As its title indicates, this book is an exploration of the theme of madness in Cervantes’s novel in light of the information that the author has been able to extract from bibliographical sources and archival materials regarding medical, theological, ethical and legal approaches to the question of madness in early modern Spain. In the process, the author draws important distinctions between the way we define, diagnose, and treat mental illnesses in modern times and how madness was debated, codified, and treated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These findings allow Shuger to distinguish his own historicist approach from the considerable number of Cervantes specialists who have linked the mad protagonist of the novel to the treatment of madness in classical satires and Renaissance literature, and simultaneously from those scholars who have applied Freudian and post-Freudian theories to the study of Cervantes’s texts. At times even Foucauldian historicism comes under fire in Shuger’s book, if not in itself, certainly as it has been incorporated into the critical tradition of Golden Age studies. As Shuger writes: “The influence of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization in Cervantine scholarship is somewhat inexplicable for, after a brief initial chapter which cites no archival material, Foucault speaks neither of Spain nor of anything prior to the 1656 founding of l’Hopital Général in Paris” (13–14).

The book includes a preface from the series editor, an introduction, six chapters, a short epilogue, a bibliographical section, and an index. The introduction poses a key question, which is indeed central to the entire study: “We know that Cervantes chose to call the protagonist of his masterpiece a ‘madman’, but which ‘madness’ did he mean?” (1). According to Shuger, the answer to this question is not to be found in preceding literary models, and certainly not in psychoanalytic theory or medical discourse, but in the real madness recorded in the documents of the inquisition. The fact that Cervantes’s frame of reference is “the popular madness of his own society” is, in Shuger’s estimation, what makes Don Quixote’s madness truly “novelistic.” As he argues, “[b]ecause Don Quixote is a novel, we must read it in its ‘confrontation’ with extra-literary discourse. And, I will argue, it is because of its ‘confrontation’ with extra-literary madness that Don Quixote becomes a novel” (3). The rest of the book is largely devoted to contextualize and support this key assertion. Thus, chapter one provides a survey of those discourses of madness that were contemporary to the writing of Don Quixote. Chapter two focuses on what made someone “mad” in the eyes of Cervantes’s contemporaries, including friends and neighbors as well as figures of authority. Chapters three and four rely heavily on inquisition documents which offer important insights into the social experience of madness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Shuger establishes a series of parallels between this historically recorded social experience of madness in early modern Spain and a good number of scenes of Don Quixote. He is especially attentive to questions of ethics in his detailed discussion of the multiple ways in which other characters treat the protagonist. Chapters 5 and 6 re-engage the question of Cervantes’s contribution to the development of the novelistic genre. While Shuger’s focus is still the treatment of madness, he pursues a line of argumentation that allows him to reconnect with standard lines of theorization of the novel, especially with the well known interpretations of such scholars as Manuel Durán, Howard Mancing, James Parr, and Diana de Armas Wilson, among others. In general, we can say that in these final sections, Shuger works hard to provide a critical and historiographic context within which to anchor his own findings. The book’s conclusion is perhaps best represented in the following remarks: “Literature and madness both live in quicksand; precisely when they appear to have settled into recognisable forms.. .. Literature became ‘novel’ because it looked outside epic and satire and found a madness in inns, on the road and before the Inquisition that was not epic or satiric” (202). Don Quixote in the Archives is a well researched study that will prove useful for students and scholars alike.