Quixotic Memories: Cervantes and Memory in Early Modern Spain(Toronto Iberic)

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Obsessions with Remembering: The Culture of Memory in Early Modern Spain 1. The Anatomy of Early Modern Memory Cervantes and the Early Modern Mind The Topography of the Early Modern Brain Memory and Recollection Don Quixote’s Memory 2. Mental Libraries: The Places of Memory Imaginary Libraries Cervantes and Artificial Memory The Art of Memory and Its Tradition The Art of Memory in the Time of Cervantes Sierra Morena: The Vast Territories of Memory 3. Ut Pictura Memoria: The Mnemonic Power of Images Visual Expressions of Mnemonic Culture in the Age of Cervantes Cervantine Mnemonic Inflections The Mnemonic Power of Images: The Imago Agente in Don Quixote Affectio and the Corporeality of the Phantasmata The Circulation of Images in Cultural Artefacts 4. Information Overload: Stocking Memory in the Age of Cervantes The Anxiety of the "Labyrinths of Letters" Pedagogy, Mnemonics, and the Limits of Humanist Education The Cousin: Student and Humanist External Memories The Mimetic Memory of the Cousin 5. Disputes over Memory: Sancho and the Artful Manipulation of Memory "O Sancho miente o Sancho sueña" "A fe que no os falta memoria cuando vos queréis tenerla": Sancho’s Selective Memory "Como ya pasó, no es" The Story of Torralba and the Performative Dimension of Memory "Alta y sobajada señora…" The False Memory Embedded in Imagination Epilogue Lethe and the Laws of Oblivion: Sites of Forgetting in Don Quixote

About the Author :
Julia Dominguez is a professor of Spanish at Iowa State University.

Review :
"With her masterful analysis of how Cervantes treats memory throughout Don Quixote, Domínguez has accomplished something quite rare in the world of Cervantine studies, a field populated by new books every month: writing a book that will be remembered." - William Worden, The University of Alabama (Hispanófila)