Capturing the Pícaro in Words: Literary and Institutional Representations of Marginal Communities in Early Modern Madrid

Capturing the Pìcaro in Words discusses the framing of the transient marginals of early modern Madrid in the literary pìcaro. It compares the perceptions of constables, shopkeepers, and criminals, to those of mass-produced literary representations, and argues that the literary representations "displaced" the pìcaro, assigning the marginals different places in the literary texts in order to centralise the problem of urban vagrancy. The texts "spanished" the pìcaro, thus establishing the image of a culturally homogenous group; and lastly, "silenced" the pìcaro, under-representing the power marginals in the city derived from their knowledge of the information flows in the city.