Introduction

Two best-sellers were without rival in fifteenth-century Spain, Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo's Amadís cycle (1496) and Fernando de Rojas's Celestina (1499). One author was without rival in sixteenth-century Spain: Feliciano de Silva. Silva's five continuations of Amadís revived romances of chivalry and ranked the Mirobrigian as the Golden Age's best-selling novelist. Silva's sequel to the Celestina seeded a new genre and proved the most enduring and productive response that Rojas's work would ever receive.

Though famous for his powerful and prolific pen, Silva wrote always and only for the most noble of reasons: love and honor. When a primitive author or rival continuator besmirched a beloved character's honor, Silva sallied forth as sequelist. In this office, Silva restored to life and livelihood the age's greatest and most prolific knight, Amadís, and its greatest and most prolific whore, Celestina. These complementary quests in turn made him the Golden Age's greatest and most prolific professional continuator. During his lifetime and for the century to follow, no author wrote more than a single sequel to either Amadís or the Celestina: Silva was undefeated in serial combat.

Much of his success as a continuator – particularly in the Segunda Celestina – came courtesy of an unprecedented ability to imitate old linguistic registers while simultaneously introducing new ones, thus binding his works to his precursors while opening the way for his successors. The resulting combination of continuity and novelty allowed him to expand other authors' worlds in his own voice and name: he never feigned to be the authors whom he continued, and through compelling allegory he persuaded would-be sequelists not to do so either. He also defined the continuator's essential craft.