Books of chivalry

Books of chivalry are the immensely popular romances that furnish Don Quixote with his imagined world and give Cervantes’s novel its stated satirical target. They are presented both as a powerful cultural influence, capable of persuading a reader to mistake invention for history, and as a literary form criticized for improbable exploits, disordered plots, and poor judgment about what makes fiction convincing. The novel’s argument is not simply that heroic ideals are foolish: it distinguishes the degraded imitation of chivalry found in these books from chivalry itself, while asking what imaginative writing can achieve when it joins invention to truthfulness and craft.

A popular form and its cultural force

The romances’ influence is described as a defining literary phenomenon of the sixteenth century. Their popularity, associated with works such as those of Amadis of Gaul and Palmerin of England, drew sustained criticism from writers whose character and standing lent weight to their objections. In the novel’s account, ridicule was needed to clear away the public’s infatuation. That context makes the books more than the private taste of one eccentric reader: they represent a literary fashion with enough reach to provoke recurring public denunciation.

The distinction between chivalry and its fictional counterfeit matters to the book’s historical argument. Cervantes is often credited with having laughed Spain’s chivalry away, but the narrator rejects that formulation: Spain’s chivalry, in this account, had already ended more than a century earlier, after Granada fell, and could not survive under the political order Ferdinand established in place of medieval Spain’s free institutions. What the novel attacks is instead a degrading mockery of chivalry. The romances are thus treated not as the cause of chivalry’s historical disappearance, but as a distortion that keeps its outward poses alive in popular imagination.

The narrator also describes a change in how later readers approached the novel itself. As publishers, editors, and annotators elevated its philosophical or satirical meanings, admirers increasingly became uncomfortable with laughing at it. Humor came to be treated as secondary, a vehicle for some deeper purpose that critics disputed. Against readings that turn the novel into a deliberately constructed allegory of idealism and realism, the narrator argues that the ordinary conflict between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is recognizable because Cervantes drew on life, not because he set out to expound a philosophical system. The same defense situates the book in the concrete provocation of the romances’ popularity.

How the romances transform Don Quixote

Don Quixote’s absorption begins with a pattern of neglect and sacrifice. He gives so much of his leisure to reading that he nearly abandons field sports and the management of his property; he even sells acres of farmland to buy more books. He stays awake trying to untangle the elaborate conceits of Feliciano de Silva, and worries over the wounds dealt and suffered by Don Belianis of Greece, imagining the scars such adventures must have left on the knight’s body. Reading has become more than amusement: its invented conventions occupy his attention and displace ordinary responsibilities.

The consequences are described as a collapse of the boundary between story and history. After nights spent reading from sunset to sunrise and days from dawn to dark, with little sleep, his mind fills with enchantments, battles, challenges, courtships, and other impossible events. He believes the romances more real than any history. He ranks the legendary Knight of the Burning Sword above the Cid Ruy Diaz, admires Bernardo del Carpio’s victory over Roland at Roncesvalles, and prizes Reinaldos of Montalban’s robberies and theft of an image of Mahomet. These examples show how the books supply not merely a collection of colorful stories but a scale of value by which Don Quixote judges the world. His decision to become a knight-errant follows from that conviction: he intends to right wrongs, face dangers, and win lasting fame by putting the romances’ practices into action.

The novel repeatedly lets the reader see how that imagined world presses against ordinary circumstances. When Don Quixote and the company at the inn sit down to supper, he interprets the gathering through the identities he assigns to himself and the lady Micomicona, and then defends the profession of knight-errantry. His case for arms is not merely a claim to bodily strength: he argues that a warrior must exercise judgment in anticipating an enemy’s plans and protecting others from danger. He also describes peace as the ultimate object of arms. The speech complicates any simple dismissal of his ideals, even as its occasion exposes how readily he overlays the present with romance.

Dispute over probability, design, and pleasure

The canon’s criticism gives the novel a sustained account of what is wrong with the romances. He objects to stories in which a sixteen-year-old can cut down a giant as tall as a tower, a single knight can defeat a million opponents, or an unknown wandering knight is suddenly embraced by a queen or empress. Other tales send a tower full of knights sailing across the sea, reaching Lombardy one day and the land of Prester John the next. For the canon, the problem is not that fiction departs from literal fact; it is that invention loses its persuasive force when it abandons probability and truth to nature.

He extends the criticism from individual marvels to the shape of the stories as a whole. In his view, the romances fail to connect beginning, middle, and end into a coherent plot, piling up so many parts that the result resembles a monster rather than a proportioned design. He also condemns their harsh style, incredible achievements, licentious love affairs, awkward courtly language, overlong battles, foolish arguments, and absurd journeys. The curate agrees with the canon’s judgment and reports that he burned many of Don Quixote’s books after examining them, though he had spared some. The episode makes criticism consequential within the story: the romances are not only debated as an aesthetic problem but treated as a dangerous influence on their reader.

Yet the canon does not deny the form’s creative possibilities. He acknowledges that its open range can give a gifted writer room to depict shipwrecks, storms, battles, political counsel, tragic reversals, joyful surprises, virtuous ladies, brave knights, generous rulers, and treacherous braggarts. Such variety could bring together different poetic modes and kinds of knowledge, and could unite instruction with pleasure. The canon’s ideal is not the abolition of imaginative adventure, but its disciplined use: invention should be charming, artful, and as close to truth as possible.

Don Quixote answers by insisting on the romances’ apparent authority and their power to delight. He points to their claims to specify a knight’s parents, country, relatives, age, places, and deeds day by day, and argues that the books have been licensed and widely praised. He then describes a knight plunging, still in heavy armor, into a lake of boiling pitch to reach hidden wonders beneath it, only to find himself in meadows, among clear streams, birds, and fountains. The scene is an example of the marvels he embraces, not an event the novel presents as literally occurring. His defense makes visible the attraction of the romances even as the canon’s standards expose their weakness: wonder can captivate, but without proportion and credible design it cannot satisfy the canon’s account of accomplished fiction.

The novel’s stated purpose and its target

The preface stages a conversation in which a lively friend advises the author that the book needs no borrowed array of philosophers, scriptural maxims, or scholarly references to accomplish its purpose. Its subject, the friend says, is an attack on the books of chivalry; what matters is naturalness, clear and musical expression, and a style capable of making the melancholy laugh and the merry merrier. This account gives the critique a practical literary standard. A successful answer to the romances should not imitate their false authority or inflate itself with ornamental learning; it should make its intentions intelligible and give readers both pleasure and reason to admire its invention.

That standard also clarifies the novel’s double relation to the genre. It exposes the damage caused when a reader accepts romance as history, but it does not reduce the books’ appeal to stupidity or deny the pleasures of imaginative marvel. Don Quixote’s earnest defense and the canon’s measured aesthetic objections hold enchantment and judgment in the same conversation. The satire targets romances that mistake extravagance for achievement, while the novel’s own variety of adventure, argument, and comedy demonstrates the possibility of imaginative writing governed by coherence and truth to nature.