For an anthropological/Bakhtinian reading of Don Quixote as a continuation of this Medieval tradition of mocking kings, see Gorfkle.

Vranich, at least, finds Ariño, like Cervantes, to be extremely critical of the dawdling clerical bureaucracy.

While many have forgiven this biographical detail as the normal professional option for a young man of the sixteenth century, and still others allow that Cervantes's humanistic ideology could not yet be expected to have portrayed the war against the Turk as a non-Christian undertaking, Jean Canavaggio endorses Dámaso Alonso's interesting theory that the future author might have been fleeing the consequences of «the Siguera affair» (45-7). In any case, whether he willfully accepted the Turk as his enemy or was instead a «sword-wielding fugitive from justice», Cervantes's early years are not exactly exemplary of the pacifistic ideals of Erasmian humanism.

It is interesting to note that the highly symbolic Christian number of 33 verses separates «perverse indignation» from «honor» in chapter 4 of Viaje del Parnaso. See this essay's epigraph.

One cannot help but compare this gloriously self-deprecatory performance to those by another infamous Spanish artist, Salvador Dalí, who would push the envelope of acceptable aesthetics by lauding the act of masturbating on a Paris subway or by claiming that the world's greatest living artist was a man who could suck water into his anus. Where Dalí uses autoerotic behavior to critique twentieth-century bourgeois ideology, Cervantes deploys Erasmian scatology against sixteenth-century political and religious hegemony.

Bakhtin points out a similar play between the geographical, the cosmological, the moral, and the bodily in Rabelais:

When the Sibyl of Panzoult showed her backside to Panurge he exclaimed: «I see the Sybil's hole» (trou de la Sybille), as the entrance to the underworld was called in antiquity. Medieval legends describe many of these holes in various parts of Europe. They were believed to be the entrances to purgatory or hell, but in familiar speech the word had an obscene connotation. [...] Rabelais used this interpretation in his «Antidoted Flummeries» (Fanfreluches antidotées), in which he mentions the «hole of Saint Patrick», the «hole of Gibraltar», and thousands of other «holes». Gibraltar was also known as «trou de la Sybille» (a pun on Seville) and this, too, was an improper expression.

(377)

«"Positive" applies to prescriptions according to which the faithful are supposed to be able to earn God's benevolence through works instead of moral action; to the hope for compensation in the beyond; to the divorce of a doctrine in the hands of a few from the life and possession of all; to the detachment of priestly knowledge from the fetishized belief of the masses, as well as to the detour that supposedly leads to morality only by way of the authority and miraculous deeds of one person; to the assurances and threats aimed at the sheer legality of action; finally, and above all, the separation of private religion from public life is "positive"» (Habermas 25-6).

We should also note, continuing with the theme of the «bodily» in reformist satire, that in reading this narrative and dialogic poem backwards one must travel from Adam (Adán) to the willful selection of God (Voto a Dios) via an anal-oral trajectory. Again, this map-like structuring of Spanish Catholic Subjectivity is both that of the poem as well as the cathedral, with the filth of the marginal characters being the gateway to the memory of Christ found at the altar and in the Eucharist. The text itself is architectonic and organic in the most Catholic of senses.

Don Quixote, who is repeatedly subjected to fecal derision, says to Sancho at the beginning of 2.32: «No soy de los enamorados viciosos, sino de los platónicos continentes» (2.283).

Incontinente can also have a sexual connotation. According to Alfonso de Palencia, one of the three reasons that one might take a wife seems pseudo-medical: «Si alguno es inco<n>tine<n>te» (Universal vocabulario en latín y romance, fol. 541v). In any case, it is obvious from the word's history (Cuervo, Nebrija et al.) that by the late sixteenth century it can be understood as both an adjective and a noun in addition to an adverb. And this is not to mention the word's clearly nominative status in Italian. See, for example, the ever popular (especially in Spain) Libro del Cortegiano (4.15) for a discussion of those misguided incontinenti.