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.

Abstract

La Fama en la Tragedia de Numancia de Cervantes no es únicamente el personaje que cierra la tragedia, sino que es un elemento de desarrollo dramático. Los romanos comienzan a cantar las glorias de la ciudad y de sus habitantes mucho antes de que ésta sea destruida, son ellos los que modifican su percepción de los numantinos según avanza la obra, aunque Escipión solo lo hace tras la muerte del muchacho.