The house where Cervantes was born
As an adult, Cervantes suffers constant money troubles, but his parents had lived well. [Don Quixote recites a passage from Chapter II of a book about him as we sit in front of Cervantes' Birthplace-Museum: "Happy the age, happy the century, when my deeds of fame sha

"From Best-Seller to Oblivion"
An essay in which I argue that we can't blame it all on Cervantes. The November 2009 issue of the Internet Review of Science Fiction includes my essay "From Best-Seller to Oblivion: A Renaissance Literary Phenomenon." In it, I tell how the novel Amadis o

Chapter 22
About how Amadis left the lady's castle, and what happened to him on the road.[Sohail Castle, Fuengirola, Spain. This polygonal fortress stands on a small hill on the Mediterranean coast. A fort has stood t

Who was Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo?
We know little about the life of the knight who created the only surviving version of Amadís de Gaula.[Detail from "The Descent from the Cross" by Pedro Machuca, which hangs in the Prado Museum.

Chapter 21 [final third]
[How Amadis came to pledge his aid to the beautiful girl.][Detail from "The Lady and the Unicorn," a series of six wool and silk tapestries made from designs drawn in Paris in the late 1400s, on display at the