Introduction:

Medieval vs Renaissance: Like Boccaccio, Cervantes hopes that his readers will reject medieval values & commit to Renaissance values.  Cervantes, however, uses tactics that differ from Boccaccio.  You recall that Boccaccio's  theme was that people have fundamental human rights that not even the church can, with justice, ignore.  This is not the concern of Cervantes, who makes a rather strange attack on the church.  He does not attack what we might call authentic spirituality & religion, nor does he attack the authority of the Catholic church in Spain or Italy or anywhere else.  Again there is a parallel with Boccaccio & even with Dante, who both found so many corrupt & even fraudulent clergy, implying that the church is need of reformation (notice the lower case "r").  Although he is certainly not a Protestant, Cervantes does suggest that the medieval church took  a wrong turn; a turn away from this world into fantasy & even madness.  This outlook is personified by Don Quixote.

Charming or Crazy? Is Don Quixote eccentric & charming in a pixilated way?  Or is he crazy & thus a negative role model, a type to avoid?  A strange thing has happened with the fictional character of Don Quixote.  He has been taken away from the context of the novel & portrayed in various advertising contexts, in association with 19th c. Romanticism, so that Don Quixote seems to be a creative individual, who has the courage to march to a different drummer or go his own way, no matter how many of us smile at his antics.  This interpretation of the character is not supported by a close reading of the text.  The narrator never finds Don Quixote's visions to be charming, alluring, or even inventive.  The narrator consistently & frequently pronounces Don Quixote to be crazy & to have accomplished nothing more than mischief.  This is the case because Don Quixote is committed to medievalism:
1924     He would maintain that what the world needed most of all was plenty of
            knights-errant & that he himself would revive knight-errantry.
 

Click on the next section: Background above.