Abstract

GONZALEZ ECHEVARRIA, Roberto. Love and the law in Cervantes. Atenea (Concepc.) [online]. 2012, n.505, pp. 11-31. ISSN 0718-0462.  doi: 10.4067/S0718-04622012000100002.

The convergence of the history of the law and the emergence of novelistic realism in the West, especially in the Spain of the Catholic Kings where the creation of a new modern state gave rise to an increasingly centralized judicial system, is where the figure of the pícaro emerges and the depiction of everyday life in fiction, particularly that of criminals. Cervantes incorporates these developments into his Quijote, in which characters like Ginés de Pasamonte, a picaresque author and galley slave, appear. A minor figure, one of the galley slaves in Part One Chapter 22, is analyzed. He has had sexual relations simultaneously with four women, two of them his cousins and with whom he has had multiple children. He boasts about these relationships in a speech that reveals that he is a law student, thus highlighting the link between the novel and the law.

Keywords : Law; history of law; picaresque; realism; development of the novel; Cervantes; Quijote.