On September 23 and 24, 2005, a group of Hispanists gathered at Yale University's Whitney Humanities Center to honor the 400th anniversary of the publication of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quijote. They had arrived a decade early. What we call the Quijote today was not created in 1605 but in 1615 with the publication of its second and superior part. Thus in 2015, and only in 2015, can and should we celebrate its quatercentenary. The Yale conference on the Quijote was not the first untimely celebration of an early modern Spanish literary landmark. In 1999, a similar gathering of scholars had descended on Seville to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the publication of Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache. The very title of the conference underscored their error. “Atalayas del Guzmán de Alfarache” derives from the subtitle to Part II of Guzmán, which had been printed in 1604 not 1599. Like their Cervantista colleagues, the Alemán scholars had arrived early, a half-decade too early in the latter case, for a quatercentenary celebration that should have been held in 2004.

The prematurity of these two conferences provokes a singular question: “What happened to the second parts?” Further, what happened to the rival second parts of 1602 and 1614 by Juan Martí and Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda that preceded Alemán's and Cervantes' concluding gestures? Indispensable in their own era, they appear to be invisible in ours.