What I recall as the original idea for this book occurred to me while teaching Cervantes' “exemplary novels” at Cornell around 1975. It seemed to me that in El casamiento engañoso and El coloquio de los perros Cervantes was probing, as usual, for the origins of fiction, but with a peculiar twist: he made the frame tale a reading scene in which the reader is a lawyer. I thought it was significant that Cervantes should make the reader someone trained in interpreting texts and determining their validity and truthfulness. The story Licentiate Peralta read and could not easily dismiss was, of course, quite fanciful, and herein lies the usual Cervantine irony, but there had to be more to it than an elegant joke. I thought (or so it seems now) that Cervantes was actually unveiling the origins of picaresque fiction, not only by alluding to the notorious climate of delinquency prevailing in those works which calls for the presence of the law in various guises, but more technically to the actual model for the picaresque text: a deposition or confession by a criminal that is addressed to someone in authority. A look back at La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes confirmed my intuition. This discovery led me to ponder the origins of the modern novel, and its relation to the law. Many factors contributed to this.