La mujer hermosa y la estatua de palo de El mundo por de dentro de Francisco de Quevedo

Abstract

Although the fourth of Quevedo’s Dreams and Discourses (Sueños y discursos), The World from Within (El mundo por de dentro), has been characterized as one of his most ‘skeptical’ texts, few critics have explored how skepticism functions in the text. Based on my doctoral research that takes into account recent revisions of Renaissance skepticism as a ‘multi-purpose tool’ and examines the text as a Menippean satire, this article offers a new interpretation of the ‘abrupt ending’ of the princeps version where a beautiful woman is compared to a wooden statue. The underlying premise of this interpretation is that through his Menippean satire Quevedo responded to epistemological challenges of the early seventeenth century when the notion of knowledge was subject to great changes.