of Amadis of Gaul, the amorous hero sets forth in search of chivalrous adventures.
“. . . and holding his shield in front of him, sword in hand, he advanced towards the lion; for the great shouts the King Garinter uttered could not deter him.”
Amadis of Gaul is a primitive novel, a romance, and a book of chivalry, and it is the most relevant and original Spanish contribution to the Arthurian legend of adventures of knights-errant. There is evidence that the story has been popular since the mid-fourteenth century. The adventures circulated in three books that Rodríguez de Montalvo abridged and re-presented between 1470 and 1492, making room for his new saga of chivalry about the son of Amadis and Oriana, The Exploits of Esplandian (1510).
The debt of Amadis to the Arthurian legend is evident in actual incidents, such as the investiture of the knight, and in the prophecies and the appearance of magic. For example, Merlin and Morgan have their Castilian counterparts in Urganda the Unknown and Arcalaus the Magician. As in the genre of chivalry, the driving force is love and marriage. But Amadis remains remote from the troubadour theme of adulterous love for a married woman, which is at the heart of the chivalrous adventures that most influenced Amadis: Tristan of Leonis and Lancelot of the Lake. Oriana, with whom Amadis was in love, was the daughter, not the wife, of the King of Brittany. The cycle of Amadis, continued in The Exploits of Esplandian, incorporates moralizing elements, which make the text close to the theoretical treatise School of Princes. Montalvo’s work is a Christianization of the knightly code, making the worn-out folkloric Arthurian model believable in the Spain of the Catholic kings. MAN
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The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes
Anonymous
First Published | 1554
First Published by | Alcalá de Henares, Spain
Original Title | La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades
It is likely that it will never be known who wrote this work. For a long time it was suggested that the author was a nobleman, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza; recently, it has been suggested that it was Alfonso de Valdés, a highly educated imperial official with Erasmian tendencies. No one would think that this story was written by the participant himself. The tale concerns the life of the son of a woman who ended up living with a black slave—the child becomes a blind man’s guide, the servant of several masters, and, finally, Toledo’s town crier as a result of the influence of an archpriest who was certainly his mother’s lover. Yet this short book would have us believe that, in all honesty, it is a letter in which Lázaro explains the “situation” that has aroused so much attention in the anonymous man or woman (“Your worship”) to whom the text is addressed.
Everything the author wrote was already the material of folklore or from the repertory of anticlerical tales; but what was radically new was the uninhibited tone and the skill with which he turned the whole collection into the experiences of just one life. This work was the start of the picaresque story, but it was also much more: the modern novel as a personal expression of the world. JCM
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Gargantua and Pantagruel
François Rabelais
Lifespan | b. c. 1494 (France), d. 1553
First Published | 1532–1564, by F. Juste (Lyon)
Full Title | Grands annales tresueritables des gestes merveilleux du grand Gargantua et Pantagruel
Published under the anagrammatic pseudonym of Alcofribas Nasier, Pantagruel established a whole new genre of writing, with a riotous mix of rhetorical energy, linguistic humor, and learned wit. In creating a comedy of sensory excesses, playing off various licentious, boozy, and lusty appetites, Rabelais also prefigures much in the history of the novel, from Don Quixote to Ulysses. Perhaps his greatest achievement is his free-spiritedness, which combines high-jinking vulgar materialism with a profound, skeptical mode of humanist wit.
The novel itself tells the story of the gigantic Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. The first book details fantastic incidents in the early years of Pantagruel and his roguish companion Panurge. The second, Gargantua, tracks back in time to the genealogy of Pantagruel’s father, while satirizing scholasticism and old-fashioned educational methods. The third develops as a satire of intellectual learning, mainly through the heroic deeds and sayings of Pantagruel. In the fourth book, Pantagruel and Panurge head off on a voyage to the Oracle of the Holy Bottle in Cathay, which provides scenes for satire on religious excess. The fifth and most bitter book takes them to the temple of the Holy Bottle, where they follow the oracle’s advice to “Drink!” The plot hardly rises to the level of picaresque, but there is a feast of mirth in the telling. DM
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The Lusiad
Luís Vaz de Camões
Lifespan | b. c. 1524 (Portugal), d. 1580
First Published | 1572
First Published by | Antonio Gõçaluez (Lisbon)
Original Title | Os Lusíadas
The central thread of Camões’s Portuguese national epic The Lusiad is a narrative of the voyage of Vasco da Gama, pioneering the sea route from Portugal to India in 1498. As a man of the Renaissance, besotted with the Latin and Greek classics, the author embroiders this story with a profusion of history and legend, giants and nymphs, and disputes of the gods on Olympus. Yet The Lusiad is grounded in the author’s hard-won experience of the world. Camões lost an eye as a young man fighting the Moors in Morocco and spent seventeen years on travels around Portuguese outposts in India and East Asia.
