Zayas invites readers of her Exemplary Tales of Love into the long-familiar scene of storytelling to entertain or instruct friends. Wellknown examples besides Boccaccio's Decameron are Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and One Thousand and One Nights. Painting such a scene was not Zayas's invention, however, nor the only model available to her. Other literary or proto-literary models that we can identify as influences in her writing include oral storytelling, poetry, hagiography, popular novellas, Greek romance, and picaresque tales. Before analyzing more of her stories and her influence on other writers, we should look at the literary models on which Zayas could build, as I do in this chapter.

Scenes of oral storytelling bridged the lengthy transition from oral culture to one consumed in print, either read aloud to listeners, or silently for the reader's private enjoyment. Given her voracious reading, Zayas probably read at least a partial version of the Decameron in Spanish translation and, if she did live for some time in Italy, might have read it in Italian. She is likely to have experienced as oral tales told among friends or cited in sermons the genre of Middle Eastern advice tales, brief stories that in later centuries were gathered in One Thousand and One Nights and similar collections. Some Early Modern story collections recreated that oral scene. The title of Antonio de Eslava's Noches de invierno (Winter Nights) (1609) evoked the simple pleasure of friends exchanging stories around a fire on a cold night. Zayas's narrator don Miguel conjures up a firelit image in N. 7, “Just Desserts.” The story's protagonist Hipólita prefaces telling it to don García: “My story would amaze anyone who heard it. When you hear it from the beginning, it will really astound you. It's so strange you’ll think it's one of those fabulous tales people tell in the winter by the fireside instead of a real story” [mis cosas admiren … cuando sepais desde principio mi historia …los inviernos a las chimeneas que caso sucedido]. Throughout her two volumes, Zayas has her narrators establish the physical setting of the storyteller and audience as each begins his or her tale.