Sources
Where every word on this site comes from.
The novel's text
- Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, translated by John Ormsby (1885). The English text quoted throughout this site. Public domain in the United States. Digital text verified against Project Gutenberg eBook #996 (The History of Don Quixote, translated by John Ormsby): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/996 — plain text at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/996/pg996.txt. Gutenberg's edition identifies Ormsby as translator and the text as public domain in the USA.
- Every quotation on this site was checked word-for-word against that text; each entry cites part and chapter. The verification procedure is described in methodology.
On Cervantes's life
- Standard scholarly consensus as summarized in major reference works (birth/baptism 1547 at Alcalá de Henares; Lepanto 1571; Algiers captivity 1575–1580; La Galatea 1585; Part I 1605; Exemplary Novels 1613; Part II 1615; death April 1616). See cervantes and timeline. Dates of uncertain precision are labeled on the page where they appear.
On the historical setting
- Early-17th-century Spain: the reign of Philip III (1598–1621), the administration of the Duke of Lerma, inflation and fiscal strain in Castile, the morisco expulsion of 1609–1614, Madrid as capital from 1561. Standard scholarly consensus; see spain in the 1600s.
On adaptations
- Avellaneda's spurious second part (1614) and Cervantes's in-text response (Part II, ch. 59, 72, 74).
- Gustave Doré's illustrations (1860s); Ludwig Minkus's ballet Don Quixote (1869, choreography by Marius Petipa); Richard Strauss's tone poem Don Quixote, Op. 35 (1897); Jules Massenet's opera Don Quichotte (1910); Pablo Picasso's 1955 ink sketch; the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha (1965, book by Dale Wasserman, music by Mitch Leigh); Orson Welles's unfinished film; Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018). See adaptations.
On the word "quixotic"
- The adjective's 18th-century entry into English and its dictionary definitions are standard lexicographical facts; the literary-historical readings (18th-century comic reception, Romantic reinterpretation) follow standard literary history. See quixotic idealism.
Images
- All images on this site are AI-generated dramatization art produced in-house in 2026 — not historical depictions, and no image depicts a real person. Each content image carries the caption label "AI-generated dramatization art — not a historical depiction." Full generation records are in
the image credits on this page. See methodology.
What this site does not cite
- Wikiquote and similar quote aggregators were consulted only as leads; no quotation on this site rests on them. Every quote was re-verified against the Gutenberg text above.
- No social-media posts, fan wikis, or AI-generated summaries are used as sources for facts about the novel or its author.
Source notes
- This page is itself part of the citation chain: content pages link here, and the methodology page describes how the sources were used.