Gerard Wiegers cites me on Don Quixote's mole . . .

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Some readers may recall that I published an article a couple of years ago on Don Quixote's mole - a birthmark, I mean, not the furry little earth tunneler. Anyway, I discovered yesterday that the scholar Gerard Wiegers, professor at the University of Amsterdam, cites me on this mole:

[It] can be confirmed that Cervantes read the Verdadera Historia, as is evident from part 1, chapter 30 of the Quixote, in which we are told that Don Quixote's identity and valor depend on a mole on his right side under the left shoulder. Horace Jeffery Hodges saw that this passage was very similar to a passage in the Verdadera Historia, in which a prophecy is discussed, which states:

that the Christians were to lose that land, and that it was to be conquered by the Moors: it said farther, that the Captain that was to gain it, was to be valorous and strong; and for a proof of the knowledge of him, he was to have a hairy mole as large as a garvanzo, or vetch, over the shoulder of his right hand. On conclusion of these words by that woman, the Tariff was much pleased, and before all his retinue stripped himself, and having carefully looked, they found the mole as the woman had said.

Wiegers, for his part, cites me on pages 159-160 of his article in a book titled The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, Volume 3, Displaced Persons (2015). The article is titled "The Granada Lead Books Translator Miguel de Luna as a Model for both the Toledan Morisco Translator and the Arab Historian Cidi Hamete Benengeli in Cervantes' Don Quijote."

Getting cited for good scholarship is satisfying in a way that being cited by police is not, so to speak (with tongue in cheek).