When translations of Iberian romances first appeared in England in the late sixteenth century, their reputations preceded them. From the initial printing of the first and most ubiquitous of the romances, Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Amadís de Gaula, in Zaragoza in 1508, these texts had been the subject of controversy throughout Europe. The Spanish and Portuguese romances were undisputedly popular reading matter, spawning numerous reprints, translations and appropriations, and were occasionally cited as models of eloquence or pleasant diversions, particularly in their French and Italian translations. More frequently, they were considered to be dangerous texts, likely to lead the reader into an idle or unrestrained life and containing little in the way of pragmatic lessons to be studied, commonplaced and reproduced by a humanistically trained reader. In the course of the sixteenth century, the terms ‘Amadis’ and ‘Palmerin’ (the names of the protagonists of the two main Iberian chivalric cycles) came to stand metonymically for the kind of frivolous or harmful text which humanist and religious writers counselled against. However, more thorough debates on the aesthetic and moral merits of romance fiction were conducted through the romances’ paratexts; this front matter, in particular, helped to shape and reshape the publication and reception of the texts as they were translated first into French and then from French into English. When translations from the Palmerin cycle arrived in the English marketplace of the 1580s, their front matter bore the weight of almost a century of criticism and apology. Sensitive to widespread charges of immorality and inelegance, Anthony Munday’s English peritexts (those paratexts which Genette defines as part of the material object of the book) participate in an intricate, tongue-in-cheek rebuttal of accusations of the unworthiness of the genre; these pseudo-humanist preliminaries, which engage with humanist concerns about the proliferation and popularity of the chivalric romance texts, expose a playful attitude to the function of the peritext among a close network of agents in the printing trade connected both personally and professionally.