Las Amazonas en el Mundo Hispánico: La Persistencia de un Mitro Transatlántico

Abstract

In Western culture, the myth of the Amazons has embodied the symbolic existence of a gynocracy at the cultural and geographical margins of masculine control. My dissertation explores the origin of the myth in classic sources and how the Amazons appeared recurrently in Medieval Spanish literature through Summae, Historiae, travel books, the Libro de Alexandre, chronicles and chivalric romances, and analyzes how the myth had a significant importance to understand and comprehend the new American space and cultural otherness in Early Modern period. Finally, I approach the ambivalent myth using Structuralist and Feminist theory.