Abstract

In recent years, a number of critics have brought the history of science as well as more contemporary scientific approaches to bear on Spanish baroque literature and culture with positive results (a little pun for you there, Moi). Scholars such Amy Williamsen, David Castillo and Massimo Lollini, Vicente Pérez de León, William Egginton, and Carroll Johnson, among others, have illuminated the struggles taking place between emergent, modern scientific paradigms and residual natural philosophies and how Cervantes’s aesthetic experiments perform and problematize these paradigms and their collisions. The goal of this paper is to reframe these discussions according to contemporary scientific models of inquiry in order to demonstrate how Cervantes’s timely marriage of poiesis and scientific knowledge not only questions early modern assumptions about scientific knowledge but our own as well.