ABSTRACT
After providing a brief historical overview of how the use of plants in relation to the mind was viewed and practiced in early modernity, the authors argue in this chapter that the passages of Cervantes’s work in which the mind of the characters is being affected via the ingestion of potions or concoctions relied, to a large extent, on Andrés Laguna’s Dioscórides, a medical source that was accessible to a wide audience and, thus, very popular at the time not only among doctors and specialists in early modern pharmacology but also among writers and artists. To defend this hypothesis, they delve into the Cervantine mentions of mind-altering agents and their different uses: therapeutic remedies, toxic and poisonous agents (love elixirs, poisonous potions), and abusive substances (witches’ ointments). While Cervantes routinely avoids giving concrete information on the composition of the unorthodox concoctions that he cites in his works, likely to avoid any censorship and punishment from the Inquisition, the description of the symptoms that befall his characters allows us to infer, from a toxicological perspective, which ingredients could have been part of their composition. The accuracy of these descriptions attests to his interest and knowledge of herbal therapies.
