ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the prevailing ideas about memory that circulated during the early modern period and how they are reflected in Cervantes’s works. At the time, memory was an essential part of rhetoric and equally important to the study of medicine, as evidenced by its reference in philosophical and medical treatises of the early modern period. In his works, Cervantes often refers to memory and his characters remind us time and again that memory’s hidden physical and psychological workings propel many stories, which likewise reference memory’s rich presence in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture. More specifically, in Cervantes’s well-known last two novelas ejemplares [exemplary novels], El casamiento engañoso [The Deceitful Marriage] and El coloquio de los perros [The Dialogue of the Dogs], memory prominently guides the act or the process of writing, and it is memory that unifies and brings the two stories together. These stories provide an interesting perspective involving memorization and its connection to imagination. What we learn is that memory and its care were significant sociocultural and scientific topics in early modern Spain—just as they were also discussed in Europe—and authors like Cervantes were sufficiently versed in the subject to integrate these evolving ideas into their literary texts.
