Quixotic Memories: Cervantes and Memory in Early Modern Spain by Julia Domínguez (review)

Reviewed by: Quixotic Memories: Cervantes and Memory in Early Modern Spain by Julia Domínguez William Worden Domínguez, Julia. Quixotic Memories: Cervantes and Memory in Early Modern Spain. U of Toronto P, 2022. 261 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4875-4392-1. In the opening pages of this fascinating monograph Julia Domínguez explains that Quixotic Memories “analyzes the essential role of memory within the context of the rapidly shifting cultural production during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and how memory is central to understanding Cervantes’s work” (4). Focusing on Don Quixote, but with occasional reference to other Cervantine works, the book examines in depth both what early modern thinkers wrote about the topic of memory and the fundamental role that memory plays in Cervantes’s writing. Consisting of an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue, Quixotic Memories expertly combines what was known about memory in the seventeenth century with an insightful analysis of characters and episodes in Don Quixote that involve the topic of memory. The book’s introduction highlights that humanist pedagogy in the age of Cervantes “promoted different instruments, technologies, and artefacts to cope with the ‘information overload’ of the Renaissance, brought about by early modern Spain’s shift from an oral to a written culture stimulated by the advent of the mechanical press” (9). The introduction also establishes the importance of Huarte de San Juan’s Examen de ingenios (1575) for Cervantes and offers an overview of the chapters that follow. The first chapter explains how Plato and Aristotle influenced writers of early modern Spanish medical treatises, and elucidates the important distinction that Aristotle makes between memory—the capacity to store representations of past events, the space where these images were located, and the place where memorization took place—and recollection—“the reconstructive process by which something is recalled through internal operations” (40). It also begins relating these theories about memory to Cervantes’s novel, showing that “[f]or Don Quixote, recollection becomes a reconstructive process similar to an act of reading where his memories are not just ‘read’ but also profoundly visualized” (42). Chapter 2 begins by tracing the development of the art of memory from antiquity (referencing Simonides of Ceos and Cicero) to the Middle Ages (including Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas) to the time of Cervantes. After explaining how these [End Page 162] various thinkers developed systems to improve memory, most often by relating what was to be remembered with an imagined space, Domínguez shows how the episode that recounts Don Quixote’s penance in the Sierra Morena is intimately connected to the art of memory. The third chapter explores the intersection of the art of memory with collective memory in fields as diverse as painting, rhetoric, literature, emblems, and physiognomy. With compelling examples from various episodes in the novel, Domínguez shows that “Don Quixote becomes an iconological repertory where the construction and dissemination of memorable images derive from the precepts of the art of memory” (109). With the printing press producing new texts at an ever-increasing rate, how could one best reckon with the resulting overload of information in the seventeenth century? Chapter 4 addresses the explosion of knowledge in early modern Spain by analyzing the character of the Cousin who accompanies Don Quixote to the Cave of Montesinos, an intriguing humanist who composes tracts in a wide array of subjects. Though the Cousin insists that his books are both useful and entertaining, the topics he studies (e.g., quién fue el primero que tuvo catarro en el mundo) contradict those assertions. This chapter quite astutely reads the Cousin’s episode as a cautionary tale, treating him as someone Cervantes uses to show how not to deal with the proliferation of information that characterized his age. Of the willy-nilly publish-everything approach employed by the humanist, Domínguez maintains, “some scholars like the Cousin have abandoned the rigorous pursuit and publication of original research in favour of printing encyclopedic-type texts that contain fairly useless information” (22). The fifth chapter focuses on the character development of Sancho, a particularly fruitful topic of study given the importance that memory plays in episodes ranging from the squire’s...

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