What constitutes a genre, and where its boundaries lie, is largely open to debate. Their outward presentation as text, as well as their internal justification by way of metanarrative strategies. Two major tendencies of the materiality of the libros de caballerías will be of concern. The aim of this paper is to contextualise the tendencies of conservatism and innovation within the chivalric romance tradition, and to signal some possible answers to the problem of the boundaries of genre. Footnote 2 Back in 1555, however, a fresh new look was apparently still a valid option for the Espejo de príncipes y cavalleros, a book that in many other respects stayed very close to its models.

Indeed, the same template was still around even in the 1580s (Syrovy 2019, pp. 366–367), and depending on whether one fully subscribes to the common narrative of the steady decline of the genre in the second half of the sixteenth century, it might at that point be considered a quaint anachronism, a mock-medieval element harking back to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, while literary tastes had slowly moved on. This dimension of the libros de caballerías is comparatively well-studied by now (see Lucía Megías 2000 for the most extensive contribution Lucía Megías 2004 Trujillo 2011). In fact, the template became so central to the genre, Spanish scholars coined the term of género editorial or “editorial genre”-describing it as an aspect of branding which would alert readers of chivalric romances to the contents of the books. the chronological table of editions in Lucía Megías 2000, pp. 609–618) and most of the title-pages were set in Gothic type and featured a woodcut of a knight, with the text set in two columns on the folio page, a scheme still widely in use long past the point where it reflected late fifteenth-century book design in general (see Rautenberg 2008). By that point, several dozen romances in more than 160 known editions had been published in Spain (cf. Footnote 1 Daniel Eisenberg, who edited the romance in 1975, did not fail to point out the volume’s contrast to the usual look of the libros de caballerías (Eisenberg 1975, p. Its title-page featured an elaborate classicist design made up of a decorated woodcut frame with statues, Satyrs and masks surrounding the long title of the book printed in two-colour Roman type. Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra’s Espejo de príncipes y cavalleros, first published in 1555, departed from the blueprint of Spanish chivalric romances from the outset.

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