Printing Heuristics in the Carolingian Romances

Abstract

From a heuristic implicit in the nascent business of the Spanish printing press, where the market was growing through discontinuous paths and different scores, printed publishing products were the result of commercial flows between the urban and suburban public and the courtly public. Although it has been found that several loose sheets of other subgenres of the Romancero reached commercial success since before their integration in printed formats, the present study is interested in demonstrating that the Carolingian cycle traveled an opposite path, but remaining within the context of editorial experimentation that played with episodes, characters, amplification techniques and redundant elements. The study also aims to show how the extensive versions of the most representative romances of the cycle managed to position themselves as commercial hooks in the most demanded and novel format of the time: the printed book.