Abstract

The intimate link between two internal senses—memory and imagination—is central to Cervantes’ novel. Following the ancients and early modern thinkers such as Juan Huarte de San Juan, Cervantes understood how memory is not separate from present or future creative processes. The novel tells the story of a gentleman who goes mad from reading too many chivalric romances and whose actions seemingly pit his imagination against his bookish memory. However, the source of Alonso Quijano’s problem is embedded in imagination and its relation to memories that are rooted in the past but available for future recall. Don Quixote embodies the characteristics of the Janus face, a visual representation of one who looks at the past and the future simultaneously, thereby intertwining seemingly dissimilar timeframes into a continuum. Using this metaphor as a point of departure, this chapter discusses how memory was believed to function in early modernity.