The Hand as Metaphor in the Novelas ejemplares

Abstract

From the prologue to the final words of the Coloquio de los perros, the Novelas ejemplares abound in corporeal metaphors that reflect Renaissance notions of selfhood. While it is not surprising that the ‘Manco de Lepanto’ wrote insightfully about hands, it is remarkable that hand imagery in the Novelas ejemplares has yet to be sufficiently examined. This article demonstrates the importance of the motif to this collection of short stories and contextualizes Cervantes’s artistic treatment of the hand in early modern thought about the human body. Due to the particular details of Cervantes’s life events, I argue that hand imagery in his literature takes on a more significant role. More specifically, while he undoubtedly incorporates elements of the Renaissance tradition, I contend that hand imagery in the Novelas ejemplares reflects a rich panoply of connotations related to the nascent epistemological preference for empiricism, the hand’s unique capacity to both construct and dissect narrative, and is a fecun...