Cervantes and the Early Modern Mind

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.

Isabel Jaén is Professor of Spanish at Portland State University and holds PhDs from Purdue University and the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. She is co-editor of Cognitive Literary Studies (University of Texas Press, 2012), Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Self, Other, and Context in Early Modern Spain (Juan de la Cuesta, 2017).

Julien Jacques-Simon is Associate Professor of Spanish at Indiana University East. He is co-editor of Cognitive Literary Studies (University of Texas Press, 2012), Cognitive Cervantes (special issue of the Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, Spring 2012), Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Self, Other, and Context in Early Modern Spain (Juan de la Cuesta, 2017).