How come the Knight of the Sad Countenance appeared? In search of the context of the 1607 festivals in Pausa

Abstract

This study is about the famous theater tournaments that occurred in the Peruvian locality of Pauza in 1607. The evidence of this competition exists in an anonymous relación de fiestas discovered by Rodríguez Marín. However, due to the lack of researches about the history of Pauza, the event has converted into kind of a myth for both the locality and for Cervantes-studies because the date is so close to the first edition of the Don Quixote and due to the appearance of the famous character into the tournaments. My intention in the following work is to place the event within its own local history. First, I offer an analysis of festive traditions that circulated in the territory and that could led up to the Quixotic competition. Later, I propose an hypothesis about the larger context of the festival and the manuscript in which the account of it is contained. This includes an analysis of the powerful social groups that would have been behind the exposition and their interests in the event. For this, a juridical document found in Cuzco will be essential.