Handless Maidens, Modern Texts: A New Reading of Cervantes’s the Captive’s Tale

“La leyenda de la doncella Carcayona” is a Morisco version of the folktale, “The Handless Maiden.” In the legend, Carcayona rebels against her father’s religion and converts to Islam. Yet, far from an unknown tale that merely circulated among a marginalized people, Carcayona’s story is at the center of one of the most famous episodes of Don Quijote, I, the Captive’s Tale. This intertextuality is crucial, not only for our understanding of the Captive’s Tale, but also because it registers the arrival of a modern moment for Spain, one that depicts complications and failure, both for individuals and the nation.