ABSTRACT

“There are only two families in the world, my old grandmother used to say, the haves and the have-nots (el tener y el no tener)” (Don Quijote II, ch. xx). The early modern Spanish sage who made this observation, Sancho Panza, was no Marxist before Marx. Rather, he voiced the common sense that everyone around him learned early in life: that a great gap separated men and women whose lot in life was to enjoy wealth and power from those who lacked them. Nowadays, when people speak of assuming, dropping, and changing their identities with stunning ease, it is worth recalling that in earlier periods the widespread poverty that the vast majority of men and women suffered severely limited their ability to control, much less better, their own fates—a matter of no little importance for one’s identity. That said, Sancho’s aphorism actually echoed a similar remark made earlier by his master Don Quijote: that the world was divided into two lineages, those falling over time from high social position, and those rising from the ranks of commoners to become great lords (Don Quijote I, ch. xxi). Which suggests that while fate played a strong hand in assigning and otherwise shaping status and identity in early modern Spain, some individuals were able to end their lives in a different place or position from whence they had started out. Early modern society afforded a certain margin for change in the activities and appearances by which people wound up making their way in the world, and this was as true of the dynamic patchwork of localities that made up the Iberian world as anywhere else in Europe.