“Curiosa Impertinente”: Women and Curiosity on the Spanish–North African Borderlands

In European imaginings of the Islamic world, women incited intense curiosity and were often depicted by early modern writers as sexualized subjects and curious objects of male desire. However, this Orientalist fascination ignores the very curiosity of these women and their desire to glean knowledge about the world around them. While curiosity became increasingly valued in the early modern period as a means of progress, female curiosity was still often linked to the perils of excess (Neil Kenny). This essay examines this apparent contradiction by focusing on the Muslim protagonist in one of Miguel de Cervantes’s plays that takes place on the Spanish–North African borderlands. In Los baños de Argel (1615), Zahara defends her desire to inquire about the world by portraying herself as a “curious impertinent” (“curiosa impertinente”), a name that clearly recalls the tale of “El curioso impertinente” intercalated in the first part of Don Quixote (1605). Moreover, Zahara harnesses her ability to ask questions to further her goals and ambitions. Ultimately, through a close reading of the female protagonist in this play, I argue that Cervantes considers the ways in which women asserted their own curiosity and represented themselves as agents of inquiry.