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

征服者贝尔纳尔·迪亚兹·德·卡斯蒂略（Bernal Diaz de Castillo）在伊兹塔帕拉帕（Iztapalapa）行进时，将这一场景描述为《阿玛迪斯》（Amadis）故事中的迷人景象，引用了一个流行的骑士浪漫故事。我的论文确立了征服新世界的叙述是如何建立在十字军和骑士叙事的文学理想之上，并通过跨文化接触而形成的。虽然他们的历史，修辞和拉丁美洲基础神话的塑造已经被研究过，但我质疑这些叙事的文化先例，强调他们的文学技巧。我确认他们的遗产来自中世纪文学的语库，包括虔诚的战争，他者性和英雄主义，通过交叉参考文学主题和流派模型来追踪这些遗产的属性。基于对骑士传奇和十字军编年史的来源分析，本研究揭示了中世纪征服者自我神话化的基石，使我们对新大陆的欧洲文化遗产有了更全面的了解。

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.