I use El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha, ed. Luis Andrés Murillo. Unless otherwise noted, all further references to La novela del curioso impertinente, cited as El curioso in the text, will be from this edition and parenthetically documented by page numbers. «Murillo» refers to the editor's notes.

Herodotus's story has been increasingly associated with El curioso, even, at times, as its archetype. See D. Wilson, «Passing the Love of Women», for a history of this association (14-15 and n. 15). See P. Arriola, «Varia fortuna de la historia del rey Candaules» y El Curioso Impertinente, 33-49.

In 1568, for the subjects of Aragon, the 1559 pragmatics that had been applied to all of Spain are implemented. To this a prohibition is added safeguarding Aragonese citizens from French influence. Philip II legislates that «[f]or the preservation of the Catholic faith we prohibit any French subjects of whatever condition (i.e. including priests) from teaching children in any subject in the principalities and counties» (cited in Lynch I, 215: emphasis mine).

For a comprehensive discussion of the statutes on purity of blood and their effects, see Henry Kamen, «A Crisis of Conscience in Golden Age Spain» in Crisis and Change in Early Modern Spain, 1-22.

Constant warfare exacerbated religious and racial tensions. Philip II's entire reign was given to fighting the «enemies» of Spain -first in the Mediterranean and the Netherlands, and in the 1590s in three fronts at once- the Netherlands, England, and France. Adding to the racial and religious tensions were the great plague of 1596-1602 and the economic realities of Philip II's imperial ventures. Established as an imperial power, Spain was nevertheless exploited by its own imperial system which drained the country economically (Hamilton), and by a dependency that frustrated hopes of escaping from a cycle of poverty. As is well known, the wealth from the Indies that flooded the underdeveloped colonial markets of Andalusia and northern Castile never succeeded in moving Spain from its position of dependence on foreign markets (Kamen 1993, 41-50).

Anne Norton, Jurij Lotman and others point to the efficacy of cultural / racial antinomies in producing what Benedict Anderson has called an «imagined community» or nation. For Norton, a nation invents itself precisely in terms of what it rejects and deviancy myths become essential in the construction of what it wants to signify. They provide it with a «counter-identity» (53-54). Lotman et al. explain how inseparably linked the notion «culture» is with its opposition «non-culture», that it is to these discursive representations in the constructedness of a country's texts that we must look for «a condensed program of the [society's] whole culture» (1975, 57-58; 74: emphasis mine). See also Jean Starobinski who shows that the sacralizing of a term, «civilized» in this instance, means the necessary demonizing of its antonym -the non-civilized: «Un terme chargé de sacré démonise son antonyme». Le remède dans le mal. Critique et légitimation de l'artifice à l'age des Lumières, 33.6.

We learn in I.47, however, that another manuscript has been found in the valise, namely, the account of two pícaros, «Rinconete and Cortadillo», which is one of Cervantes's exemplary tales, and which, we are told, «may belong to the same author of El curioso».

For a representative summary of the recurrent critical contempt El curioso has elicited from translators and commentators, see D. Wilson, esp. 9-14.

For a bibliography of translations and adaptations of El curioso in Spain and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Sister Marie Thomas, F.S.E., «Extraneous Episodes in Don Quijote», Hispania XXXVI (1953), 309. See also Paul M. Arriola, «Varia fortuna».

In Derrida, terms like «center» or «origin» give way to «a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and play of signification infinitely» (280). I use connotation here in Barthes's sense. Denotation pretends to close a text, «to represent the collective innocence of language», and privileges one meaning as authoritative. Connotation, instead, contests authoritative meaning and constitutes «the way into the polysemy» of the text (9, 8: emphasis his).