Abstract
Wit is one of the most important notions in European culture during the Renaissance and the Baroque. This article shows, with examples from Caramuel, Góngora and Cervantes, that there are three traditions of this notion in the European culture of the 16th and 17th centuries: wit as mental subtlety, related to Theology and Philosophy; wit as verbal acuity, related to Rhetoric and Poetry; and wit as a bodily temperament, related to physics, medicine, politics, and satire. Although the bibliography is extremely extensive, these three traditions can be emblematized with the following treatises: Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (1575) by Juan Huarte de San Juan; Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1648) by Baltasar Gracián; and Il cannocchiale aristotelico (1663) by Emanuele Tesauro.
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