Bad Moon Rising: Lycanthropy and Liminality in Cervantes's “El coloquio de los perros”

Abstract

Among the three possible explanations for Cipión and Berganza's sudden and unexpected power of speech in Cervantes's “El coloquio de los perros” is the suggestion that these two characters are actually the progeny of a witch and that they have been cursed to live as dogs until such time as they revert to their human form. Through an examination of the history of lycanthropy and cynocephaly in European mythology, this essay traces the lycanthropic foundations of “El casamiento engañoso” and “El coloquio de los perros” and explores Cervantes's talking dogs as a metaphor for hybridity, liminality, and contamination within the context of early modern Iberian anxieties about “pureza de sangre.”

Keywords:

• Freud
• hybridity
• lycanthropy
• pureza de sangre
• Wolf Man

Notes

¹For more on this episode, see Sconduto 29.

²For more on lycanthropy in European literature, see Carey; Davidson; Gerstein; Higley; Krappe; and Ménard.

³See also Alcalá Galán; Bush; Foster Gittes; Huerga; Sánchez Laílla; Santos; Vicente García; and Wells.

⁴On the intersection of pyschoanalysis and lycanthropy, see Corbellari; Ginzburg; Grinberg and Rodríguez; and Gutenberg.

⁵On the early modern Spanish association of canines with Moriscos, who were often seen as economic parasites, see also Hutchinson 73; and Quérillacq.