Noble image and Renaissance fiction: the memory of lineage in the House of Benavente in an unpublished chivalric romance

Abstract

This paper intends to delve deeper into the connections that the House of Benavente must have had with the learned world, based on its encoded presence in a Chivalric manuscript. Indeed, father Miguel Daza, author of Caballero de la Fe (1583), builds up a determined praise of this noble family by describing their possessions in Benavente within the storyline, as well as by actively including of its VIII Count-Duke as a fictional character. The author offers an interesting literary recreation of the history of the Pimentel lineage, taking advantage of the boom in encoded fiction during the final stages of Chivalric literature. The data provided by fiction does not only deliver an extraordinary description of the shape of the disappeared castle in Benavente, but its also provides with an irreplaceable approach to the cultural atmosphere that probably surrounded this House during don Juan Pimentel’s appointment as well.