The Limping Devil – El Diablo Cojuelo

First published in 1641, El diablo cojuelo (The Limping Devil) is a satirical masterpiece by the renowned Spanish playwright and poet Luis Vélez de Guevara. Highly admired by his contemporaries, including Cervantes and Lope de Vega, this fantastical novel offers a biting and grotesque overview of 17th-century Spanish society.

The narrative follows the rascally student Cleofás, who inadvertently frees a mischievous "limping devil" from an astrologer's bottle. In gratitude, the devil takes Cleofás on a supernatural flight over Madrid and across Spain, literally lifting the roofs off houses to observe and mock the vices, hypocrisies, and pretensions of its inhabitants—from greedy merchants and corrupt officials to jaded playwrights and vain aristocrats.

Despite its profound influence on European literature—inspiring Alain-René Lesage's French best-seller Le diable boiteux and receiving praise from authors like Charles Dickens—Vélez de Guevara’s original Spanish text has long remained unavailable to the English-speaking world. This Stockcero bilingual edition, featuring an accurate and fluent translation by Robert S. Rudder and Ignacio López-Calvo, finally fills this scholarly lacuna.

Complete with a critical introduction and extensive footnotes to navigate its rich Baroque language, this edition is an essential resource for courses in Spanish Golden Age Literature, Satire and Society, Comparative Literature, and Translation Studies. It invites modern readers to witness a "personally whimsical" manifesto of an author who dared to unmask the follies of his age.