This book explores the work of Cervantes in relation to the ideas about the mind that circulated in early modern Europe and were propelled by thinkers such as Juan Luis Vives, Juan Huarte de San Juan, Oliva Sabuco, Andrés Laguna, Andrés Velásquez, Marsilio Ficino, and Gómez Pereira. The editors bring together humanists and scientists: literary scholars and doctors whose interdisciplinary research integrates diverse types of sources (philosophical and medical treatises, natural histories, rhetoric manuals, pharmacopoeias, etc.) alongside Cervantes’s works to examine themes and areas including emotion, human development, animal vs. human consciousness, pathologies of the mind, and mind-altering substances. Their chapters trace the cognitive themes and points of inquiry that Cervantes shares with other early modern thinkers, showing how he both echoes and contributes to early modern views of the mind.

The work of Miguel de Cervantes – one of the most influential writers in early modern Europe – is a reflection of the rich culture of memory in which it was created. More than a theme, memory is a system of understanding in Cervantes’s world, resulting from the major social, religious, and economic changes that epitomized Renaissance humanist culture and that informed the transition to modernity. Quixotic Memories offers insight into the plurality and complexity of memory and demonstrates how it plays an exceptionally critical role in Cervantes’s Don Quixote. It acknowledges Cervantes’s transition into modernity as he engaged with theories of memory that were developed in classical antiquity and adapted to the specific circumstances of his own time. Julia Domínguez explores the many spaces that memory created for itself in early modern Spain, particularly in the fields of philosophy, medicine, rhetoric, mnemotechnics, the visual arts, and pedagogy. Engaging with primary and archival sources, Quixotic Memories provides a new reading of Cervantes’s famous novel by tracing the socio-historical and cultural prominence of memory throughout the author’s lifetime.

Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature is the first anthology exploring human cognition and literature in the context of early modern Spanish culture. It includes the leading voices in the field, along with the main themes and directions that this important area of study has been producing. The book begins with an overview of the cognitive literary studies research that has been taking place within early modern Spanish studies over the last fifteen years. Next, it traces the creation of self in the context of the novel, focusing on Cervantes's Don Quixote in relation to the notions of embodiment and autopoiesis as well as the faculties of memory and imagination as understood in early modernity. It continues to explore the concept of embodiment, showing its relevance to delve into the mechanics of the interaction between actors and audience both in the jongleuresque and the comedia traditions. It then centers on cognitive theories of perception, the psychology of immersion in fictional worlds, and early modern and modern-day notions of intentionality to discuss the role of perceiving and understanding others in performance, Don Quixote, and courtly conduct manuals. The last section focuses on the affective dimension of audience-performer interactions in the theatrical space of the Spanish corrales and how emotion and empathy can inform new approaches to presenting Las Casas's work in the literature classroom. The volume closes with an afterword offering strategies to design a course on mind and literature in early modernity.

Miguel de Cervantes’s experimentation with theatricality is frequently tied to the notion of revelation and disclosure of hidden truths. Drawing the Curtain showcases the elements of theatricality that characterize Cervantes’s prose and analyses the ways in which he uses theatricality in his own literary production. Bringing together the works of well-known scholars, who draw from a variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches, this collection demonstrates how Cervantes exploits revelation and disclosure to create dynamic dramatic moments that surprise and engage observers and readers. Hewing closely to Peter Brook’s notion of the bare or empty stage, Esther Fernández and Adrienne L. Martín argue that Cervantes’s omnipresent concern with theatricality manifests not only in his drama but also in the myriad metatheatrical instances dispersed throughout his prose works. In doing so, Drawing the Curtain sheds light on the ways in which Cervantes forces his readers to engage with themes that are central to his life and works, including love, freedom, truth, confinement, and otherness.

This volume provides a comprehensive account of how scholarship on affect and scholarship on texts have come to inform one another over the past few decades. The result has been that explorations of how texts address, elicit, shape, and dramatize affect have become central to contemporary work in literary, film, and art criticism, as well as in critical theory, rhetoric, performance studies, and aesthetics. Guiding readers to the variety of topics, themes, interdisciplinary dialogues, and sub-disciplinary specialties that the study of interplay between affect and texts has either inaugurated or revitalized, the handbook showcases and engages the diversity of scholarly topics, approaches, and projects that thinking of affect in relation to texts and related media open up or enable. These include (but are not limited to) investigations of what attention to affect brings to established methods of studying texts—in terms of period, genre, cultural contexts, rhetoric, and individual authorship.

The body, touch and its sensations are present, sometimes viewed in contradictory ways, both expressed, visualized, and rejected, in early modern art and literature. In seven essays moving from the 16th to the mid-18th century, and from Italy and Spain to France and Sweden, this volume explores strategies used by early modern women poets, philosophers, and artists in order to create subversive expressions of the body, gender and the senses. Showing how body and soul, the carnal and the divine, the senses and the mind, could be represented as intertwined and dependent on each other in various ways, it gives due attention to European women writers and artists that in unconventional ways responded to the period's two main intellectual and philosophical attitudes - Epicurean and Stoic - towards the body and its senses. These attitudes not only intersect in the period's discussions of virtue and other moral phenomena, but are central to critical assessment of the relations between emotions, perception, and reason. By following this topic from a gender perspective, the book highlights other forms of subjectivity than the ones usually related to the early modern period's dominating subjectivation of female bodies, thinking and desires.

Spanish physicians constituted a crucial political force in the nineteenth century during the tumultuous process of nation-building that followed the War of Independence against the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. Many participated in the Cortes of Cádiz, which drafted Spain’s first constitution in 1812 and went on to prove highly influential in the public sphere and legislature during the liberal revolution that undertook the establishment of a new, and precarious, political order. Andrew W. Keitt’s A Physician in the Age of Liberal Reform excavates the life and work of one such doctor, Ildefonso Martínez y Fernández, whose brief career coincided with the consolidation of the liberal revolution and the drive to improve and professionalize Spanish medicine. Born in 1821, Martínez was a polymath and activist whose prolific literary and scholarly output made him a fixture in the political and intellectual ferment of midcentury Spain until his untimely death in 1855 during a devastating outbreak of cholera. He produced a significant body of intellectual research, made key contributions to the profession, and cultivated a deep engagement with the political struggles of the period. His impassioned endeavors, as chronicled by Keitt, highlight the efforts of Spanish physicians to mobilize medical science toward forging a new political culture for liberal Spain.