By the time Miguel de Cervantes evoked Amadís of Gaul as his hero's primary target for imitation in Don Quixote Part I (1605), the romance of chivalry had lost much of its cultural cachet in Spain. Beatriz Bernal's Cristalián was among the last group of new romances to emerge in print, and what little chivalric publication continued during the reign of Felipe II was largely confined to editions of already known romances. In Cervantes's context, it was perhaps not possible to view books of chivalry as sacred objects capable of sustaining narrative authority, as Bernal does in her proemio. For Cervantes, chivalric romance is indeed a relic, but not an authoritative one. The reading of chivalry, transgressive in Bernal, becomes risible in Cervantes. Indeed, if one considered only Don Quixote's too-literal reading practices, it would be logical to conclude that Cervantes expresses a categorical denouncement of chivalric romance in his novel. The mad knight, however, is not the only reader of chivalric fiction in Don Quixote, nor is he the final arbiter of what romance tropes mean or how they can be used.

The next two chapters of this book will examine the fates of four inscribed female readers in Cervantes's novel—Luscinda and Dorotea from Part I, and the duchess and Altisidora from Part II—who echo the essential quixotic drive to apply literature to life. Although Cervantes mocks the romance of chivalry, he also celebrates it, primarily through the genre's women readers. Cervantes eulogizes the masculine plotlines of Iberian chivalric romance while preserving one of its most radical features, the agency it grants female characters through the written word. In this chapter, I discuss how Luscinda and Dorotea partner to out-Quixote the other readers gathered at Juan Palomeque's inn. These two seemingly naïve young women use chivalric romance as a handbook of creative solutions for the predation of men.

Far from representing the reading of chivalry as a masculine, aristocratic pursuit, Cervantes goes to great lengths throughout Don Quixote Part I to emphasize the diversity of romance readers. A work of fiction, of course, cannot be taken as a historical document, especially for a slippery phenomenon like readership, but various scholars have examined the readers Cervantes depicts and found them historically plausible.