The half-century after the publication of Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo's 1508 Amadís de Gaula witnessed a vogue for chivalric romance crafted in its image. Montalvo himself, Ruy Páez de Ribera, Juan Díaz, Feliciano de Silva, and Pedro de Luján explicitly continued Amadís, and in the process they diminished the work's independent-minded female characters. Even Feliciano de Silva's ludic sequels celebrated the freedom of men, not women. Beatriz Bernal's Cristalián de España, first printed in 1545 in Valladolid, goes against this trend, crafting new female characters who are in some ways more subversive than their models. Though Bernal does not continue the story of Amadís and Oriana, she expands on the tacit promise Amadís de Gaula made to literate women by proposing a more egalitarian division of chivalric labor. In Amadís, the plot is gendered and bifurcated: men fight and women write. However, in Cristálian de España, characters of both genders write and act. Bernal also expands the number of literate female characters, suggesting that reading and writing women are the rule and not the exception. These women, like their counterparts in Amadís, exercise a conditional agency through their literary practices. Bernal's literate women draw heavily on available models, not just from Amadís, but also from Montalvo's sequel Las sergas de Esplandián and other chivalric works, including Tirant lo Blanch and La crónica troyana. Bernal's allusions to these texts in a sense ‘read’ the women depicted therein, and intertextual borrowings complicate her depictions of women's literacy. The result is a romance world in which women's literary practices are both more frequent and more risky than in the source works. Women use reading and writing for good and evil, and their attempts at accomplishing a communicative goal through written texts often fail. Women, however, are primary rather than secondary players in Cristalián, and the range of roles and functions they undertake speaks to Bernal's egalitarian notion of chivalric romance as a genre.