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This dissertation examines representations of legal, theological, and medical modes of case thinking and case narration in the novella collections of four early modern authors: Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), Matteo Bandello (c.1485-1562), and Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). It further investigates how these collections perform and problematize practices of narrating and interpreting cases while framing such practices within the context of the navigation of daily news. Indeed, keen observers of the capacity of informal and formal networks to circulate information and opinions in unpredictable ways and on scales unprecedented, these authors also used the novella genre—and the polysemy of the term “novella”—to intervene in contemporary debates on the value of novelty and on the merits of popularizing expert knowledge. I argue that the early modern novella’s role as a literary mediator between professional forms of the case and popular forms of the news report was instrumental to its durable transnational European success. Over the course of this dissertation, I show how these collections depict the art of storytelling qua case narration as an essential ethical component of professional casuistries and of everyday information exchanges. I draw attention to specific professional inflections of the case-novella-news nexus, in order to highlight how each author conceives—and makes the case for—the indispensability of storytelling to spiritual and civic life. I demonstrate that a juridical approach to cases and novelty takes precedence in Boccaccio’s Decameron. I show that, in contrast, Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron relies on distinctly theological conceptions of cases and news. I proceed to compare the type of moral casuistry found in the Heptaméron to that found in Matteo Bandello’s Novelle. Finally, I investigate the consequences of Cervantes’ predilection for a medical approach to case analysis, novelty, and news in his Novelas ejemplares. The broader ambition of this investigation is twofold: first, to contribute a literary and historical perspective to contemporary methodological debates on the value of case thinking in the human sciences and in the liberal professions, and second, to pave the way for an exploration of the casuistical foundations of modern journalism at a time when its epistemological and ethical priorities are sorely in need of being reassessed.

Miguel de Cervantes’s novel El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha Part One (1605) and Part Two (1615) has delighted readers for centuries. The literary criticism analyzing just this one product of Cervantes’s literary genius is voluminous. In particular, the novel’s structure has received significant scrutiny, and discussions regarding its unity, or lack thereof, abound. This debate rages today with Cervantine experts still espousing various theories. Puzzling over this quandary and asking why a truly convincing explanation regarding the structure has not emerged, we arrive at a partial answer. We believe that there is unity in the Quijote and that Cervantes created a unified work by ingeniously taking full advantage of the elements of both the “Byzantine” and the chivalric literary traditions, combining them in a harmonizing synthesis. Moreover, he resolved the problem of unity within variety by establishing thematic consistency throughout. The purpose of our study is to explore the confluence of the “Byzantine” and chivalric literary traditions in works that precede Cervantes and to examine how Cervantes innovatively worked with this element in the Quijote of 1605. We present a panoramic view of works written between the thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries, which reveal writers’ efforts to combine, consciously or unconsciously, the various characteristics of the “Byzantine” and chivalric literary traditions. For this project, we look at six representative works written in Spanish or Italian that represent significant antecedents to the Quijote and Cervantes’s unique method of synthesizing the traditions: Libro de Apolonio, Libro del caballero Zifar, Orlando innamorato, Orlando furioso, Palmerín de Olivia, Los amores de Clareo y Florisea y los trabajos de la sin ventura Isea. We investigate each author’s approach at coupling the two traditions and determine his/her degree of success in merging them artistically to produce a coherent whole. Our analysis reveals that not only does Cervantes systematically integrate the two literary traditions in his parody, but he also skillfully devises a way to unify thematically the delightful variety in his work. To wit, Cervantes embraces the theme of literature (fiction) and life (reality) and explores the need for distinguishing judiciously between them. / text