ABSTRACT
The English word ‘picaresque’ is borrowed from the Spanish picaresco or from picaresca. Vast armies of Spanish pike-men had to be provisioned, garrisoned, transported and occasionally paid to defend Spain’s far-flung territories. The efficiency of the Spanish military decreased in the second half of the century. The change is perhaps best illustrated by the history of the wars in Flanders where Spanish troops were engaged off and on for eighty years. Sebastian de Covarrubias, a Spanish lexicographer of the early seventeenth century, under the heading ‘Picardia’ states that ‘at some point a few poor people might have come from there to Spain because of their poverty, bringing us the name.’ The ‘literature of roguery’ has always been of interest to literate society but it reached the proportion of an international obsession precisely at the end of the sixteenth century.
