expressed itself in the emancipation of women which was 
accomplished by assigning men and women to the same jobs. 
It was thereby hoped they would be free. But this mechanical 
operation of the human spirit was also felt and furiously 
resisted in the first age of print. “One might almost say,” writes 
Leo Lowenthal in Literature and the Image of Man  (p. 41), 
“that the prevailing philosophy of human nature since the 
Renaissance has been based on the conception of each 
individual as a “deviant case whose existence consists very 
largely in his efforts to assert his personality against the 
restrictive and levelling claims of society.”

     Before considering the evidence from the world of 
Cervantes offered by Lowenthal, here are two peripheral items 
that also bear on these issues. Writing of Oxford University in 
the sixteenth century, C. E. Mallet opens his second volume of