The Curate and Barber Examine Don Quixote’s Library

The Curate and Barber Examine Don Quixote’s Library is a comic inquest into the books blamed for Don Quixote’s disorder—and into the difficulty of deciding what literature deserves to survive. While he sleeps, the curate and the barber assess his volumes individually, condemning many to the fire but sparing or restricting others according to their style, invention, and imagined power to tempt him. The scene makes the household’s attempt at a cure into a debate about literary judgment, with the curate acting less like a simple censor than a critic whose exceptions expose the limits of censorship itself.

The household intervention

Don Quixote has been brought home, and the peasant’s account of his confused talk on the journey has strengthened the curate’s resolve to act. The next day, the curate summons his friend Master Nicholas, the barber, and goes with him to the house. Don Quixote is still asleep. The niece gives them the keys to the room that holds the books, which the household has identified as the source of his mischief. The examination begins not with the owner’s consent but with the guardians’ effort to remove the objects they believe have shaped his conduct.

The shelves contain more than a hundred large, well-bound volumes, as well as smaller books. Their number and handsome bindings give the room the air of a substantial collection, but to the housekeeper the books also pose a supernatural threat. She rushes out and returns with holy water and a sprinkler, asking that the room be blessed against the magicians who might retaliate for the books’ destruction. Her fear makes the planned scrutiny resemble an exorcism; the curate laughs at her simplicity, then insists on examining the titles rather than allowing an indiscriminate bonfire.

The niece and the housekeeper would spare none of the volumes. The niece proposes throwing them out of the window and burning them in the yard, where the smoke will not inconvenience the household; the housekeeper agrees with equal eagerness. The curate refuses to condemn the books without at least reading their titles. That procedural restraint sets the terms of the scene: the library is treated as dangerous, but judgment is to be passed item by item, with literary merit sometimes outweighing the presumption against the whole genre.

The chivalric books on trial

The first book examined is Amadis of Gaul. The curate calls it the earliest Spanish-printed book of chivalry and the source from which the others derive their origin. Its foundational status initially makes it seem especially culpable: as the founder of what he considers a pernicious literary sect, it appears to merit the flames. The barber counters that it is the best book of its kind. The curate accepts that distinction and grants it a reprieve, preserving it as a singular achievement even while condemning the tradition it began.

That mercy does not extend to the founder’s son. When the barber identifies the next volume as Sergas de Esplandian, the curate rules that a father’s merit cannot be credited to his son and orders the book thrown into the yard. The housekeeper carries out the sentence with satisfaction. The verdict quickly expands to other books associated with the Amadis lineage: the barber identifies Amadis of Greece and says that the volumes on that side belong to the same family. The curate sends the group away together, objecting to the books’ episodes and their convoluted writing. The niece and barber agree, and the housekeeper begins dropping the volumes through the window rather than carrying them down the stairs.

Other titles receive similarly brisk, but distinct, assessments. Don Olivante de Laura is judged alongside its author’s The Garden of Flowers, neither of which the curate considers truthful; he dispatches the former as a swaggering fool. Florismarte of Hircania is rejected despite its marvelous birth and adventures, because its style seems stiff and dry. The old Knight Platir is given no reprieve, and the curate sends The Knight of the Cross to the same fate despite its pious-sounding name, treating that name as no guarantee of merit. In these decisions, neither age, sacred language, nor extraordinary subject matter protects a book from an adverse reading.

The curate’s verdict on The Mirror of Chivalry is more complicated. He recognizes its connection to Reinaldos of Montalvan, his companions, the Twelve Peers of France, and the historian Turpin, but does not order its immediate destruction. Instead, he proposes perpetual banishment or storage in a dry well until a later decision. He also distinguishes between Ariosto in his own language and an altered version: the barber has the Italian book but cannot understand it, while the curate objects to bringing the poet into Spain in a translation that, in his view, strips away much of the original’s force. He reserves especially severe treatment for Bernardo del Carpio and Roncesvalles, which he says should be burned if they come into his hands.

