Writing in 1525, the Venetian Embassador to Spain, Andrés Navagero commented that Seville was a city run by women. Documents attest that women bought and sold property, contracted marriages, made wills, brokered dowries, owned businesses and saw to the support of their families. The liberty with which Leonor's mother married off her daughter without consulting the bride's father, far from representing a flight of novelistic fancy on Camerino's part, reflects the tremendous freedom that Sevillian women enjoyed during the Age of Discovery while their spouses were detained abroad (Perry, 23-40). (N. from the A.)

The phenomenon of conspicuous consumption exemplifies this projecting function of money. The ownership and ostentation of Ferraris, Rolexes and diamonds, for instance, persuades observers that the possessor wields financial power. The object of ostentation is neither hoarded nor proffered in exchange for another object; it is displayed for rhetorical purposes. (N. from the A.)

See for example, Brown and Elliott. (N. from the A.)

Elliott, Imperial Spain, 199-200, 210-211, 231, 263, 269. (N. from the A.)

Nobeti Ponchi y Oya Marsac. Madrid 1736. A costa de Pedro Joseph Alonso y Padilla. Rodríguez, Novelas amorosas, 107, 108. (N. from the A.)

Rodríguez characterizes Camerino as an «escritor que quiso ser arbitrista», referring to the group of social reformers or «projectors» who sought to solve the riddle of Spain's inflation and bankruptcy in the midst of New World bounty. In Novela corta marginada, 27. «In the field of economic thought, the Scholastics were largely concerned with religious and moral problems provoked by the sudden deluge of gold and silver, and the consequent inflation. The arbitristas, for their part, dedicated their efforts to the salvation of Spain from the material ruin which threatened her». «Scholastic Economists and Arbitristas in the Lands of Castile and León», Moss and Ryan, 68-78. Arbitristas, as Jean Vilar documents, figure among the most universally satirized writers of the period. (N. from the A.)

Michel de Certeau defined this model in an essay published in French in 1975 and later translated as «Ethno-Graphy: Speech, or the Space of the Other: Jean de Léry» (History 209-243). He refined and amplified the model in a 1981 essay which was subsequently reprinted in English under the title «Montaigne's 'Of Cannibals: The Savage I'» (Heterologies 67-79). (N. from the A.)

Like the tale told by the fictional Captive, the Rabinow narrative recounts the author's personal experiences in North Africa. Rabinow, as Clifford Geertz explains, borrowed the phrase I have quoted from Paul Ricoeur, and several other ethnographers have subsequently appropriated the concept from Rabinow's text (Geertz 92). (N. from the A.)

In the years since El Saffar published these observations, a number of critics have offered new perspectives. Mariscal, for example, addresses «the difficult issue of the decentered subject» (22) in order to discuss «subjectivity [identity of self] not as a thing but as a process» (23). In his opinion, all subjects are inherently decentered, and the characters in Cervantes are no exception, because «subjects themselves... are constituted not through single but through multiple discursive positions, and therefore they must negotiate at any given moment the various contradictions and interests that intersect them» (25). In Representing the Other, Paul Julian Smith suggests that «... for all their appearance of immutability, relations between self and other (of appropriation and depropriation) are always subject to change... that whatever paradigm is adopted, one fundamental principle remains: that the subject, however masterful, is always dependent on the object for its own sense of self» (4). (N. from the A.)

Here one must keep in mind the obvious distinction between «The Captive's Tale» and the tale told by the Captive. «The Captive's Tale» is the title by which critics usually designate Chapters I, 37 through I, 47 of Don Quijote. The ethnographic narrative to which I refer, the «text» composed by Ruy Pérez de Viedma at the inn, appears in Chapters I, 39 through I, 41. Cervantes's larger episode frames Ruy Pérez's ethnographic narrative, supplying both contexts and commentary. (N. from the A.)