On the occasion of the celebration of the fourth centenary of the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, and organised jointly by three Spanish cultural institutions, the Fundación Carolina, the Fundación Rafael del Pino and the Colegio Libre de Eméritos, three international meetings were held in Madrid in 2004 and 2005, at the headquarters of the latter, under the common title Europe and America four centuries after Don Quixote.
The organising institutions of these Meetings considered that the commemoration of the appearance of Don Quixote, one of the great universal literary myths, which arose precisely when what has been called Western civilisation began to crystallise both geographically and culturally, straddling Europe and America, provided a particularly appropriate occasion to reflect and debate on the relations between the two continents over the last four centuries and in the current context of globalisation.
The topics covered and their authors are:
- Mixed Identities: Jews, Christians and Changing Notions of the Other in Early Modern Europe (David B. Ruderman)
- Sacred Origins and Memory of Islam: the Case of Granada (Mercedes García-Arenal)
- Reflections on related histories: messianic hopes in the Ottoman Empire, Portugal and Brazil during the seventeenth century (Lucette Valensi)
- Tolerance and intolerance. Old and new inquisitions (Ricardo García Cárcel)
- Memory of memories. The imperial experience and forms of communication (Fernando Bouza)
- The "return to life" of Antiquity as a source of conflict and cultural upheaval in Europe in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The notion of otherness and the case of the story of Ulysses between Boccaccio and Pierre Bayle (José Emilio Burucúa).
- The idea of decadence and the perfection of the origins in the second half of the French 18th century (Jean M. Goulemot)
- The vision of Europe and America in Enlightenment Spain (Alejandro Diz)
- Ideologies: An Ambivalent Legacy of the Enlightenment (Krzysztof Pomian)
- Globalisation, globalisation and miscegenation in the Catholic Monarchy (Serge Gruzinski)
- On Comparisons and Connections: Notes on the Study of the Iberian Overseas Empires (Sanjay Subrahmanyam)
- America's reaction: the construction of republics in the 19th century (Hilda Sabato)
- The Modernist Club. Tales of an American Passion (Antonio Saborit)
- What's so modern about modern empires (Frederick Cooper)?