Religion in Don Quijote has been a frequent subject of inquiry over the past century. As a "vehicle for religious expression," to use Ziolkowski's terminology (1), Cervantes's masterpiece has been studied as an analogy of the relationship between religious faith and the world around it (Ziolkowski 8), as a manifestation of the historic clash between the secularization of the modern era and the waning medieval domination by "religious institutions and symbols" (Ziolkowski 9, citing Berger 107), as a vessel of both the spirit and the letter of selected pronouncements of the Council of Trent (Descouzis 479), as a text that fell under the scrutiny of the Inquisition (Castro, "Cervantes" 427; Boruchoff 40-49), proof of Cervantes's own religious orthodoxy or lack thereof (Spitzer 61; Castro, El pensamiento 240-320), and a study of the nature of belief and its relationship to truth: "truth is always a function of belief" (Forcione 109). Special attention, of course, has been paid to the scrutiny of Don Quijote's library by the priest, Pero Pérez, in Part 1, Chapter 5 (Eisenberg, Ziolkowski 28), Quijote's encounter with Ricote (Ramírez-Araujo, Boruchoff 53), and the more than 160 quotations from and allusions to passages from the Bible (Monroy 79-173), as well as "minor irreverences" and occasional jibes" seen throughout (Ziolkowski 27-28). This brief overview is, of course, only a taste of the scholarship available on the subject, but it will suffice here to establish the scope and breadth of previous discussion of religion in the Quijote.