Don Quixote in the Archives: Madness and Literature in Early Modern Spain by Dale Shuger (review)

Dale Shuger’s book, Don Quixote in the Archives: Madness and Literature in Early Modern Spain, explores the issue of madness in Don Quixote from the perspective of early modern archival materials. The author’s sociohistorical approach not only puts forward a more nuanced view of madness but also suggests that Cervantes’s novel treatment of madness is fundamentally linked to the formal innovations within the work. Shuger further argues that Cervantes used a popular brand of madness as his point of reference in constructing madness within Don Quixote. This is not to say that Cervantes in some way simulates the madness he sees in the world around him, only that, from his modification, parody, critique, and expansion of said madness, a character and a novel emerged.

The first two chapters examine the multiplicity of meanings and symptoms that the archives of Baroque Spain offer with regards to madness. Shuger begins by distancing her research from that of Foucault and Bakhtin, whose madhouse and carnivalesque theories diverge from the early modern forms of madness found within records from the Spanish Inquisition. These accounts depict a new madness, indefinite and multiple by nature and without resolution or finality. The author links the beliefs and behaviors of early modern Spain that made someone mad in the eyes of his friends, neighbors, and authorities, to various episodes within Don Quixote. Shuger’s movement between archive and novel, however, is sometimes suggestive of a more direct relationship between the two, which she rejects in the introduction but does not entirely avoid in the chapters thereafter. While she is to be commended for the quixotic dreamers, visionaries, and madmen she discovers in the archives, Shuger’s attempt to connect them to Cervantes’s protagonist is sometimes too simplistic and lacking the depth of analysis she displays elsewhere. That is not to say that in making these connections she is overtly trying to correlate madness in literature and madness in society. Instead, her objective is to show “how Cervantes uses the tools of fiction to explore madness as lived experience, and how he uses madness as lived experience to create—and to meditate on the nature of—literature” (70).

Chapters 3 and 4 address the manifestations of and reactions to madness on the literal and figurative landscape of early modern Spain. Shuger initially situates madness within society at large, taking the specific case of one archival loco as a model for understanding the ways in which both historical and fictitious madmen were treated. The movement from unfamiliar to familiar, as she explains, reveals a shifting ethic surrounding madness. That is, authorities and strangers did not have the same responsibility (and hence the same response) to madmen that those closely associated with them did. The reaction to Don Quixote and the action taken on his behalf (or at his expense) reflects the social hierarchy of the time. Within this ethical landscape, Shuger maintains that charity and cruelty are not necessarily incompatible. As long as the damage was minimal, entertainment could be pursued at a maximum. For family members, the goal was straightforward: keep the madman at home so as not to jeopardize their own economic and social well-being. Shuger explores these dynamics in the novel by looking closely at the ways in which the niece and housekeeper, as well as the priest and barber, interact with Don Quixote. The chapter ends with a close examination of Don Quixote and Sancho’s unique relationship, which Shuger defines as one of constant negotiation. As he gains fluency in Don Quixote’s madness, Sancho becomes increasingly more capable of managing ambiguity.

Chapters 5 and 6 consider the relationship between form and theme. Shuger begins by highlighting the interiority of the Baroque and identifies this as Cervantes’s primary interest. Specifically, she asserts that Cervantes’s work explores how madness interrupts the individual’s effort to explain the world to himself and...