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Susan Byrne Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote

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, allowing students, teachers, and academics alike to catch the ways in which sixteenth-century juridical and historiographical debates slid into the ironic postures and structural disruptions of the first modern novel. Having studied Don Quixote (pt. 1, 1605; pt. 2, 1615) for twenty-five years, I cannot recall a more efficient delivery of its meaning. Byrne’s control of her bibliography is impressive, her conclusions generally reasonable, her concern for her readers’ comprehension exemplary. Byrne begins with an intellectual atmosphere in which historiographers and jurists (e.g., Gaspar de Baeza, one of Juan de Orozco’s students at Salamanca) were reassessing medieval and classical legal codes, navigating between the casuistic mos gallicus (French practice) and the principled mos italicus (Italian practice). Chapter 1, ‘‘History, Jurisprudence, and the Creation of the Novel,’’ indicates the genre’s interest in legality, reviewing El Lazarillo de Tormes as a response to pragmatics issued by Ferdinand and Isabel around 1500 regarding clergy accused of harboring prostitutes. Priests took to marrying their concubines to servants in order to exploit a loophole that no woman could be charged with this crime unless her husband registered the complaint: thus tension between the state and its subjects gives birth to the picaresque. Likewise, Don Quixote and Sancho differ on whether parents or their children should decide whom the latter married. The knight agrees with Alfonso X’s classically inclined and statist Siete Partidas, which grants parents control; the squire argues for children’s rights, following the