Not-so-New World? Examining the Literary Genealogies of Sixteenth Century Spanish Conquest Narratives

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Marching on Iztapalapa, conquistador Bernal Diaz de Castillo describes the scene as an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadis, referencing a popular chivalric romance. My thesis establishes how accounts of New World conquest were founded upon the literary ideals of crusader and chivalric narratives, and forged by intercultural contact. While their historicity, rhetoric, and shaping of Latin American foundation-myths have been studied, I interrogate the cultural precedents of these narratives, foregrounding their literary techniques. I confirm their inheritance from a corpus of medieval literature comprising pious warfare, Otherness, and heroism, tracing the properties of this legacy by cross-referencing literary motifs and genre-models. Predicated on source analysis of chivalric romance and crusader chronicles, this study uncovers the medieval bedrock of the conquistadors' self-mythologising, affording us a fuller understanding of European cultural legacies in the New World.