Abstract
Early in the First Part of Don Quixote (1605), the narrator intervenes in the story of the knight’s exploits to explain that his source for the text up to this point, originally found in the archives of La Mancha, has run out. Fortuitously, he tells us, he has discovered Cide Hamete Benenjeli’s continuation of Quijote’s adventures at a stall in Toledo’s Alcaná marketplace. It is this manuscript—in a language he cannot read, with amusing marginalia, and found in a pile of junk—that forms the supposed basis for what becomes a central masterpiece of European literature.
One day I was in the Alcaná market in Toledo, a boy came by to sell some notebooks and old papers to a silk merchant; as I am very fond of reading, even torn papers in the streets, I was moved by my natural inclination to pick up one of the volumes the boy was selling, and I saw that it was written in characters that I knew to be Arabic. And since I recognized but could not read it, I looked around to see if some Morisco who knew Castilian, and could read it for me, was in the vicinity, and it was not very difficult to find this kind of interpreter, for even if I had sought a speaker of an older and better language I would have found him.
In short, fortune provided me with one, and when I told him what I wanted and placed the book in his hands, he opened it in the middle, read for a short while, and begun to laugh.
I asked him why he was laughing, and he replied that it was because of something written in the margin of the book as an annotation. I told him to tell me what it was, and he, still laughing, said:
“As I have said, here written in the margin is written: ‘This Dulcinea of Toboso, referred to so often in this history, they say she had the best hand for salting pork of any woman in all of La Mancha.’”
—Don Quixote 1.91
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Notes
All translations are from Edith Grossman, trans., Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (New York: Ecco Books, 2005). Cervantes scholars writing in English often prefer “j” rather than “x” in the spelling of Don Quijote for the sound to reflect orthographic changes in Spanish spelling. This essay acknowledges both the older Spanish printed form and its contemporary version. I use the orthographic difference as a means to distinguish the novel’s title, Don Quixote, from the character, Don Quijote.
Gil Anidjar, “Lines of Blood: Limpieza de sangre as Political Theology,” in Blood in History and Blood Histories, ed. Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio (Florence: Sismel, Galluzzo, 2005). Published as this collection was going to print was Anidjar’s Blood: A Cultural Critique of Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
See Caroll B. Johnson, Cervantes and the Material World (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
Roger Chartier, “Don McKenzie and Don Quixote,” in Books and Bibliography: Essays in Commemoration of Don McKenzie ed. John Thompson (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2002) 19–35.
Francisco Rico, El texto de “Quixote”. Preliminares a una ecdótica del Siglo de Oro (Barcelona/Valladolid: Ediciones Destinos/Centro para la Edición de los Clásicos Españoles y Universidad de Valldolid, 2005).
Fernando Bouza and Francisco Rico, “‘Digo que yo he compuesto un libro intitulado El ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha’,” Cervantes 29, 1 (2009) 12–30.
Carroll B. Johnson, “The Virtual Don Quixote: Cide Hamete Benenjeli’s Manuscript and Aljamiado Literature,” in Essays on Golden Age Literature in Honor of James A. Parr, ed. Barbara Simerka and Amy R. Williamsen (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 172–88.
Juan Carlos Rodríguez, El escritor que compró su propio libro. Para leer el Quijote (Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, 2003).
Mercedes Alcalá Galán, Escritura desatada: poéticas de la representación en Cervantes (Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 2009).
Albert Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre: Contraversias entre los siglos XV y XVIII (Madrid: Taurus, 1985).
David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1998).
Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
Albert Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre: Contraversias entre los siglos XV y XVIII (Madrid: Taurus, 1985).
David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1998).
Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1998).
David Nirenberg, “Race and the Middle Ages: The Case of Spain and its Jews,” in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, ed. Margaret R. Greer, Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 71–87.
David Nirenberg, “Was there Race Before Modernity? The Example of Jewish Blood in Late Medieval Spain,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Zeigler (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 232–64.
Gil Anidjar, “Lines of Blood: Limpieza de sangre as Political Theology,” in Blood in History and Blood Histories, ed. Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio (Florence: Sismel, Galluzoo, 2005).
George Mariscal, Contradictory Subjects: Quevedo, Cervantes, and Seventeenth-Century Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
George Mariscal, “The Role of Spain in Contemporary Race Theory,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 2 (1998), 7–22.
Georgina Dopico Black, Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
John Beursterien, An Eye on Race: Perspectives from the Theater in Imperial Spain (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006).
Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Mercedes García Arenal, Inquisición y moriscos. Los procesos del Tribunal de Cuenca (Madrid: Siglo XXI de España Editores, 1978).
Israel Burshatin, “The Moor in the Text: Metaphor, Emblem, and Silence,” in Race, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr (University of Chicago Press, 1986).
Julio Caro Baroja, Los moriscos en el reino de Granada, 4th edn (Madrid: LISTMO, 1995).
Vincent Barletta, Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
Trevor Dadson, “Official Rhetoric versus Local Reality: Propaganda and the Expulsion of the Moriscos,” in Rhetoric and Reality in Early Modern Spain, ed. Richard J. Pym (London: Tamesis, 2006), 1–24
Antonio Domínguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent, Historia de los moriscos: Vida y tragedia de una minoría (Madrid: Allianza, 2007).
Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
Mercedes García Arenal and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, Un Oriente español: los moriscos y el Sacromonte en tiempos de Contrarreforma (Madrid: Marcel Pons, 2010).
Eric Graf, “When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes’s Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish Orientalism,” Diacritics 29.2 (1999), 68–85.
Carroll B. Johnson, “The Virtual Don Quixote: Cide Hamete Benenjeli’s Manuscript and Aljamiado Literature,” in Essays on Golden Age Literature in Honor of James A. Parr, ed. Barbara Simerka and Amy R. Williamsen (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 172–88.
Carroll B. Johnson, Translating a Culture: Cervantes and the Moriscos (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2010).
Frederick De Armas, Don Quijote Among the Saracens: A Clash of Civilizations and Literary Genres (University of Toronto Press, 2011).
María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
Lúcia Helena Costigan, Through Cracks in the Wall: Modern Inquisitions and New Christian Letrados in the Iberian Atlantic World (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
Max S. Herring Torres, Martínez, and Nirenberg, eds, Race and Blood in the Iberian World (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012).
Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, ed. Ignacio Arellano and Rafael Zafra (Madrid: Iberoamericana-Veuvert, 2006), 851; translations of works in Spanish other than the Quixote are mine throughout.
Vincent Barletta, Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 6.
Barbara Fuchs, Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003).
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1987).
Studies of the early modern Spanish book trade and the early editions of Cervantes in particular are many. See María Marsá’s La imprenta en los Siglos de Oro (Madrid: Ediciones del Laberinto, 2001).
Juan Carlos Rodriguez’s El escritor que compró su propio libro (Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, 2003).
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© 2014 Rachel L. Burk
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Burk, R.L. (2014). Metamateriality and Blood Purity in Cervantes’s Alcaná de Toledo. In: Coles, K.A., Bauer, R., Nunes, Z., Peterson, C.L. (eds) The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137338211_2
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