Reading Chivalric Novels: the Guilty Pleasure of Late Medieval TimesĪ little background information about the time when the novel was written helps to better understand this tragicomic story about the failed knight. Usually, the adventurous escapades end with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, his loyal shield-bearer, getting beaten black and blue. That, however, doesn’t seem to bother him in the slightest because his vivid imagination turns inns into castles, prostitutes into noble damsels and the famous windmills into dangerous giants, whom he fights bravely. There is just one catch: the armour is self-made, the old nag is no warhorse, the simple farmer no squire and Don Quixote no knight. He saddles his warhorse, puts on his armour, gets himself a squire and goes into battle. A little too much, because at some point the good man completely loses touch with reality and believes himself to be a knight. The protagonist Don Quixote, an impoverished nobleman from La Mancha in central Spain, loves to read chivalric novels very much. On the left, we see Don Quixote fighting the infamous windmills.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |