Part I, Chapter VIII
The windmill episode — the novel's most famous scene, the origin of "tilting at windmills" as a cultural metaphor for deluded idealism.
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Miguel de Cervantes · 1605 · Spanish
For neither good nor evil can last forever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.— Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I, Chapter XVIII
Official judgment: “Specific passages and editions of Don Quixote were reviewed by the Inquisition. The 1640 Index of the Spanish Inquisition required expurgation of certain passages, particularly those touching on prophecy, prayer outside the Church, and heterodox spiritual practices.”
What happened: Expurgated editions were required; the unamended text was prohibited. Censors went through the text marking offending passages for removal.
Outcome: Expurgated editions circulated in Spain while fuller texts were available in translation in Protestant countries. The Inquisition's interference is documented in surviving copies with censors' marks.
Official judgment: “Challenged as promoting delusion, mocking religion, and presenting a morally ambiguous protagonist; specific challenges related to scenes of violence and the protagonist's mental illness.”
What happened: Challenged in several school contexts for age-appropriateness.
Outcome: Challenges unsuccessful; the novel is now recognized as a foundational work of Western literature and widely taught.
Spanish
Miguel de Cervantes lived a life of extraordinary misfortune and extraordinary resilience. He fought at the Battle of Lepanto (1571), one of the largest naval battles in history, and was wounded three times, leaving his left hand permanently disabled — hence his sobriquet, "the one-handed man of Lepanto." He was captured by Barbary pirates on the voyage home and spent five years as a slave in Algiers (1575–80), during which he organized four escape attempts, each time throwing himself on his captors' mercy to protect his companions. When he was finally ransomed, it was through the efforts of Trinitarian friars.
His return to Spain brought no reward for his military service. He spent years in various unsuccessful commercial and government positions, was imprisoned twice for accounting irregularities in his tax-collecting work, and received no royal pension despite his Lepanto service. He began writing Don Quixote around 1600, in his early fifties, as a satire of chivalric romance — the equivalent of writing a parody of superhero movies — and produced a book that transformed the genre it mocked into the founding text of the European novel.
Spain in Cervantes's time was the greatest empire in the world and in profound internal crisis. The expulsion of the Moriscos (converted Moors) was completed in 1609; the Inquisition enforced religious conformity with institutional violence; the economic base of empire — American silver — was beginning to produce inflation and social disruption rather than prosperity. The Golden Age of Spanish culture was inseparable from these contradictions: extraordinary artistic production fueled by imperial wealth, subject to institutional censorship, aware at some level of its own fragility.
Cervantes died on April 23, 1616 — the same day as William Shakespeare, though the calendar difference between England and Spain means they died on different actual days. The coincidence has enchanted literary history. He died in poverty, having completed his final novel Persiles y Sigismunda just days before the end.
Don Quixote is dangerous because it is simultaneously a parody of a literary genre and the founding text of a new one — and in that transition it raises questions about the relationship between narrative and reality that remain philosophically unresolved. Quixote believes the fictions he has read; he cannot distinguish between the world of chivalric romance and the world of 17th-century La Mancha. Is he mad, or does he see a dimension of reality that the sane cannot access?
Cervantes's novel refuses to answer this question cleanly. At moments Quixote is clearly pathetic — tilting at windmills, beaten by muleteers, humiliated and deluded. At others, his vision of a world governed by honor, courage, and the protection of the weak seems morally superior to the world of practical common sense that surrounds and defeats him. This ambiguity was dangerous to a society organized around firm categories: sanity and madness, fiction and truth, the ideal and the real.
The novel also satirized precisely the chivalric literature that had provided the ideological scaffolding for Spanish imperial culture — the heroic knight, the conquest of alien worlds in service of Christian civilization. This satire, conducted through comedy rather than criticism, was the most effective tool available. You cannot ban comedy without appearing ridiculous; you can only try to suppress its circulation and hope the laughter dies before it spreads.
The Spanish Inquisition's expurgation orders for Don Quixote reveal the difficulty of censoring a work that is ostensibly satirizing rather than endorsing heterodox views. The novel mocks chivalric romances and, through them, a certain species of deluded idealism; but the mechanisms of mockery — Quixote's encounters with priests, pilgrims, and spiritual practices — inevitably touch on religious life in ways that the Inquisition found unacceptable. The censors' marks in surviving copies show them trying to excise specific passages while leaving the bulk of the text intact, which is itself an argument for the impossibility of surgical censorship.
The expurgated Spanish editions alongside the fuller foreign translations reveal how censorship can backfire by drawing attention to what it suppresses: readers who compared the Spanish and Dutch editions knew exactly what the Inquisition had removed, and why. The censored passages became, by their absence, more significant than they might otherwise have been.
The 20th-century American challenges to the novel reveal how completely the historical specificity of censorship can be lost: by 1905 the chivalric romance was no longer a living genre, the Inquisition was history, and the novel was challenged for reasons Cervantes could not have anticipated — violence, mental illness, religious mockery. Each era censors what it fears, and what it fears changes, but the impulse to suppress what is uncomfortable remains constant.
The root of the inquisition
Read Don Quixote because it invented the novel as a form — not just as a narrative, but as a machine for exploring the relationship between imagination and reality, self and world, the ideal and the actual. Every subsequent novel that engages self-consciously with its own fictionality — from Fielding to Sterne to Nabokov — is in conversation with Cervantes's foundational innovation.
Read it for Sancho Panza, who is in some ways the more interesting character: a pragmatic peasant who follows a madman, who gradually comes to believe in the knight-errantry he began by humouring, and who, as the novel progresses, becomes a kind of idealist himself. The transformation of Sancho is as remarkable as any element in the novel, and it suggests Cervantes's deepest argument: that sustained proximity to an idealist changes you, even if you start as a materialist.
Read it, finally, as an argument for the persistence of idealism in a world that defeats it. Quixote fails — repeatedly, completely, sometimes comically, sometimes heartbreakingly. And yet his project — to live by an honorable code, to defend the weak, to insist that the world can be better than it is — remains sympathetic long after the windmills have defeated him. This is not sentimentality; it is Cervantes's most precise and most difficult observation about the human condition.
Part I, Chapter VIII
The windmill episode — the novel's most famous scene, the origin of "tilting at windmills" as a cultural metaphor for deluded idealism.
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Part I, Chapter XXII
Quixote frees the galley slaves — the episode that best captures the novel's central irony: the liberation that creates more suffering.
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Part II, Chapter LXXIV
Quixote's deathbed sanity — the heartbreaking conclusion in which Quixote recovers his reason and loses everything that made him extraordinary.
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This book was silenced. It now lives permanently on the Flow blockchain — free to read, impossible to erase.
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