Health and Medicine in Cervantes and His World (Literature and Science)

This course will explore the vibrant dialogue between literary, medical, and scientific texts of the Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance periods. Focusing on Miguel de Cervantes, alongside a selection of his contemporaries, we will study how premodern ideas of the body and embodiment, disability, illness, healing, and medical authority were represented and (re)negotiated during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. We will cover a range of genres, particularly fiction, theater, and treatises to situate literary works within their historical, cultural, scientific, and medical contexts. This will help reveal how premodern writers discuss physical and mental health, patients versus medical “authorities,” individual and public health, etc., while also positioning Cervantes and Early Modern Spanish Literature at the crux of dynamic premodern discourses about the body, health, and the healing potential of medicine.