Parole Rubate (Dec 2013)
Knight-Errantry. Code Word and Punch Line in Edmund Gayton's "Festivous Notes on Don Quixote" (1654 and 1768)
Abstract
Gayton viewed Cervantes's famous protagonist as the representative of an outdated and anomalous code of conduct, as well as a hypocrite who fails to live up to the high standards demanded by that code. Gayton ridicules the protagonist's profession by employing the English expressions knight-errant and knight errantry, which the first translation of the novel uses to render caballero andante and caballería andante. He thus played on the secondary meaning of errant as mistaken, as well as on the implied homonym arrant, an intensifying adverb carrying highly negative connotations (an arrant coward). Gayton then coined related satirical neologisms for groups such as that of the ladies-errant, thereby suggesting their reprehensible behaviour.
