This volume offers a bold re-examination of the representation of women in the work of Miguel de Cervantes by highlighting the role of perversity. Bringing together historicist, psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer perspectives, the essays analyze how Cervantes’ narratives construct scenes of sexual violence, objectification, and female suffering while perversely inviting the reader’s complicity in their consumption. Through readings of Don Quijote, the Novelas ejemplares, and other works, contributors challenge the long-standing view of Cervantes as a proto-feminist author. Instead, they reveal how his fiction often transforms women’s vulnerability into narrative spectacle, exposing the troubling dynamics of power, gender, and pleasure embedded in the Cervantine aesthetic.

Elizabeth Spragins is Associate Professor in Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross, USA. Her research focuses on authority and identity in early modern Mediterranean narrative and has appeared in La corónica, ConSecuencias, Medieval Encounters, and postmedieval. 

Sonia Pérez-Villanueva, originally from the Basque Country in Spain, is a scholar of early modern Iberian historical, literary, and visual cultures. Her research explores gender, violence, and representation across texts, images, and archival materials. She is currently working on a monograph on the violence of the Inquisition and the cultural histories of crypto-Jewish women. She is Vice Provost for Liberal Arts & Business and Professor of Spanish and Literature in Translation at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.

Leyla Rouhi teaches at Williams College, USA. She has published numerous articles and chapters on medieval and early modern Iberia as well as Middle Eastern culture. She is the author of Mediation and Love as well as co-editor and contributing author of collected volumes on early modern Spain and gender studies. Her teaching includes Spanish language and Peninsular history, culture and literature.