Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote by Susan Byrne (review)

Volume 33.2 (2013) 217 Reviews Reviews Byrne, Susan. Law and History in Cervantes’ DON QUIXOTE. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. 240 pp. ISBN 978-4426-4527-1. Susan Byrne initiates her study by marking the contrast between two approaches to jurisprudence: the acceptance of historical legal codes (mos italicus ) and their rejection as obsolete (mos gallicus), associated, as their names would suggest, with Italy and France, respectively. Although there was no official mos hispanicus, scholars in Spain did enter into the polemics. It has been noted, for example, that Juan de Orozco and jurists who studied under him at the University of Salamanca sought a middle ground in the debate. Byrne proposes that Don Quixote fits within the parameters of the issues being pursued in the field of law, and, correspondingly, that Spain’s contribution to the ongoing intellectual arguments was not a legal treatise or a developing tradition but a profound and multi-layered work of fiction. As his corpus of writings indicates, Cervantes had a wealth of knowledge and experience, along with a background in dealing with the judicial system, and not just in theoretical terms. Although he was neither a lawyer nor a student of the law sensu stricto, Cervantes was able to incorporate commentary on pressing questions of the day into Don Quixote, a socio-cultural, political, and historical document of the first magnitude. As she evaluates the ideological bases of Don Quixote, Byrne relies heavily on her investigation into sixteenth-century philosophical discussions of jurisprudence and concepts of history. She explores an impressive number of primary and secondary materials, and this is clearly a strength—and an innovative feature—of her analysis, which owes a certain impetus to Roberto González Echevarría’s Love and the Law in Cervantes (Yale UP, 2005). For Byrne, variations on the theme of justice—as ironically embodied in a wellintentioned lawbreaker—and the distinctions and interplay among history, historiography, and fictional narrative provide decisive unifying threads of Don Quixote. This is, in essence, a means of framing critical areas of philosophy as part of the creative arts, “an encapsulation of verba, res, and mores in the mind of one man […] and its impact on the rest of the world around him” (20). Byrne relates Cervantes’s statements on law and history and his thought patterns, as reflected in Don Quixote, to the Italian historian Paolo Giovio (c. 1486-1552) and to the Spanish jurist Gaspar de Baeza (1540-c.1570), author of legal glosses and translations of Giovio’s historical and biographical 218 Cervantes Reviews works. As Byrne reads Giovio and Baeza, one can note the dialectical strain and the tensions—ethical, doctrinal, social, historical, political—that link life and art, the world and the word. The angle of vision here does not affect the content per se of Don Quixote as much as its contexts. Byrne amplifies ways of looking at Cervantes’s—and certainly Don Quixote’s—consciousness of history and at the text’s insistence on its historical veracity. Cervantes not only brings legal elements into the narrative, from classical antiquity forward, but he makes them profoundly entertaining, that is, profound and entertaining . He “tailor[s] his protagonist Alonso Quixano in strict compliance with the Siete Partidas prescription for the perfect knight and then set[s] him loose like a bull in a china shop,” and he has the squire Sancho Panza “use outdated language from the Fuero Juzgo but also make Solomonic decisions on legal matters” (51). Needless to say, within the text Don Quixote has many discursive interventions and many dialogical opportunities, which give the author a range of perspectives to introduce and to examine. The adventure of Don Quixote and the galley slaves in part one of the novel lends itself, of course, to scrutiny under the rubrics of justice, criminality , and judicial procedures. The presence of felons and officers of the law adds a unique dimension to Don Quixote’s rather paradoxical offense, and the legal response to insanity—in this episode and throughout the narrative— must be appended to the list. After dedicating a chapter to Don Quixote and to what she calls “laws broken, glossed, and made...