"Amadis de Gaule may well have been France's first real best-seller. When it first appeared, in 1540, Amadis attracted the smart crowd - court circles and rich bourgeois. Its early editions are large luxury folios, dedicated to members of the royal family. But some twenty years after the Amadis phenomenon started, it ended. References to it in the last quarter of the sixteenth century tend to be either nostalgic or critical. This book uses the rise and fall of Amadis de Gaule as a case study of the time-bound nature of readers' reading. The rhetorical, narrative, and memorial techniques of Amadis also appear in other contemporary works where they have received little notice."--BOOK JACKET.