Sixty years before a gaunt and deluded nobleman from La Mancha was overdosing on tales of derring-do, visiting his madness on those around him – and single-handedly rewriting the rules of fiction – the deeds of another heroic knight had already made literary history.
Though completely eclipsed by Don Quixote, Cristalián de España, which was first published in 1545, has a unique claim to fame. Its 800 pages, bristling with swords, sorcerers, dragons and damsels, make up the earliest known work by a female Spanish novelist.
But while Miguel de Cervantes and his fatal skewering of chivalric romance have long permeated western culture, the life and work of Beatriz Bernal have been largely relegated to the sphere of academic research.
A new, illustrated adaptation of her novel, called Las aventuras del caballero Cristalián (The Adventures of Cristalián the Knight), aims to redress the balance and introduce Bernal’s work to younger readers.
Its adapter, the children’s author Diego Arboleda, first heard Bernal’s name while studying Spanish literature at university. “She’s one of those writers who are studied a lot but who haven’t managed to break out of the cage of academic studies,” said Arboleda. “It’s ironic because the kind of chivalric romance that Beatriz Bernal wrote did have a big audience back then – even though a lot of people couldn’t read.”
Bernal, who was born to a well-to-do family in northern Spain at the beginning of the 16th century, published Cristalián when she was in her early 40s. The first edition did not bear her name and was attributed to “a noble and native lady of the most loyal town of Valladolid”. But the second edition, published posthumously in 1587, named her as the book’s author.
Although she is unfamiliar to today’s readers, Bernal made her mark in her own time and her eponymous knight was namechecked in a verse by the Spanish Golden Age poet Luis de Góngora.
Arboleda’s interest in Bernal was rekindled a few years ago and he found himself taking advantage of Spain’s lengthy Covid lockdown to read and transcribe a digital version of Cristalián that the University of Valencia’s historical library had uploaded to the web.
“I love the text itself but I also love her as an author,” he said. “There was this woman in the 16th century who was writing a book that was full of fantasy and imagination.”
Arboleda was so taken with Bernal that he introduced her as a character in his recent book, Una librería en el bosque (A bookshop in the wood). “I saw that a lot of the people who were reading that book couldn’t read Beatriz’s Cristalián … because the transcriptions aren’t accessible.”
The writer’s proposal for an adaptation of Cristalián – based on two episodes from the second edition of the novel – was accepted by his publisher, Anaya.
Arboleda said he had chosen those particular adventures because of what they reveal about Bernal’s mind and her creations. “She has this female vision within a genre that was very masculine,” he said. “Her female characters aren’t passive, they’re strong and active.”
Although female sorcerers abound in chivalric literature, Bernal’s character Membrina is described as being so wise “that she never wanted to take a husband in order that no one should order her about”. Similarly, the female errant knight Minerva is, in Arboleda’s words, “a really good warrior who’s very powerful and very brave”.
“Bernal is moving away from these archetypal female characters that are passive,” he said. “And instead of a princess who has to be saved by a knight, you have Minerva the knight saving people.”
But, above all, Cristalián is a massively fun read. “There’s this female giant who flies a dragon that you don’t sit on,” said Arboleda. “There’s a door in its side and you open it and get in. It’s like a plane or like the bus from [Hayao] Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro. There are so many details like that.”
Donatella Gagliardi, an associate professor of Spanish literature at the Orientale University in Naples and the author of a 2010 work on Bernal, said the writer’s pioneering work had “legitimised the female voice” in a very male literary world.
“Beatriz preferred weaving chivalric plots in her Cristalián to weaving wool and linen, and she chose a literary genre against which contemporary moralists and self-righteous individuals constantly launched invectives,” said Gagliardi. “From her pen sprang unforgettable female characters.”
For Arboleda, the text is as irresistible as the figure of its half-forgotten author.
“Historically speaking, everything was against Beatriz Bernal,” he said. “She was a woman and she was choosing not to write a ‘virtuous’ book about religion or offering advice to other women. Instead, she wrote in this chivalric genre that was so successful but which then disappeared.”
He hopes his adaptation, with pictures by Eugenia Ábalos, will end up in the hands of young readers who will discover that it is not so different from more familiar sagas such as the Arthurian legends and The Lord of the Rings.
“That makes me smile because now that the book is reaching readers, there’s some small satisfaction there for Beatriz Bernal. It’s not revenge, it’s just seeing that after such a long time, people are enjoying her text, even if they don’t know it was written by a woman.”
