Amadis de Gaula was, perhaps, the first “fandom.” At its core, Amadis was a chivalric romance – a genre of proto-novel following the heroic exploits of a knight.1 Although the roots of the story date to the 14th century, the oldest surviving printed edition is from 1508. However, in the mid 1500s, the craze for Amadis literature led to the publication of dozens of sequels, prequels, interquels, and even “aggiunta” – additions to existing volumes!
In the manner of much late Medieval and Renaissance literature, length was no object. Many of the Amadis sequels are extremely long in their own right. Taken as a corpus, the entire Amadis material may be millions of words – a very vast narrative indeed.
Notoriously, Amadis de Gaula was one of Don Quixote’s favorite chivalric romances that drove him to madness, and the fervor for which was a theme of Miguel de Cervantes’s whole satire:
The curate asked the niece for the keys of the room where the books, the authors of all the mischief, were, and right willingly she gave them. They all went in, the housekeeper with them, and found more than a hundred volumes of big books very well bound, and some other small ones….
The first that Master Nicholas put into his hand was “The four books of Amadis of Gaul.” “This seems a mysterious thing,” said the curate, “for, as I have heard say, this was the first book of chivalry printed in Spain, and from this all the others derive their birth and origin; so it seems to me that we ought inexorably to condemn it to the flames as the founder of so vile a sect.”
“Nay, sir,” said the barber, “I too, have heard say that this is the best of all the books of this kind that have been written, and so, as something singular in its line, it ought to be pardoned.”
“True,” said the curate; “and for that reason let its life be spared for the present. Let us see that other which is next to it.”
I’m fortunate to own a copy of the sixth and seventh French installments, published in 1557 and bound in a single volume:2
A dream of mine is to edit a complete modern English edition of the Amadis stories. To this end, I’ve been working on a collation/edition web app that I’m working up to a prototype of. It’s nowhere near ready, unfortunately. In the meantime, I slowly compile resources of various editing projects, Amadis among them.
To date I’ve identified 41 distinct installments, published originally in Spanish, Italian, French, and German – cross-translated, augmented, reduced, and edited among them in a complex web of textual history. No language has all the same installments in the same order. I don’t believe every installment could be harmonized, since the editors/authors in each “national” translation regarded different items as canonical. However, towards a complete Amadis edition, I’ve compiled a concordance with links to many digitized items. The colored cells represent the primary edition of each installment, as far as I’ve been able to tell.
- Many of the longest “vast narratives” in my collection are romances, either chivalric (knight stories – Amadis, the Lancelot cycle) or pastoral (shepherd stories – L’Astrée, Artamenes). ↩︎
- It’s in extremely poor condition, lacking several pages and falling apart at the binding. I got it for less than a day’s wage. It’s really not valuable or remarkable apart from being a pivotal item in my vast narrative collection. ↩︎
Tim Sullivan 
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