Amadís de Gaula (1508) appealed to sixteenth-century Castilian readers, including women, because it re-interpreted the Arthurian world in ways uniquely suited to early modern Spain. Amadís has always been marked by cross-cultural borrowings and influences. The work tells the story of Amadís, a prince of Gaul, and Oriana, the daughter-heir to the throne of Britain, who work together to overcome obstacles to their marriage and unite their kingdoms under a joint rule. The legend first arose in Castile around 1350 in response to French Arthurian romances, especially the prose Lancelot. Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, a fifteenth-century nobleman from Medina del Campo, combined one or more medieval or ‘primitive’ versions of the legend with new material. The work utilizes diction and narratological structures that recall medieval romances and chronicles, but its concept of the self, the state, and the roles of men and women points toward the modern. Daniel Eisenberg characterizes Amadís as ‘a link between the medieval and the Renaissance periods’, and indeed, Montalvo's Amadís contains courtly language typical of the late fifteenth century and encomia to the Catholic Kings.

A crucial but underappreciated aspect of Amadís de Gaula's forwardlooking gaze is its representation of women's culture, by which I mean women's stories, women's spaces, and women's texts. Amadís de Gaula contains thirty-eight named female characters, compared to just over two hundred male characters. While the text offers many episodes in which men accomplish daring feats, it also introduces queens, princesses, mothers, wives, sisters, aunts, and serving women who interact with each other and with men. Amadís organizes itself through the device of interlace, with strands of narrative focalized on different characters alternating throughout the 1508 text's four volumes. Chapters tend to begin with men and with combat, but once the battle ends, men return to households of women. Female characters have two axes of influence in Amadís, one concerned with reproduction and the other concerned with literacy. Amadís de Gaula thus fuses a traditional notion of women's identity and social role, motherhood, with an emerging conception of women's power to act on the world through reading and writing.