It has repeatedly been pointed out the irruption of violence in Cervantes' La Galatea. Nevertheless, violence had not been alien to previous Spanish pastoral novels: grabbing, tying, stoning, kidnapping, raping, committing suicide, murdering (including filicide and parricide), wounding, persecuting, dismembering, beheading, arresting, torturing, drowning, scratching, without forgetting sword fights and naval battles, are violent scenes that appear in pastoral novels prior to Cervantes' work. At this point, one might wonder why violence in La Galatea has particularly called scholars' attention. This article proposes that the Spanish pastoral novel before Cervantes' La Galatea is governed by a narrative 'economy of violence'. The article aims to build a conceptual framework to understand the mechanisms of the regulation of violence in the Spanish pastoral novel prior to La Galatea and will study the changes introduced by Cervantes in response to them.