ABSTRACT
Part II of Don Quixote shares Part I’s preoccupation with the readership of the romances of chivalry, but its view of the literary market and of women readers is less utopian. While Cervantes in Part II affirms that women can and should read, he presents chivalry as a tool for mischief rather than redemption. This shift reflects Cervantes’s increasingly critical outlook on the powers of the reader as Don Quixote Part I circulates on the literary market. In Part II, the character Don Quixote truly has become like Amadís, though not in the way he would have liked. Both Quixote and Amadís are personalities of the printed page, unable to defend themselves against the imitations and interpretations of their readers. As in Part I, chivalric romance remains a tool that can be used to subvert or reinforce social hierarchy. While certain reading women in Part I were able to effect positive change by drawing on chivalric trope, in Part II, women readers of chivalry use their knowledge to corrupt, oppress, and discomfit others.
