Law and History in Cervantes' Don Quixote

Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote illustrates how Cervantes’ art highlighted the inconsistencies of juridical-historical texts and practice, as well as anticipated the ultimate resolution of their paradoxes.

Susan Byrne is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University.

‘Byrne’s erudite and thoroughly researched book is an indisputable contribution to Cervantes’ studies.’

Eric C. Graf:
‘Susan Byrne’s scholarship is dispassionate and informative, refreshingly unlike interpretations of Cervantes that read like baseball rule books riddled with Freudian gobbledygook. She strikes an enviable balance between sophisticated analysis and warm exposition.’

J. A. G. Ardila:

‘Byrne's study and her conclusions constitute an essential contribution toward our understanding of the conception of the Quijote as a fully modern work. This is, conclusively, another must-read study for all Cervantistas and for all scholars of the history of the Spanish novel.’

J. A. G. Ardila:

‘Byrne's study and her conclusions constitute an essential contribution toward our understanding of the conception of the Quijote as a fully modern work.

This is, conclusively, another must-read study for all Cervantistas and for all scholars of the history of the Spanish novel.’

Barbara Simerka:
‘Susan Byrne succeeds in the ever-more-challenging task of shedding new light on Don Quixote through her careful tracing of the ways in which his dialogue with Giovio and Baeza helped Cervantes to forge the modern novel.’

Frederick A. de Armas:

‘Learned and insightful, Susan Byrne’s book provides a new look at Cervantes’s masterpiece through the lenses of law and history in order to highlight and clarify how the novel engages in specific arguments that foreground these topics. Her book is one more testimony of Cervantes’s wide learning and willingness to engage in the most important issues of his day as he composed what came to be considered as the first modern novel.’

Charles Victor Ganelin, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Miami University:

‘Stimulating and illuminating, Law and History in Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’ makes a strong case for the argument that Cervantes’ brushes with and knowledge of law were sufficient for him to incorporate its multiple threads throughout the novel. Susan Byrne consistently reveals her thorough knowledge of the confusing compendia that form Spanish jurisprudence as Cervantes would have known it. Byrne’s success in identifying legal issues in numerous episodes of the novel (beyond what most twentieth- and twenty-first-century editors have noted) and bringing to light the writings of jurist Paolo Giovio make this book a major contribution to the research on Cervantes.’

Isaías Lerner, Distinguished Professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literature and Language, Graduate Center, City University of New York:

‘This is a most important and original study that deserves a central and special place in the vast bibliography on Cervantes. Susan Byrne’s highly sophisticated use of archival research, developed in her historical and philological approach to Don Quixote’s text, greatly helps to reconstruct anew the ideological contexts of the writer and of the “idle readers” of his time.’

E.H. Friedman:
‘This is a substantive work of investigation, analysis, and metacriticism. Highly recommended.’