All Program Dates

• October 9, 2025 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET

• November 6, 2025 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET

• December 4, 2025 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET

• January 8, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET

• February 5, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET

• March 5, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET

Registration

• Tuition for this course is $300. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.

• Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.

• This program is for those 18 and older.

• Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Friday, August 22, for Rosenbach members on Friday, August 29, and for the general public on Friday, September 5. Registration opens at 12:00 p.m. ET.

Description

Since 1605 Cervantes’s Don Quixote has been read as an icon of idealistic and misguided desire and as a meme of human experience, modernity, the novel, and more. William Faulkner read it every year; Primo Levi thought it should be required reading for Holocaust survivors; and Sigmund Freud learned from it. Close readings and cultural contexts will enable us to enjoy Cervantes’s experimental creation and to consider why it continues to captivate its readers.   

The Rosenbach holds a significant Cervantes collection. Don Quixote was one of our founder’s favorite books, and he collected many editions and significant artwork of Cervantes’s “Ingenius Gentleman.” The Rosenbach owns the only three documents in Cervantes’s own hand in the Western hemisphere, all relating to his work as a commissioner of supplies for the Spanish fleet. We also have the first edition, in its original vellum binding, of the first part of Don Quixote (1605), one of only 18 copies known to survive today, and over 200 etchings, engravings, lithographs, and drawings related to Cervantes and Quixote. We will share images of this collection during the seminar. 

Sponsors

Our Don Quixote course with Marina Brownlee is sponsored by Maureen Gibney.

Instructor

Marina Brownlee works on pre-modern culture. She is the Robert Schirmer Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her books include: The Severed Word: Ovid’s ‘Heroides’ and the ‘Novela Sentimental,’ Poetics of Literary Theory in Lope and Cervantes and The Cultural Labyrinth of María de Zayas. She has co-edited a number of volumes on comparative medieval and early modern topics, including Renaissance Encounters: Greek East and Latin West.