ABSTRACT
The title-page description of the eighteenth-century translation, also anonymous, stresses the entertainment value of what today is viewed as the work's complex mix of themes, characters, settings and parody of literary theory: Persiles and Sigismunda: A Celebrated Novel intermixed with a great Variety of Delightful Histories and Entertaining Adventures. Cervantes's work, modelled on Heliodorus's Byzantine romance but combined with sensational chivalric elements that the author of Don Quixote knew well, translated culturally into a high-adventure, low-lite comedy. Cervantes imagines, with quixotic idealism, the flight of a couple in love from a barbaric society at the fringe of Christian Europe to the centre of the Catholic world, in Rome. Although eclipsed as a romance over the last two centuries by the paramount place of Don Quixote within the history of the novel, Persiles and Sigismunda has lived up to Cervantes's high hopes for it as one of the best works of fiction written in Spanish, as its reception in Britain shows.
