Acceso usuarios
Chad Leahy
The expelled morisco Ricote in Don Quijote (1615) is on a quest to reunite his family and recover a cache of buried treasure, including a substantial volume of coins. This paper diverges from current critical trends focused on economic discourse in Cervantes by approaching Ricote’s coins not as economic signifiers but as material artifacts. Contrasting the numismatic messages materially embodied in Ricote’s coins with his own personal drama, a fundamental dissonance emerges, problematizing Cervantes’s representation of the morisco expulsion, and opening Ricote’s story to a broader interrogation of the relationship between numismatic propaganda and contemporary justifications of the mass expulsions of 1609–1614 (such as those penned by apologists like Aznar Cardona, Bleda, Corral y Rojas, Fonseca, and Guadalajara y Javier).