There can be no pretence that The Lusiad is an easy read, yet its prolix verse reveals a novelistic imagination convinced that historical fact can be made more dramatic than romantic heroics. Da Gama is a surprisingly downbeat hero, wily and sensible, prone to error, and owing much to luck. Camões was a man of his time; he views the voyage to India as bringing civilization to the barbarians, and encourages his king to embark on a crusade to destroy Islam. Yet the author is no one’s fool. He can see the horrors perpetrated under the disguise of spreading Christianity, the corruption that empire breeds, and the illusions of heroic conquest. English critic Maurice Bowra described The Lusiad as “the first epic poem which in its grandeur and universality speaks for the modern world.” RegG
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Monkey: A Journey to the West
Wú Chéng’en
Lifespan | b. c. 1500 (China), d. 1582
First Published | 1592, anonymously
Alternate Title | Monkey
Original Title | Xi You Ji
The cunning and playful Monkey is a thorn in the side of the gods and a most useful companion on the journey to India.
Monkey is an abridged translation of the popular Chinese folk novel A Journey to the West, attributed to a scholar and poet of the Ming dynasty, Wú Chéng’en. Based on traditional folktales, with its background in Chinese popular religion, mythology, and philosophy—in particular Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism—A Journey to the West became one of the four classical novels of Chinese literature.
The novel is based on the story of a famous Chinese Buddhist monk, Xuánzàng, who undertook a pilgrimage to India during the Tang Dynasty (618–907) in order to obtain Sanskrit texts called Sutras. Xuánzàng is accompanied by three disciples—Monkey, Pig, and Friar Sand—who help the monk to defeat various monsters and demons before they finally bring the Sutras back to the Chinese capital. Monkey himself reflects many traditional values in his quest for immortality, enlightment, atonement, and spiritual rebirth.
The book is unique
in its combination of adventure, comedy, poetry, and spiritual insight. Working on many levels, it is thought to be at once an allegory for a spiritual journey toward enlightenment and a satire on inefficient and absurd bureaucracy, ancient or modern. JK
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Unfortunate Traveller
Thomas Nashe
Lifespan | b. 1567 (England), d. 1601
First Printed | 1594, by T. Scarlet for C. Burby
Full Title | The Unfortunate Traveller; or, The Life of Jacke Wilton
The Unfortunate Traveller is perhaps the most brilliant of the Elizabethan novellas. Thomas Nashe tells the complex and disturbing story of Jack Wilton, an amoral young recruit in Henry VIII’s army in France. Wilton has a series of dangerous adventures, starting when he worms his way into the good offices of the army’s Lord of Misrule, a cider seller. He convinces the man that the king regards him as an enemy spy, and receives a great deal of free drink. Eventually the king is confronted and the plot is exposed, resulting in a whipping for Wilton (although we are aware that in the real world a harsher punishment would have befallen him). Wilton then travels throughout Europe, witnessing the destruction of the Anabaptist Utopia established in Münster, before reaching Italy where he witnesses even more spectacular vice and cruelty—specifically the executions of two criminals, Zadoch and Cutwolfe. Wilton returns to England, horrified at what he has seen, and vows to remain at home in the future.
The Unfortunate Traveller is disturbing and funny by turns, with every description undercut by a powerful irony, so we remain unsure whether travel is an enlightening or a pointless process. Nashe’s descriptions, especially those of violence, are a brilliant and unsettling combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary—notably when the dying Zadoch has his fingernails “half raised up, and then underpropped . . . with sharp pricks, like a tailor’s shop window half-open on a holiday.” AH
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Thomas of Reading
Thomas Deloney
Lifespan | b. c. 1543 (England), d. c. 1600
First Published | c. 1600
Full Title | Pleasant Historic of Thomas of Reading; or, The Sixe Worthie Yeomen of the West
In its diversity, Thomas of Reading parallels Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It caters for all tastes: comic anecdotes, folk wisdom, reveling, adultery, murder, a journey, doomed love, rivalry between royal siblings, and a thief’s cunning escape from punishment. Roughly following the fates of six West Country clothiers, Deloney interweaves their largely comic adventures with the tragic story of Margaret, a noblewoman whose father has fallen from grace and who works with one of the clothiers’ wives until she falls in love with the king’s brother.
On the surface an innocent collection of anecdotes, Thomas of Reading is also an astute social critique. It celebrates the clothiers but disparages their social superiors. Virtuous and generous, the clothiers form a close-knit community. The nobility, however, fails to live up to that ideal. When her aristocratic friends shun her, Margaret realizes that “the meane estate is best.” She finds happiness among the clothiers until she consents to elope with the king’s brother, a reentry into the nobility that is ruinous for the lovers.
