Abstract

This paper studies two Exemplary Novels written by Miguel de Cervantes, The English Spaniard and The Liberal Lover, focusing on the economic anxiety that existed at the time. The «abstraction» of money due to the emerging use of credit is part of a series of irreversible and significant changes that Europe experiences as a result of the gold extracted from the New World. This anxiety reveals itself, at the same time, a clear inestability in the economic and affective discourse of the period, expressed in the semantic moving that the narrative of the body and clothing expresses.

Abstract

This article offers an interpretation of Miguel de Cervantes’ exemplary novella The Two Damsels (1613). Its theoretical and methodical basis is informed by the achievements of recent approaches from men’s studies and one of its most important representatives, R. W. Connell’s foundational work on Masculinities (2005). My reading elucidates what pre-modern readers identified as «masculine» in a literary text, particularly in cases where women dressed as men, a literary artifice and social practice which, following Judith Halberstam, I read as an example of pre-modern «female masculinity». I thus show how theories stemming from postmodernity can open up new approaches to interpreting and understanding pre-modern cultural phenomena while insisting on the distance that separates us from these pre-modern conceptions of what «being a man» signified in a long-gone culture and society. Given these twin aims, this article explains historical alterity via a current theoretical model but does so without translating that alterity immediately into concepts that may sound familiar —perhaps deceptively so.