Successor to the Medieval Romance
The Kings Used to be Heroes. Then Came the Common Man
The most popular stories of the middle ages today are the romances of knights and Kings. But these romances inspired another kind of literature which succeeded it.
King Arthur, Alexander the Great, Charlemagne. These three Kings and the knights who served them were popular in the middle ages. Their stories were told by troubadours, travelling minstrels who either recycled the stories from others, or made up their own.
The Romance tradition was all about the adventures of the characters as they encountered fantastical beings like dragons or similar beasts (especially in the Alexander romances). Arthur, of course, fights against Mordred and Morgan Le Fay and their forces. Charlemagne (and more specifically his knights Roland, Oliver and others) battle the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula (known to the Islamic world as Andalusia).
A New Kind of Hero
But with the success of La Reconquista in 1492, the Iberian Peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal) came under the iron fist of the Church, and the Inquisition.
In this oppressive time, a new kind of Romance emerged, one that not only removed the fantastical elements of the Medieval Romance, but used a character similar to the troubadour to expose the oppressive church and other social ills.
That cliché that the Jester was the one at court who was allowed to speak the most freely, because he was allowed to mock the King holds true for this new kind of Literature, known as the Picaresque.
Named for the Picaro, (Spanish for Rogue), the Picaresque's main characters were men who lived by their wits in a world surrounded by hypocrites, especially among the ruling class. They would often portray Kings, nobility and even the clergy in a negative light, in order to expose the real life hypocrisy of "Spain's Golden Age" and the simultaneous Inquisition (which immediately followed the expulsion of the Muslims in 1492). Lazarillo de Tormes, considered the first true Picaresque novel was published in 1554. It was published anonymously and was placed on the Vatican's list of banned books for its.
Mocking the Heroes of Old
In the book, Lazarillo climbs up the social ladder, serving as an assistant to a series of people belonging to various professions (including a bailiff, a friar and a priest), all of which are lampooned. The book was banned for its criticism of the church as well as for Lazarillo not being "high-born". The romances of Medieval days featured high-born Kings, knights and squires as the valiant heroes for all, and now the common man was the hero of the common people.
Such audacity has reverberated through the centuries to where the common people, and the common man is idolized and all are free to ridicule leaders, the powerful and the clergy.
