This article draws on Aristotle, Castiglione, Vives and Huarte to examine the representation of anticipatory and retrospective shame in Cervantes’s La fuerza de la sangre (1613) in relation to prevailing notions of honra and honestidad, which were underpinned by deeprooted preconceptions linking virtue to blood and lineage, and reputation to wealth. In analyzing the social and gender dimensions of early modern approaches to shame, the article seeks to shed new light on the existing critical debates on the verisimilitude and the exemplarity of this tale.