Don Quixote's Journey from Castile to Aragon as a Nostalgic Search for Jousting

At the end of the 1605 part one of Don Quixote, the narrator claims that he has exhausted the sources for his story and that "sólo la fama ha guardado, en las memorias de la Mancha, que don Quijote la tercera vez que salió de su casa fue a Zaragoza, donde se halló en unas famosas justas que en aquella ciudad hicieron" (1.52:558). Consequently, in the second part published in 1615, right after visiting El Toboso, the narrator announces that Don Quixote and Sancho are on their way to Zaragoza, "adonde pensaban llegar a tiempo que pudiesen hallarse en unas solenes fiestas que en aquella insigne ciudad cada año suelen hacerse" (2.10:652). In the meantime, and quite probably while Cervantes was finishing his own second part, an apocryphal continuation of Don Quixote was published in 1614, for which Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda was listed as author. In this sequel, Fernández de Avellaneda made Don Quixote participate in a burlesque juego de la sortija in Zaragoza (159-73). In order to refute Fernández de Avellaneda's text, Cervantes has Don Quixote vow not to set foot in Zaragoza, once the character finds out about the spurious continuation. One of the nobles who tells Don Quixote about Fernández de Avellaneda's sequel recommends that he go to Barcelona instead, where jousts were routinely held as well, and Don Quixote heads there immediately (2.59:1035). Thus, even as Don Quixote changes his initial course, he stubbornly remains within the confines of the Crown of Aragon throughout most of the second part. One possible explanation for such a detour, which I will explore here, might be that Don Quixote is in search of jousting, a very specific form of equestrian performative culture that is related to an ideal of social hierarchy and that had been largely abandoned in Castile.

The presence of festival culture in Don Quixote has been amply noted in scholarship. Thus, for Francisco López Estrada, "las fiestas están en la contextura del libro como tales espectáculos en cuanto estas poseen un sistema literario que, dentro del libro, se ofrece de manera paralela a lo que ocurría en la realidad de la época" (314). For Ignacio López Alemany, Cervantes does not merely describe the festival culture of his own time without comment, but rather uses his work to criticize the excessive expenditure allocated for festivals during Philip III's reign. Pedro Cátedra suggests that the projects of reforming urban militias between the 1560s and the 1620s, regardless of their actual results in improving military training, contributed to the reinvigoration of aristocratic ceremonies, as they implied a certain democratization of the concept of nobility that opened a door for social mobility and triggered "el sueño caballeresco" that ultimately afflicts Don Quixote (96-110).¹

Yet most analyses tend to offer a flattened picture in which all manifestations of equestrian performative culture are conceived as equally aristocratic. The reason for such homogenization is partly terminological, because aristocratic equestrian performances are often conflated in present scholarship under the broad category "joust and tournaments." However, early modern audiences gave very specific meanings to each form of equestrian performance, which had different cultural and social implications. The joust is, properly speaking, the encounter between two armored knights with lances and shields. In tournaments, which could be on foot or on horse, several groups of participants engaged in melee combat.² Two other common exercises were the estafermo [quintain] and the juego de la sortija [tilting at the ring], in which participants proved their individual ability, aiming their lances at a target. All these exercises belonged to an aristocratic equestrian culture that was common throughout much of Europe from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Usually, knights in these equestrian performances mounted in the bridle style, which required long stirrups. Along with the aforementioned exercises, we find another equestrian performance that was particular to the Iberian Peninsula: the game of canes (el...