Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part 1 SOCIAL AND CULTURAL MINORITIES IN CHANGING SOCIETIES
- Part 2 CONTACT AND CONFLICT: PERSPECTIVES ON HISTORY AND CULTURE
- Part 3 TRANSMISSION OF LEARNING AND TEXTS IN CHANGING CULTURES
- Hermes Trismegistus in General Estoria II
- Pharmaceutical Fictions: Celestina's Laboratory and the Sixteenth-Century Medical Imaginary
- Spanish and Portuguese Scholars at the University of Paris in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: The Exchange of Ideas and Texts
- The Primary Audience and Contexts of Reception of Thirteenth-Century Castilian cuaderna vía Poetry
- Editorial Interference in Amadís de Gaula and Sergas de Esplandián
- Part 4 LINGUISTIC CONTACT AND CHANGE
- Index
Editorial Interference in Amadís de Gaula and Sergas de Esplandián
from Part 3 - TRANSMISSION OF LEARNING AND TEXTS IN CHANGING CULTURES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part 1 SOCIAL AND CULTURAL MINORITIES IN CHANGING SOCIETIES
- Part 2 CONTACT AND CONFLICT: PERSPECTIVES ON HISTORY AND CULTURE
- Part 3 TRANSMISSION OF LEARNING AND TEXTS IN CHANGING CULTURES
- Hermes Trismegistus in General Estoria II
- Pharmaceutical Fictions: Celestina's Laboratory and the Sixteenth-Century Medical Imaginary
- Spanish and Portuguese Scholars at the University of Paris in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: The Exchange of Ideas and Texts
- The Primary Audience and Contexts of Reception of Thirteenth-Century Castilian cuaderna vía Poetry
- Editorial Interference in Amadís de Gaula and Sergas de Esplandián
- Part 4 LINGUISTIC CONTACT AND CHANGE
- Index
Summary
Around the turn of the sixteenth century, printers working throughout Castile found themselves in straits so dire that the years 1501–10 have been called ‘los años negros de la edición española’ (Berger 64). In spite of Crown and Church patronage, the death of several major printers working in Spain as well as the rise of monopolies abroad left Peninsular firms struggling to survive. Desperate for income, Castilian printers began to devise ways to attract the business of local readers. One strategy was the printing of previous works, especially fifteenthcentury narratives, written in Spanish. Some firms undertook to reprint popular works first published prior to 1500, including Cárcel de amor, Celestina and Libro del Arcipreste de Talavera. The success of this strategy inspired printers to develop entire ‘editorial genres’, or groups of works published to meet the growing demand for literary works written in Castilian, including love poetry, long and short chivalric romances and medieval chronicles. The driving economic interest behind the publication of older literature in sixteenth-century Spain leads Infantes to identify the printed book and its circulation as a type of commercial ‘interference’ between text and reader (115).
Consumer demand also obliged editors to tailor older material to meet contemporary tastes, a phenomenon I call ‘editorial interference’. In some cases, the editors sought the public's approval through attractive formats. The prologue to Juan de Vilches’ Bernadina de illustris, for example, promises that the printer Zapata of Seville ‘os dará los buenos autores que deseáis […] las obras enmendadas en sus tipos y adornadas con figuras’ (qtd. in Domínguez Guzmán 283).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Medieval IberiaChanging Societies and Cultures in Contact and Transition, pp. 136 - 150Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007