Had Miguel de Cervantes, while doing research for his book, been able to google the word ‘madness’, he would in all likelihood have crashed his server. Early modern Spain saw an increased preoccupation with madness in almost every sector of society; for different reasons and in different ways, jurists, theologians, artists, advisors and the royal court all found themselves debating, exploring or dealing with madness and madmen. Yet the madnesses spoken of in elite literature, festivals, legal codes and medical manuals were not always the same, just as the madness spoken of in sixteenth-century Spain does not necessarily refer to the same actions or have the same signifi cance as madness in fourteenth- century Germany or twenty-fi rst-century America. We know that Cervantes chose to call the protagonist of his masterpiece a ‘madman’, but which ‘madness’ did he mean?

A few of the many discourses of madness swirling around in early modern Spain have, in subsequent centuries, been privileged as critical frameworks from which to read the madness of Cervantes's most famous protagonist. Not surprisingly, given Don Quixote's privileged status in the literary canon, the most common reading has emphasised a literary genealogy. The critic who wishes to trace a constellation of literary madness has any number of star charts to choose from; early modern European literature features furious lovers (the epic lovers who Don Quixote explicitly imitates), melancholy lovers (in countless comedias and romances, including many of the characters in the intercalated stories of Don Quixote), buffoons or fools (the graciosos of the comedia and the court), objects of satire (the patients in Garzoni's or Beys's madhouses), and the satirical voices themselves (Erasmus's Dame Folly, Cervantes's own ‘licenciado Vidriera’).