Vandalia

Vandalia is the province of Felismena’s birth and the setting of the family history that she recounts to three nymphs. Though the narrative gives it little independent description, it anchors her identity in a region beyond Lusitania and frames the extraordinary circumstances of her birth, orphaning, and early upbringing.

Geography and Setting

Felismena calls Vandalia a great province not far from the land where she is telling her story. She identifies Soldina as her birthplace, but offers no detailed account of the province’s borders, towns, or landscape. Vandalia is therefore defined chiefly by its relation to the narrative’s present setting: it is Felismena’s homeland, recalled from elsewhere rather than visited in the scenes described.

The account distinguishes this origin from the Kingdom of the Lusitanos, where Felismena later tells her history. Her movement away from Vandalia begins early: after she and her twin brother are raised in a convent until the age of twelve, he is taken to court, while she goes to live with her grandmother. By nearly seventeen, she is living there when Don Félix falls in love with her.

Family and Birth

Felismena describes her parents, Delia and Andronio, as foremost in Vandalia for lineage and fortune. After many years of marriage without children, Delia prayed and made offerings for a child; she eventually became pregnant when much of her life had passed. Her long-awaited pregnancy gives the family’s happiness a particular weight, while the events surrounding it foreshadow the losses that will define Felismena’s beginnings.

During the pregnancy, Delia asked Andronio to read to her while she felt unwell. He read the story of Paris judging the goddesses, and the couple disputed whether the prize for beauty belonged to Venus or to Minerva. Delia argued that true beauty was not merely bodily and that martial strength, as a virtue, made Minerva deserving; Andronio maintained that Venus was the most beautiful. In a dream, a divine visitor foretold that Delia would bear a son and a daughter destined to excel in arms. About a month later, she gave birth to Felismena and her twin brother and died in childbirth; Andronio died a few days afterward from grief.

Narrative Role and Legacy

Vandalia’s significance is conveyed through recollection rather than through a separate plot unfolding there. Felismena names it as her origin while explaining to the nymphs why she has been shaped by both martial promise and profound bereavement. The prophecy links the twins’ birth to arms, while the deaths of their parents make that inheritance part of an abruptly broken household.

The province also marks the beginning of Felismena’s displacement. Her childhood passes from the convent to her grandmother’s household, and her later story carries her farther from Soldina. Vandalia thus serves as a point of origin against which her subsequent life is measured: it establishes her birth and family standing, but the narrative’s attention falls on the separations and ordeals that take her away from it.