If one had to characterize in a simple way the new orientations of the critical and historical research on the Iberian epic in the last twenty years, perhaps the notion of decompartmentalization would be expedient and encompassing. Epic poetry can no longer be isolated from the literary field as a whole; if the sixteenth-century epic constitutes “a system,” to use the term of Hélio Alves, it is a flexible system, in permanent communication with the other genres and with the entire literature.