This study offers a reading of Don Quixote with comparative material from Golden Age history and Cervantes life to argue that his greatest work was not just the hilariously comic entertainment that most of his contemporaries took it to be. Rather it belongs to a subversive tradition of writing that grew up in sixteenthcentury Spain and which constantly questioned the aims and standards of the imperial nation state that Counterreformation Spain had become from the point of view of Renaissance humanism. Prime consideration needs to be given to the system of Spanish censorship at the time run largely by the Inquisition albeit officially an institution of the crown and its effect on the cultural life of the country.