Unanimous Winner of the Canadian Association of Hispanists Award—"Most Valuable Contribution to Hispanic Scholarship for the Previous Three Years" (1994)
     Among the literary figures of the Golden Age, it would be difficult to find any who equals Cervantes' familiarity with Islam and Islamic lands. To a great extent this can be attributed to his five years involuntary sojourn in Algiers—a Turkish dependency at the time. His participation in the battle of Lepanto would have already awakened his curiosity about the Western world's formidable foe. However, Cervantes' knowledge about Islam cannot be limited to his own experiences, but also oral, written, and printed sources must have contributed to the formation of his vision of the Islamic Orient. In this respect his years in Italy are not irrelevant since fairly reliable information about Turks, for example, was more readily available than in Spain. In view of the great number of turcica published in Rome and Venice, and the nascent journalism in Italy, represented by the numerous avvisi.
     Professor Hegyi believes that there is a justification to make a distinction between Cervantes' works dealing with the "matter of Barbary" (Los Baños de Argel, El Trato de Argel, "El capitán cautivo") and those taking place in the Ottoman-controlled Eastern Mediterranean (La gran sultana, El amante liberal), the latter meriting an independent study. Not only have they received less attention by critics, but there has also been a tendency to regard them (especially La gran sultana) as mere products of fantasy, with no basis whatsoever in reality, contrasting them to the supposedly "realistic" Algerian themes.

In this book, Hegyi challenges some of the assumptions about historicity in fiction, or the lack of it, examining the varied sources of Cervantes' information and his technique of integrating historically verifiable data with the literary conventions and motifs of the period.---Documentación cervantina, Nº 12

      Professor Flores begins his study with a historical survey of how Sancho or characters that Sancho inspired were treated in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, by authors such as Molière, Racine, Fielding, and Smollett. Then he moves into the nineteenth century, examining authors such as Turgenev, Dostoevski, Montalvo, and especially Dickens, pausing to discuss Gustave Doré's artistic view of Sancho.
      He then discusses how Sancho has been treated in the twentieth century-the age of the professional critic-by authors such as Allen, Amado Alonso, Brenan, Castro, Close, Manuel Durán, Madariaga, Augustin Redondo, Savj-López, Unamuno, Willis, and even by novelists such as John Fowles and J. R. R. Tolkien.
      The culmination of the book is in the fifth chapter, where Professor Flores describes with his usual impeccable scholarship what Cervantes' Sancho was truly like. This chapter refers to citations from 34 appendixes which follow containing 926 quotations from the Quijote to back up all of his statements. The appendixes include Sancho's ambitions, his simplicity, his cowardice, his proverbs, his sexual temperance, his memory, and 28 other topics.
      A triumphant vindication of this misunderstood character.
      "This book gives more than its title promises, for in addition to a review of Sancho criticism over the centuries we are presented with an analysis of Sancho's character and personality based on a mass of evidence patiently collected and classified-evidence that no future student of the subject can afford to ignore." ----Geoffrey Stagg, Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos