ABSTRACT
Don Quixote is read today primarily as a collection of humorous adventures. Its author nevertheless experienced the bitter uncertainty of the small man in post-medieval society. Cervantes attempted perpetually, and in vain, to shake off the conditions of poverty into which he was born. His father, coming from the lowest ranks of gentility, was a man of somewhat obscure professional qualifications, part lawyer, part physician; he was both deaf and destitute. Cervantes wavered for a time between attempts to make a career in the papal bureaucracy of Rome and efforts to hew out a place for himself in the military by enlisting in the Spanish Navy, which just then was readying to engage the Turkish fleet at Lepanto. During this battle the poet all but lost his life.
