ABSTRACT
The early modern treatise Examen de ingenios [Examination of Men’s Wits], written in 1575 by Juan Huarte de San Juan, establishes a fecund dialogue with Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote. Both works manifest a new understanding of imagination as a generative faculty and portray ingenio [wit], the natural force of understanding or mental capacity, as “capricious” or goatlike. While most studies on the relationship between the two authors have adopted a humoral and faculty psychology perspective, this chapter focuses on the notion of creativity in connection with the image of the goat as a symbol of originality and free, independent thinking. To this purpose, it discusses how the concepts of ingenio, imagination, and capriciousness weave a thread that not only connects Cervantes’s Don Quijote to Huarte’s Examen but also, and more importantly, underscores Cervantes’s interest in the mind as free and autonomous and in the mind’s creative process as dynamic and unrestrained.
