Spanish Romance in the Battle for Global Supremacy

How tales of love and arms mystified global conquest and rooted the idea of an idea of English empire as a civilized alternative to the cruelty of Spanish conquest

By exploring England’s fanatical consumption of the so-called books of the brave conquistadors, this book shows how tales of love and arms mystified global conquest (in such places as Mexico, Peru, Guiana, California, and Australia) and rooted the idea of English empire as a civilized alternative to the cruelty of Spanish conquest.

Did Spanish explorers really discover the sunken city of Atlantis or one of the lost tribes of Israel in Aztec México? Did classical writers foretell the discovery of America? Were faeries and Amazons hiding in Guiana, and where was the fabled golden city, El Dorado? Who was more powerful, Apollo or Diana, and which claimant nation, Spain or England, would win the game of empire? These were some of the questions English writers, historians, and polemicists asked through their engagement with Spanish romance. By exploring England’s fanatical consumption of these tales of love and arms as reflected in the works of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Ben Jonson, and Peter Heylyn, this book shows how the idea of English empire took root in and through literature, and how these circumstances primed the success of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote of la Mancha in England.