The 'Novela de Rinconete y Cortadillo' is part of the collection of ‘Novelas Ejemplares’ by Cervantes which were published in 1613. It is probably one of the earlier stories and it charts the progress of two young men from the lower professional/gentry classes who take to crime in order to try to escape from the constraints of contemporary Spanish society. However, their quest for freedom is frustrated by the realisation that their new profession is as much part of a social structure as the society they are fleeing from, and they find that the criminal underworld of which they become a part, has its own rules.

Paul Spence created a mark-up scheme using the program TACT in order to be able to carry out computerised text analysis on the novela. This study looked at the overall vocabulary richness of the novela using statistical means and took advantage of the structured mark-up, both to examine the development of themes throughout the book and to contrast the language used by the different kinds of 'speaker'.

The result was a searchable 'textbase' that the user can query and a report, which described the methodology used, evaluated its appropriateness to humanities scholarship and describe some initial project findings.

The etext that we offer for browsing originates from a later version that was marked up in XML.