Cervantes' now mythical character of Don Quixote began far differently from the altruistic righter of wrongs we know today. The transformation from mad highway robber to secular saint took place in the Romantic Era, but how and where it began has just begun to be understood. France and England played major roles, but, contrary to earlier literary historians, Pascal, Racine, Rousseau and the Jansenists scooped Henry and Sarah Fielding. Jansenism, a persecuted puritanical and intellectual group linked to Pascal, identified itself with Don Quixote's virtues, excused his vices, and wrote a game-changing sequel mediated by the transformative powers of a sorcerer from Commedia dell'Arte. As an early Romantic, Rousseau was attracted to the hero's fertile imagination and tender love for Dulcinea, foregrounding the would-be knight's quest in a play and his best-selling novel, Julie. Sarah Fielding reacted similarly, basing her utopian novel David Simple on the Jansenist concept of quixotic trust in others. Colahan here reproduces and explains for the first time the extremely rare original illustrations of the French sequel to Cervantes' novel, and documents the fortunes in French culture of the magician at the heart of the Romantic Quixote.

Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia, Vol. 24The sixteenth-century humanist Juan Maldonado (c. 1485 1554), in his Latin essays, foreshadows the Spanish picaresque. Maldonado's Pastor Bonus, a lengthy open letter to a bishop, reviews in a vivid and satirical style the abuses of the churchmen in his diocese. His Ludus chartarum is framed as a colloquium on entertaining while teaching a Latin terminology for card playing. His Bacchanalia is a spirited play pitting the forces of Lent against those of Bacchus. These works have been edited and translated into English by Warren S. Smith and Clark Colahan for the first time, with illustrations of scenes from each work, and of sixteenth-century cards, by Richard Simmons and Caleb Smith."

In recent years the Nayari (Cora) people of northwestern Mexico have experienced violence at the hands of drug producers and traffickers. Although a drug economy may seem potentially lucrative to such peasants, spreading violence tied to this trade threatens to destroy their community. This book argues that the source of the problem lies not solely in drug trafficking but also in the breakdown of traditional political authority. By studying the history of religious practices that legitimate such authority, Philip Coyle shows that a contradiction exists between ceremonially based forms of political authority and the bureaucratic and military modes of power that have been deployed by outside governments in their attempts to administer the region. He then shows how the legitimacy of traditional authority is renewed or undermined through the performance of ceremonies. Coyle explores linkages between long-term political and economic processes and changes in Nayari ceremonial life from Spanish contact to the present day. As a participant-observer of Nayari ceremonies over a ten-year period, he gained an understanding of the history of their ceremonialism and its connections to practically every other aspect of Nayari life. His descriptions of the Holy Week Festival, mitote ceremonies, and other public performances show how struggles over political legitimacy are intimately tied to the meanings of the ceremonies. With its rich ethnographic descriptions, provocative analyses, and clear links between data and theory, Coyle's study marks a major contribution to the ethnography of the Indians of western Mexico and Latin America more generally. It also provides unusual insight into the violence raging across the Mexican countryside and helps us understand the significance of indigenous people in a globalizing world.