Engaging with the interdisciplinary fields of Mediterranean studies, affect theory, and the history of emotion, Paul Michael Johnson reads Cervantes’s texts alongside the affective structures that inscribe the Mediterranean as a space of conflict, commerce, expansion, and empire. In particular, he argues that Cervantes’s writing, with its uncommon focus on the Moorish, Islamic, and North African experience, can serve to realign misconceptions about the Mediterranean we have inherited today. proposes that, with a more than four-hundred-year history of impacting the hearts and minds of readers, Cervantes’s works constitute a literary , ramifying beyond fiction to alter the popular imaginary and long-term cultural landscape.