Exceptions, probation, and critical standards

The contrasting verdicts on Palmerin de Oliva and Palmerin of England show how far the examination is from a blanket prohibition. The curate condemns the former to be burned completely, but calls the latter exceptional and worthy of preservation. He praises its quality, credits its supposed authorship to a wise and witty king of Portugal, and singles out the adventures at the Castle of Miraguarda for their invention. Its clear, polished language and the appropriateness of its speakers’ styles matter as much as its subject. The curate compares its preservation to Alexander setting aside Homer’s works among the spoils of Darius, then proposes that it and Amadis of Gaul be spared while the rest perish or face further review.

Don Belianis and its later parts are neither acquitted nor immediately destroyed. The curate says they require purging of excess, naming the Castle of Fame and other affected episodes as material to remove. He grants them an overseas period of probation: their treatment will depend on whether they improve, and meanwhile the barber must keep them at home and let no one read them. This is censorship as conditional editing and quarantine, not merely a verdict of guilty or innocent. The barber accepts the arrangement, though he soon tires of reading more chivalric titles and tells the housekeeper to take the large books into the yard.

The housekeeper’s eagerness turns the decision into physical spectacle. Taking roughly eight books at a time, she throws them from the window; one falls at the barber’s feet, prompting him to pick it up and inspect it. The accidental interruption saves Tirante el Blanco from the general rush toward the yard. The curate welcomes the discovery as a treasury of enjoyment and praises its style, its comic episodes, and its attention to ordinary bodily and social experience. Here knights eat and sleep, die in their beds, and make wills before dying—details that distinguish the book from romances that rely on marvels and adventure alone. His extravagant suggestion that the author deserves lifelong galley service for deliberately composing such follies is comic censure, undercut by the enthusiasm of his recommendation that the barber take the book home and read it.

The smaller books and the limits of the cure

When the barber asks about the smaller volumes, the curate initially separates them from chivalric romance, identifying them as poetry and other entertainment. Opening Diana by Jorge de Montemayor, he reasons that such books cannot do the same kind of harm as the chivalric volumes and need not be burned. The niece sees another danger: Don Quixote might recover from his chivalric obsession only to imagine himself a shepherd, wander through fields and woods singing and piping, or become a poet. Her warning extends the household’s theory of infection from one literary fashion to another.

The curate concedes that these books might become a stumbling block or temptation, but his remedy again stops short of wholesale destruction. He proposes removing the material about the sage Felicia and the magic water, along with almost all the longer verse, while allowing the prose to remain. Diana is thus provisionally preserved, and retains the distinction of being the first book of its kind. The scrutiny’s final movement repeats its governing pattern: perceived danger calls for intervention, but the intervention may take the form of selective revision rather than burning.

Literary judgment as comic counterpoint

The scene’s judgments are shaped by the household’s practical aim—preventing Don Quixote from returning to the habits associated with his reading—but they also reveal a lively critical standard. The curate weighs origin, style, clarity, invention, translation, and the portrayal of ordinary life. His verdicts are not consistent with a simple division between safe and dangerous genres: some romances are destroyed, some preserved, some exiled, and some put on probation; poetry is first exempted, then subjected to editing. The criteria are personal and comic, yet specific enough to make the library feel like a genuine field of argument.

The window becomes the scene’s recurring instrument of judgment. Books condemned in principle are handed to the housekeeper and sent flying into the yard, while the volume that falls at the barber’s feet earns a second look and an unexpected reprieve. That accident exposes the distance between a sweeping plan to purge a collection and the individual act of reading that can change a verdict. The examination seeks to remove the imaginative causes of Don Quixote’s behavior, but its discriminating exceptions also demonstrate that the books cannot be reduced to a single harmful influence. Even within a household determined to cure him, literary judgment keeps reopening the case.