Objective:

This work analyzes the tension and relations between fictional and historical discourse in sixteenth-century Spain, based on the prologues of two chivalric romances, Palmerín (1511) and Primaleón (1512).

Methodology:

For that purpose, it offers a brief contextualization of this debate within the contemporary literary idealism genre (such as pastoral romance and sentimental romance). Subsequently, it analyzes the history-fiction tension, taking as a primary source the prologues of the aforementioned chivalric romances and the commentaries of its editor, Francisco Delicado.

Originality:

This paper highlights the importance of observing sixteenth-century Spanish idealistic prose as an essential source for contemporary and ulterior development of historical and fictional prose (idealistic and realistic), a relatively unexplored facet in Spanish Renaissance literary studies.

Conclusions:

It concludes that the construction of idealistic prose undergoes the reading and assimilation of historic prose but, at the same time, the latter also draws from idealistic prose, which helps it define its own nature. Furthermore, it points out that the authors of idealistic prose evaluate their own reality, and legitimize it or debate it based on their own narrations. Therefore, the fantastic worlds created by authors as Feliciano de Silva or the anonymous author of Palmerín and Primaleón are deeply influenced by ideological postures, and, in its conception, require and constantly use history, understood both as lived reality and discourse that narrates said reality.