Psychology

The Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (1575/1594), a key work in the development of Western psychological thinking, has aroused the interest of scholars from various disciplines. Its author, Juan Huarte de San Juan, is considered a forerunner of the empirical approach to the psyche, given his critical use of the classical sources, and his study of the problem of ingenio
(wit) from the perspective of Philosophia naturalis, without taking recourse to metaphysical or theological explications.
Interestingly, little examination has been devoted to sexuality-related matters in Huarte’s text.
Despite the fact that the Examen offers relatively few references to these matters, it permits us to reconstruct a theory of sexuality according to its author. The relation between Huarte’s theory of sexuality and the critical spirit predominant in the rest of his treatise is a complex
one, due to the fact that his use of the natural paradigm for explaining sexual phenomenology is inconstant. On the one hand, the connection the physician establishes between sex drive, sexual activity and temperament coincides with the methodological spirit of the rest of his treatise. Similarly, in his explanation of homosexuality, his discourse remains close to natural philosophy. However, his explanation of the shame experienced by the individual who deals with such issues is characterized by transgressions of the boundaries of natural philosophy discourse.
Thus, Register shifts in Huarte’s discourse in certain passages in the Examen delineate the limit between the psychological paradigm used by Huarte and between what is still considered to be subject to the jurisdiction of metaphysics and theology.

[this is a draft of an article published in Anuario de Estudios Cervantinos, (2012), 8: 137-150]

Leido desde una perspectiva narratológica, el cuentecillo cervantino del Quijote de 1615 sobre el licenciado que decía ser Neptuno resulta un relato de intencionalidad ambigua y cuestionadora respecto de la noción de la locura como esencia y como patología.

The file uploaded here is a final draft of the article. The published version can be found in Anuario de Estudios Cervantinos, VIII, pp. 137-150.

In spite of its centrality to the plot of the Segunda Parte del Lazarillo (Antwerp,
1555), the detailed account of Lázaro’s conversion—i.e., the series of events leading to his
metamorphosis and the vicissitudes of assuming a new identity—has received so far scarce
scholarly attention. Through a close reading of key moments in the 1555 sequel, the present
study attempts to explore Lázaro’s subjective experience as it is conveyed in the text, and reflect
on the construction of converso subjectivity in Golden Age Spanish imaginary.

The present study explores the relation between madness and ingenio (wit), as represented in the Examen de ingenios para las cienciasi (1575/1594), written by the physician Juan Huarte de San Juan. A close reading of two cases related by the physician as clinical examples for his theory about the biological roots of knowledge (and madness), shows the polyphony of the text by revealing in it the tension between a medical discourse, focused on the individual body, and a perspective emphasizing the social context with which the individual interacts. The Examen’s polyphony is also shown to be reflected in the response of Jerónimo de Mondragón and Francisco de Villarino, of two of Huarte’s contemporary readers.

In my doctoral dissertation I reconstruct the early modern Spanish category of madness (locura) by exploring the ways it was imagined, theorized, and narrated in medical, lexicographic, and literary texts of the Golden Age (16 th and 17 th centuries). The research focuses on three main problems: (1) the boundaries of madness and its relation to adjacent, overlapping, or opposite categories; (2) the tension between discourses and paradigms to which this category was considered to belong, namely, medical discourse, theological and metaphysical discourses, and social-ethical discourses; and (3), the dialogue between medical writing and literary representations of madness, and the ways inter-discursive tensions shape narratives of madness in both realms. The work consists of three extensive chapters. The first chapter is dedicated to the Golden Age Spanish vocabulary of madness, and lays the philological and conceptual foundations for context-sensitive reading of early modern Spanish representations of madness. Through an analysis of the main lexicographical works written between the late fifteenth century and the early eighteenth century, I examine the boundaries of locura as a cultural-linguistic category, and explore its content through key metaphors, images, and cultural associations underlying the rich vocabulary of Golden Age madness. The second chapter examines the early modern scientific debate concerning the problem of mad genius, and offers a reading of Cervantes's El licenciado Vidriera in light of this debate. In the chapter I offer close, literary readings of clinical case histories from the Examen de ingenios (1575), a celebrated medical treatise by Huarte de San Juan, and point out to the internal tensions between theory and narrative in Huarte's writing, as well as to the multiple discourses present in it. Through a study of the Examen's reception, I show how these polyphonic qualities are echoed in the responses of medical and lay readers. Finally, I propose a reading of Cervantes's novella, in which I problematize the relation between medical writing and narrative fiction, and argue in favor of understanding this relation in terms of a non-hierarchic dialogue, in which literature can both incorporate elements of clinical writing and at the same time challenge the basic postulates underlying the medical view of madness. The third chapter, dedicated to the intersection of locura with Eros, approaches the medico-literary dialogue from the opposite direction: instead of reading a literary work as a response to medical writing, I focus upon medical attempts to appropriate, resist, and reframe the story of Antiochus and Stratonice—a paradigmatic tale of lovesickness whose roots can be traced back to Antiquity. After examining different renderings of the tale that were available to the early modern Spanish reader—translations of the Classics, Italian recreations , and popular romances—I turn to medical appropriations of the tale. I put special emphasis on Alfonso de Santa Cruz's Dignotio et cura affectuum melancholicorum (ca. 1575/1622), in which different elements—and different versions—of the tale are incorporated into a clinical history. In my analysis of Santa Cruz's narration I show how the incorporation of the tale ends up undermining the author's scientific agenda, and reflect on the relation between the medical paradigm and the paradigmatic tale, which, in this case, are both intertwined and opposing.

Composed around 1575 and published in 1622, Alfonso de Santa Cruz’s Dignotio et cura affectuum melancholicorum was one of the most elaborate clinical texts written on melancholy in early modern Spain. Mostly known for its description of glass delusion, the Dignotio has been typically read either as possible “source material” for Cervantes’s El licencia- do Vidriera, or as a text whose literary features are, at best, accessory to scientific knowledge. Through a close examination of the framing, texture, and focus of the glass man’s story, I complicate the facile identification of the narration as a case history, and showcase the importance of close, narratologically sensitive readings of early modern medical texts. Such read- ings, I argue, reveal the manifold—and sometimes contradictory—views on madness present in medical writing, and offer a new perspective on the medical–literary dialogue in early modernity, without confining it to mere “influence” or “inspiration.”