Susan Byrne’s study of historiography and jurisprudence in Cervantine fiction traces the influence of two little-known writers, Paolo Giovio and Gaspar de Baeza, upon Don Quixote and the Exemplary Novels. Byrne depicts the early modern Spanish legal system as a hodgepodge deriving from the medieval Partidas and subsequent fueros, royal ordinances, and pragmatics that contradicted each other and that were routinely violated or ignored. Byrne sees in the Cervantine corpus an attempt to extract from this stewpot a system that is both coherent and appropriate to the conditions of his day. She asserts that Don Quixote stages the misapplication of outdated legal precepts, derived from Roman mos gallicus precepts, in counterpoint to mos italicus, based on medieval juridical theory of law and custom. Cervantes traces a new legal mode that synthesizes and moves beyond both, which Byrne terms mos hispanicus.
The book opens with three chapters that set out the parameters of early modern Iberian juridical and historiographic norms, focusing on the contributions of Baeza and Giovio. Baeza was best known for his treatises on debt and dowries; Byrne offers an extended reading of dowry law as represented within the novellas and dramatic works. Within Giovio’s Elogia (historical vignettes) minor historical figures include historian Jiménez de Quesada and his friend the soldier Luis Quijada — possible sources for Alonso Quijano’s alternate last names. Byrne also notes that all of Don Quixote’s set speeches are based upon juridical disputations.
Chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate the connections between sixteenth-century legal controversies and iconic episodes. Byrne explicates the conflicted legal codes on knighthood, demonstrating that Don Quixote and the innkeeper violate nearly every precept concerning qualifications, eligibility for tax exemption, and the dubbing ceremony. She summarizes the web of discourses concerning legal definitions of insanity, with emphasis on Cervantes’s use of the colloquial loco rather than the official Latinate terms furor and insanus, and the precepts concerning the claim of insanity as a defense for illegal acts. Byrne delineates the legal ramifications of Alonso’s final acts. According to both the Partidas and the Council of Trent, his final will would not have been valid had he not been considered in his right mind; further, the failure to complete a sanctioned deathbed confession would have resulted in the loss of half of his estate to the national treasury. Byrne illuminates the juridical aspects of Sancho’s governorship, such as laws guiding court doctors and luxury food consumption. She relates the patchwork of laws regulating petty crime to the galley slaves and other minor characters.
Chapter 6 traces the emergence of historiography in the sixteenth century. Byrne connects Cide Hamete Benegeli to Giovio’s history of the Hamet family of Moorish rulers. Byrne concludes with a study of how historical and juridical narrative tactics helped to shaped Cervantes’s aesthetic, pointing out convergences between Don Quixote and Giovio’s rhetorical devices, such as interruptions, digressions, and multiple narrative voices. She identifies the overlapping boundaries among history, law, rhetoric, and fiction — which Giovio calls “chorography” — as a previously unrecognized model for Cervantes’s polygeneric novel.
Excluding endnotes and bibliography, this book weighs in at only 150 pages. It could have benefited from additional engagement with previous scholarship in two areas. First, chapter 2 offers a rather cursory treatment of The Siege of Numancia, and omits considerations of relevant recent essays by Aguilera Durán, Crowe Morey, and others. Further analysis of the historiographical dimensions of this play, as a key precursor to Don Quixote, would be valuable. And, although Byrne references James Parr’s work on Cervantine narratology, she does not address his model of the text as an anatomy — a concept that anticipates and could enrich her discussion of Giovio’s chorography.
The central thesis of this book, that Cervantes’s fiction serves as a “fulcrum for the fields … of history and jurisprudence, highlighting their inconsistencies and anticipating the resolution of their paradoxes” is convincing and, more important, interesting. Susan Byrne succeeds in the ever-more-challenging task of shedding new light on Don Quixote through her careful tracing of the ways in which his dialogue with Giovio and Baeza helped Cervantes to forge the modern novel.
