Aging, Emotion, and Cognition

Abstract

Much of the existing scholarship on Cervantes’s Entremés del viejo zeloso (1615) tends to emphasize the subversive behavior of its main female character or the foolishness of her very old husband, without paying sufficient attention to early modern ideas on the physiology of cognition or on the impact of emotion on cognitive function. By contrast, this chapter seeks to demonstrate the relevance of such ideas to our understanding of the play and its wider cultural context, examining in particular Juan Luis Vives’s discussion of jealousy as a form of fear in De Institutione Feminae Christianae (1524) and his explanations on the role of the imagination in arousing fear and suspicion in De anima et vita (1538), while also considering the views propounded in this work and in Juan Huarte de San Juan’s Examen de ingenios (1575) on the effects of old age on cognition. The failure of the old husband to see what the audience knows to be happening around him is a very effective illustration of Vives’s argument that fear is caused by the thought of what is dangerous, rather than by actual danger. Furthermore, Cervantes drew on early modern assumptions about suspiciousness as a consequence of old age in writing this masterpiece of double deception.