Paul Michael Johnson's Affective Geographies brings together two increasingly important scholarly approaches—affect studies and Mediterranean studies—and applies them to Cervantes's works. The book is divided into three sections that feature two chapters each. Part 1, “Casting Off,” functions as a multipronged presentation of Johnson's topic, with his first chapter existing as a kind of traditional introduction (complete with section and chapter summaries), while his second chapter more thoroughly lays out the theoretical and scholarly groundwork for Johnson's central argument that there is something particularly Mediterranean about Cervantes's representation of emotion, and that there exists “an innate and potent relationship . . . between affectivity and the spaces in which it is expressed” (28).

Part 2, “Quixotic Passages,” focuses on Don Quixote. Johnson's third chapter analyzes the affective importance of a regimen of public shaming in premodern and early modern Iberia within the context of what he calls “a decidedly Mediterranean phenomenon” of Christian Inquisition (69). Insisting that this regimen of public shaming is central to the decision made at the end of the 1605 part 1 to transport Cervantes's mad knight home in a cage, Johnson argues that such a gesture is discursively connected to shaming rituals like the forced wearing of sambenitos and the autos-da-fé, and is thus inextricably linked through affect to Iberian preoccupations with limpieza de sangre: “there could hardly be a more striking reminder of the politics of blood purity than the blush whose appearance depends in an equally vital way upon the same bodily fluid” (96–97).

In chapter 4, Johnson turns his attention to the question of laughter—this time within the pan-Mediterranean context of the Spanish expulsion of the Moriscos—to reframe well-known debates regarding whether Don Quixote should be read as just another funny book rather than as a much more philosophically serious text. Through an examination of Sancho's encounter with Ricote toward the end of the 1615 part 2, during which the two former neighbors share a moment of laughter that Johnson says creates an “intersubjective bond” (125), this chapter argues that “to laugh with the Morisco Ricote is to sympathize with his plight, thereby introducing an unassuming yet potent political gesture into an episode brimming with historical urgency” (125).

Part 3, “Other Ports of Call,” focuses on the Novelas ejemplares and Persiles y Sigismunda. Chapter 5 examines what Johnson calls “the problem of surprise” in La española inglesa (136) and argues that “the intense affects of suspension [i.e., admiratio, turbación, confusión, sobresalto, and suspensión] mark the calamities, conundrums, and adversities we are invited to work through and benefit from, [thus] underwriting a characteristically Cervantine kind of exemplarity” (163). Chapter 6 examines Persiles y Sigismunda and traces “the aporetic withholding of emotional signifiers [that unfolds] in the form of ineffability” (176). Insisting that Cervantes's last novel is pointedly Mediterranean even in its depiction of Europe's northern geographies, Johnson's conclusions in his final chapter function not only as a commentary on the importance of affect in Persiles y Sigismunda but also as a statement on the representation of affect throughout his entire body of work: “by depicting emotions in all their deferrals, discordance, and difficulties, the language of the text can be seen to amplify the very limits of verisimilitude, enlarging the impossible possibilities that undergird language” (189; italics in original).

Affective Geographies is a beautiful and readable book that covers much more terrain than what I have been able to outline above. The breadth and depth of Johnson's scholarship is impressive and he provides cogent insights that illuminate numerous scholarly debates beyond just those related to the fields of affect studies and Mediterranean studies. Moreover, the several maps and illustrations that he intersperses throughout the book—including the wonderfully anthropomorphized map of the Mediterranean taken from Opicinus de Canistris's fourteenth-century Vaticanus Latinus that adorns Johnson's dust jacket—provide an emotional immediacy to his arguments and highlight an affective intertextuality that crosses not just literary genres but visual media forms as well. In sum, Affective Geographies is a welcome addition to the ever-growing scholarship on Cervantes's life and works.