The story of Princess Antonomasia is one of the relatively autonomous tales interpolated into the string of adventures centered round the title character of Don Quixote. The fact that the Princess is named after the rhetorical device of antonomasia ( pronominatio), well known from ancient and early modern textbooks (Cicero, Quintilian, Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, Cypriano de Soarez), is also one of the many signals alerting the reader to the multilevel significance of names and naming in Cervantes’ fictional world. So, in this case, Antonomasia functions as a regular proper name and, once its figurative potential is factored in, as an alias, hiding or replacing the Princess’s real name.
In Don Quixote Cervantes uses antonomasia, i.e. the trope of calling a person by a descriptive tag different from his or her given name, not only to multiply new, straightforwardly appropriate epithets, but also to open to metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, allegory, irony or paradox.