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“Let it be of the Lions,” the duke continued. “I say that…”

1 A duenna was an older woman of good family, usually a widow, in the service of a noblewoman. She wore a long headdress and wimple, something like a nun’s, which distinguished her from other, usually younger, ladies-in-waiting.

2 A gesture of contempt or derision made by placing the thumb between the forefinger and middle finger or under the upper front teeth.

3 A military-religious order founded in the twelfth century; Santiago (St. James) is the patron saint of Spain.

4 A galley ship sank in the port of La Herradura, near Vélez Málaga, in 1562, and more than four thousand people drowned.

1 These were artists of Greek antiquity.

2 The word in Spanish, jirón, has several meanings and can also signify a heraldic figure called a “gyron,” a triangular shape that extends from the border to the center of a coat of arms. The allusion is to Dulcinea’s noble blood.

3 A major figure in an important early ballad cycle, Florinda, La Cava, the daughter of Count Don Julián, had an illicit and disastrous love affair with King Don Rodrigo; according to legend, the ensuing betrayals and acts of vengeance precipitated the Moorish invasion of 711.

1 An allusion to the throne won by El Cid in Valencia.

4 A very fine cloth formerly woven in Segovia.

5 As indicated earlier, Wamba was a Visigothic king of Spain (672–680).

6 The phrase means “no matter how fine.” Brocade of three piles was of the very best quality; in chapter X, Sancho exaggerated by referring to brocade of ten piles.

7 The proverb says, “You don’t need here, boy, here, boy, with an old dog” (A perro viejo no hay tus, tus).

8 An idiomatic way of saying “trust and confidence.” The phrase that follows is Sancho’s variation on this and means just the opposite.

9 “Dead in the flower of his youth,” a line from a poem by Angelo Poliziano dedicated to Micael Verino, a poet who died at the age of seventeen, during the age of the Medicis. Verino was famous for his Latin couplets, which were very widely known.

1 This is a variation on the adage about a good wife.

2 A card game.

3 The Spanish reads cazas ni cazos, a nonsensical wordplay based on caza, “the hunt,” and cazo, “ladle,” which seem to be the feminine and masculine forms of the same word but are not.

4 Hernán Núñez Pinciano, who compiled a famous collection of proverbs (Refranes y proverbios) published in 1555.

1 The name given to those who carried torches or candles in religious processions.

2 A sheer silk fabric.

3 The god of the underworld, associated with Pluto, Orcus, and Hades.

4 Don Quixote addresses Sancho in a more distant, formal way throughout this paragraph. As always, it indicates extreme anger.

5 A formula in the liturgy (abrenuncio) used to renounce Satan. Since Merlin is supposed to be the child of the devil, the phrase is strangely appropriate, even though Sancho mispronounces it (abernuncio).

1 This last statement (“and be advised…are worth nothing”) was suppressed by the Inquisition in some editions following the Indice expurgatorio of 1632.

2 A person who was whipped publicly was displayed to the crowd mounted on a jackass.

3 An allusion to the proverb “God grant that it’s oregano and not caraway,” which expresses the fear that things may not turn out as hoped.

1 Sancho hears the name Trifaldi as tres faldas, or “three skirts,” leading to his comments on skirts and trains.

2 Sancho’s statement is taken from a story about a beardless man, frequently teased because he lacked facial hair, who said, “We have a mustache on our soul; the other kind doesn’t matter to us.”

3 According to Martín de Riquer, the name Candaya is probably fictional; Trapobana was the old name for Ceylon; Cape Comorín is to the south of Hindustan.

4 Maguncia is the Spanish name for the German city Mainz; Antonomasiais a rhetorical figure in which a title