El Diablo Cojuelo

by Luis Vélez de Guevara

"El Diablo Cojuelo" by Luis Vélez de Guevara is a satirical novel published in 1641. A student frees a devil trapped in a bottle, and the grateful demon rewards him by lifting the roofs off houses across Spanish society, revealing people's true natures and hidden vices. Through ten episodes of airborne leaps from place to place, the work offers a biting moral critique of seventeenth-century social classes and customs, written in the elaborate conceptista style characteristic of Spanish Baroque literature.