Though often referred to as a novel, Thomas of Reading is hard to categorize because it lacks generic unity and does not focus on a central event or figure. But it is precisely the narrative’s deviation from familiar literary patterns that makes it appear refreshingly new today. Thomas of Reading was written over four centuries ago, but its celebration of individual merit is modern. FH
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Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Lifespan | b. 1547 (Spain), d. 1616
First Published | 1605–1615, by Juan de la Cuesta
Full Original Title | El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha
The first part of Don Quixote was originally published in Madrid in 1605; fewer than twenty copies of the first edition survived.
“All kinds of beauty do not inspire love; there is a kind which only pleases the sight, but does not captivate the affections.”
Don Quixote has read himself into madness by reading too many books of chivalry, and so sets out to emulate the knights of old, first by getting himself some armour (out of pasteboard) and a steed (a broken-down nag), and then by getting himself knighted. He goes to an inn, which he thinks a castle, meets prostitutes whom he thinks high-born ladies, addresses them and the innkeeper, who is a thief, in language so literary that they cannot understand it, and then seeks to get himself knighted by standing vigil all night over his armour. The ludicrous transformation of the sacred rituals of knighthood into their ad hoc material equivalents parallels a similar desacralizing going on Europe at the time.
In all this it is the knowing reader, rather than the characters or the action, that is the implied subject of address. Cervantes here invents the novel form itself, by inventing the reader. Reading begins with the Prologue’s address to the “idle” reader, and by implication extends throughout the first book, as Quixote’s friends attempt to cure his madness by burning his books to stop him reading. In the process we meet readers, and occasions for reading, of all kinds. In 1615, Cervantes published a second book in which Don Quixote becomes not the character reading but the character read, as many of the people he meets have read Book I and know all about him. Indeed this combination of the always already read and the force of perpetual reinvention is what continues to draw the reader in. JP
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The Travels of Persiles and Sigismunda
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Lifespan | b. 1547 (Spain), d. 1616
First Published | 1617
Original Title | Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, historia septentrional
“The desires of this life are countless and linked together in an endless chain, a chain that sometimes reaches all the way up to Heaven and at others sinks into Hell.”
Cervantes wrote the emotional dedication of this novel when he was close to death, having received the last rites, and he died without seeing it published. It is a Byzantine novel, an artificial, moralizing genre that was popular in the second half of the sixteenth century. With it Cervantes believed he would win the literary glory that could not be granted to a parody such as his Don Quixote.
The novel tells the story of the travels of Persiles, Prince of Thule, and his beloved Sigismunda, Princess of Finland, on their long and eventful journey to Rome, where the Pope blesses their love and joins them in marriage. Pretending to be siblings called Periander and Auristela, the heroes travel the icy Nordic wastes, overcoming numerous setbacks (separation, abduction, and shipwrecks), after which they continue their journey, still encountering many obstacles, through Portugal, Spain, France, and finally Italy, the capital of which symbolizes the unity and supremacy of the Church. The protagonists display perfect moral qualities: honor, virtue, fortitude, and chastity.
In this “northern story” Cervantes wrote a completely new kind of novel, combining intrigue with moral example, adventure with instruction, and he sought to encode within it an allegory of human life, a blend of good and evil, of chance and free will, in the human journey toward salvation. DRM
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The Conquest of New Spain
Bernal Díaz del Castillo
Lifespan | b. 1495 (Spain), d. 1582 (Guatemala)
First Published | 1632
Original Title | Verdadera historia de la conquista de Nueva España
A large number of historical works written in the sixteenth century were devoted to the discovery and conquest of America, and were classified as “general,” “natural,” or “moral.” This history by Bernal Díaz stands out for the words “true history” in its origin
al title: that is, the events have been “seen and experienced.” Aware that his position as a soldier made him vulnerable to the criticism of learned historians trained in rhetoric and fine writing, the author makes clear from the start his criterion of personal experience, one that is likely to become increasingly highly respected. He omits the imperialistic, ideological plan of the official histories in favor of experience.
This work is seen by some as the first novel of Spanish-American literature. It is a powerful exercise of memory that, written over three decades later, reconstructed the days leading to the discovery of the Aztec empire and the conquest of Mexico. The author brings his writing to life through a remarkable narrative skill, based on attention to detail and not excluding irony. His text, moreover, is constructed as a demanding, polemical argument; he strongly questions the inaccuracies of other historians of the same events and, instead of the unctuous panegyrics they wrote about the hero Cortés, he defends the work of the self-sacrificing soldiers who accompanied him. DMG
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The Adventurous Simplicissimus
Hans von Grimmelshausen
Lifespan | b. 1622 (Germany), d. 1676
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 6