Le songe Chevaleresque. De la chevalerie de papier au rêve réel de Don Quichotte.

Abstract

The "Quixote" is difficultly understandable without attending to the context in the most wide sense of the term. If it is true that, for don Quijote, as reader and actor, the Chivalry and his codes were a reality of signs, it is not less that in times of Cervantes still the Chivalry has a representative force to that it is necessary to recognize much more than a pure spoiled representation and already in ruin and loss. In this book there is studied the repercussion of the dream of Chivalry in the 16th century, attending to the fundamental store of this dream, the Books of Chivalry, to the uses of the Chivalry culture in the aristocratic world that internalizes it, exhibits it or the practice in the leisure and in the sport. There are attended also the historical background and circumstances little or known at all that allow to speak about an anachronistic reappearance of the chivalric dream in the reality and in the right in the last third of the 16th century. This happens exactly in the years of active maturity of Cervantes and of 'Alonso Quijano', that it forces us to throw a realistic look to the genesis of the "Quixote".