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·卡斯蒂略在向伊兹塔帕拉帕进军时，将这一场景描述为阿玛迪斯故事中的一个迷人景象，指的是一段流行的骑士浪漫故事。我的论文确立了新大陆征服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。虽然它们的历史性、修辞和拉丁美洲基础神话的形成已经被研究过了，但我询问了这些叙事的文化先例，突出了它们的文学技巧。我确认它们继承自中世纪文学语料库，包括虔诚的战争、他者和英雄主义，通过交叉参考文学主题和流派模式来追溯这一遗产的属性。这项研究以骑士传奇和十字军编年史的来源分析为基础，揭示了征服者自我神话的中世纪基础，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.