Winner of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference's Bainton Book Prize Even as the Protestant Reformation became a permanent feature of European culture, a Catholic reformation was under way in Spain. In this acclaimed social history of the Spanish Counter-Reformation, Sara Nalle uses the records of local religious courts, parishes, and notarial archives to explore in striking detail how the people and clergy of Cuenca learned to conform to the new standards of modern Catholicism.
Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra was born in Alcal of Henares in 1547. He was a novelist, playwright, and poet-criticized by himself-considered as one, if not the greatest Spanish language writer of all time, even though he never studied at a university. Don Quixote is his best known work which has transcended nations, cultures, languages, epochs and times. Cervantes has been read by children and adults, men and housewives, rich and poor. He described his own portrait by writing: 'of an aquiline face, brown hair...with a silver beard that twenty years early was a golden one.'The hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha wishes to cleanse the world of scoundrels, talkative and goofy: Did he achieve it? Even today he is doing it because although it is utopian to think that human strength can reach such step, he learned to transcend the times and bring us that unequivocal victory while denouncing and trying to introduce some bravery inside our reasoning.We cannot look at the characters of Sancho and Don Quixote as a mere souls' contradiction of the one same people, in this case Spain. They actually complement each other in a kind of literary marriage: one wants justice, shared base of any society and reports it through his ideals, the other is practical as he wants to see them in reality; but two: the announcer and corroborator, are both active in their impeachment.
