Elballeros andantes que ninguno los hubiese traido." His interlocutor replies that because the authors thought "que no era menester escrebir una cosa tan clara y tan necesaria de traerse como eran dineros y camisas limpias," it does not follow that they deemed such things unimportant (I: iii, 49). To be sure, the assumption that Amadis and his brethren never worry about mere cash is not without foundation. Eisenberg has observed that money is so seldom mentioned in the chivalric romance "that it seems that the protagonists . . live in a primitive era, outside the money economy altogether" (63). However, despite Quijote's contention, whose accuracy with regard to the sixteenth-century romances Eisenberg confirms, the apparently rudimentary economy of the chivalric texts indicates not that these works are authentically primitive in any ethnographic sense, but rather that, for reasons this essay hopes to explicate, they display a primitivist effigy of premonetary or anti-monetary economy.