By examining the pictorial episodes in the Spanish baroque novella, this book elucidates how writers create pictorial texts, how audiences visualise their words, what consequences they exert on cognition and what actions this process inspires. To interrogate characters' mental activity, internalisation of text and the effects on memory, this book applies methodologies from cognitive cultural studies, Classical memory treatises and techniques of spiritual visualisation. It breaks new ground by investigating how artistic genres and material culture help us grasp the audience's aural, material, visual and textual literacies, which equipped the public with cognitive mechanisms to face restrictions in post-Counter-Reformation Spain. The writers examined include prominent representatives of Spanish prose -Cervantes, Lope de Vega, María de Zayas and Luis Vélez de Guevara- as well as Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses and an anonymous group in Córdoba.

Alicia R. Zuese is Associate Professor of Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture in the Department of World Languages at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas.

Introduction: Viewing the Tale: Cervantes's Portrait, Lope's Hieroglyphics and Methods of Verbal Visual Cognition
Chapter One: Image, Text and Memory in Illuminated Manuscripts and Early Print
Chapter Two: Don Quijote and Don Juan: Collectors and the Collection as Models for Critical Inquiry into the Baroque
Chapter Three: Material Representations of the World: Using Physical Texts and Fictional Expression to Create Literary Edifices
Chapter Four: Emblems, Meditation and Memory: Mental Reverberations of the Novella
Chapter Five: Fragmentation of the Protagonist and Society: Emblems, Anamorphosis and Corporeality
Conclusion