ABSTRACT
The chapter “Displacing the Pícaro” demonstrates how literary representations of early modern Madrid in Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), Guía y avisos de forasteros (1620) and Historias peregrinas y ejemplares (1623) repositioned the place of the pícaro in the city in order to represent specific voices within the debate on urban poor relief, the treatment of delinquents and visions on the place of delinquency in the city. The pícaro’s place in the city is a highly significant subject against the backdrop of late-Renaissance urban planning, particularly in the case of late sixteenth-century Madrid, which was developed with rather clear-cut preconceived ideas for an ideal renaissance capital. In the literary representation, space is claimed, assigned and instrumentalized in order to debate the plans of such reformers as Miguel de Giginta and Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera. The chapter argues that contemporary readers would have immediately recognized the artificial and polemical nature of the text and interpreted it vis-à-vis other prominent positions in the ongoing discourse on poverty, the abuse of the infrastructure for poor relief by people falsely posing as poor, and urban criminality.
