Don Quixote and the Subversive Tradition of Golden Age Spain

This study offers a reading of Don Quixote to argue that this work was more than just hilariously comic entertainment. Rather, it belongs to a “subversive tradition” which constantly questioned the aims and standards of the imperial nation state that Counter-reformation Spain had become from the point of view of Renaissance humanism. In response to censorship run largely by the Inquisition, writers became adept at camouflaging heterodox ideas. Ironically, Cervantes’ success in avoiding the attention of the censor by concealing his criticisms beneath irony and humour was so effective that even some twentieth-century scholars have maintained Don Quixote is a brilliantly funny book but no more. R.K. Britton draws on scholarship—including ideas on cultural authority and studies on the way Don Quixote addresses history, truth, writing, law, and gender—and engages with the same issues as Cervantes did.