Don Quixote: The last medieval man

Cardenio's crazy story continues in Miguel de Cervantes's "Don Quixote" as suddenly he and the priest and barber come upon a beautiful woman, who'd been disguised as a boy, who's shedding tears, and she begins to tell her tale and we learn that - lo & behold!- she was betrayed by the same evil young nobleman who betrayed Carednio, in fact, she was the noble don's first fiancee whom he dumped when he saw Cardenio's fiancee the beautiful Lucretia (?) - are you following this? Do you need to? Not really - the main point is that this kind of encounter in the remote forests of the Sierra Moreno, two people crazy for love and in despair and retreating from society - could never occur and - it's tragedy played out in a comical key (much like the whole novel). Also what we continue to see here is Cervantes's contempt for the social structure of feudalism, still probably pretty powerful in Spain, especially in the countryside, in his day, and his disdain for the codes of social convention: Quixote with his fixation on the gallantry of knights errant is constantly getting battered by the fates and forces of the world, it's as if he doesn't see the world in which he is living - only the corporeal Panza sees it and experiences the realities of beatings, trauma, and humiliation. Though the period of DQ seems very long ago to us, it was a time of change and upheaval, and DQ himself is a throwback, the last medieval man, doomed to fail, destined for extinction.