This book has traced the fates of women characters in chivalric romance along an intertextual pathway that reaches from Amadís de Gaula, a work of the late medieval period, through Don Quixote, Spain's first modern novel. The letter writers and wise women of Amadís and Cristalián de España indicate that in the first half of the sixteenth century, writing and reading, though controversial activities, provide fictionalized women a means of acting on the world by proxy, thereby circumventing conventional restrictions on their behavior. Cristalián de España, published at the beginning of chivalry's decline in Spain, shows how one specific female reader, Beatriz Bernal, finds in her chosen genre the blueprints for women's agency and self-expression. Cervantes, writing at the end of Iberian chivalry's long, slow fall from prominence, recovers many of these same genre tools through his inscribed women readers. Though in Part II Cervantes guides his literate women away from chivalric romance to genres of more prestige, including lyric poetry and the emergent novel, in the world of Don Quixote, chivalry still has an emancipatory role to play for women, serving as a bridge towards the kinds of creative, transformative intertextual practices that writers of the Renaissance celebrated. Throughout this journey, acts of writing and reading have served as an index for women's self-awareness and drive to act on their own behalf. Though women's autonomy in early modern fiction is always conditional, it becomes more possible when women characters perform or write texts. Literate female characters have the potential to resist or to decide, and though they sometimes reaffirm an existing social order, they may also work to transform it.

The link among female characters, acts of writing, and chivalric trope outlives the early modern period in Spain.