Examines five early modern novels from the seventeenth century in Spain and France: Cervantes’s Don Quijote, Zayas’s Desengaños amorosos, Scarron’s Roman comique, Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre Monde, and Mme. de Lafayette’s Zayde. This book enables upper level students and scholars to see how the authors use the developing form of the novel to engage in skeptical inquiry.

This book allows students and scholars of early modern literature, history and philosophy to see how the novel can shed new light on the period by exploring how literature becomes a means to express these differences and put them in productive dialogue.

By identifying the philosophic stakes of these literary works, this book shows students and scholars how these novels are part of the larger skeptical turn of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in Europe enabling them to see the importance of studying literature alongside history and philosophy.