Cervantes's most famous work is undoubtedly Don Quijote, which was published in two parts in 1605 and 1615. Next to the Quijote his Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Tales), which appeared in 1613, have attracted most critical attention, but, except in the case of professional academic scholars and their students, they have always remained relatively little known outside the Spanish-speaking world. It is the aim of this Companion volume to introduce them to a wider English-speaking audience. This Introduction will attempt to give a general overview of the Novelas ejemplares – their dating, sources and generic affiliations – as well as of the Spanish and broader European literary-historical environments in which Cervantes wrote them, with special attention being devoted to the related and much-discussed questions of the coherence of the stories as a collection and their exemplary nature.

Cervantes and His Work

Cervantes was born in 1547 in Alcalá de Henares, a small university town close to Madrid. His family seems to have moved around Spain during his childhood, and it is known that his father, a surgeon, was living in Seville in 1564. The praise of the education offered in the Jesuit college in Seville in the last of the Novelas ejemplares, El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros (The Deceitful Marriage and The Dialogue of the Dogs) has been used to support speculation that he may have received a Jesuit education there. The family moved to Madrid in 1566, and in 1568 Cervantes published his first work, a poem in praise of the newly-born Princess Catalina, the second daughter of Philip II. In 1569 he contributed four poems to an anthology compiled by Juan López de Hoyos to commemorate the death in October 1568 of the King's third wife, Isabel de Valois. In this volume, López de Hoyos, the rector of an academy called the Estudio de la Villa, refers to him as ‘nuestro caro y amado discípulo’ (our dear and beloved pupil), showing that although Cervantes never received a university education, he did, even for a short period, pursue the equivalent of third-level studies.