Publishing a collection of novellas under the title of Novelas ejemplares, Cervantes challenged the Italian tradition of the genre or, at least, its generally negative reception among Spanish critics. Indeed, the Boccaccian genre was held in low esteem because of both its questionable morality and its virtual non-existence in the literary theory of the Renaissance.

Although some Italian theorists mentioned the novella in their discussion of the highly respected classical Aristotelian genres (tragedy, comedy, and epic), the fact is that not even Giraldi Cinthio, a critic and a novelist himself, devoted time to designing a poetic of this ‘new’ genre (Clements & Gibaldi 6). Even though Francesco Bonciani and Francisco de Lugo y Dávila (an Italian and a Spaniard, respectively) undertook the task of writing a poetic of the novella, their efforts were isolated; they did not seem to affect the general tendency of mainstream critics like Tasso, Cinthio, Castelvetro, López Pinciano, Guarini, or Mazzoni to ignore the genre.

While in Italy critics tended not to acknowledge the literary status of the novella simply by maintaining a general silence towards it, critics in Spain were not inhibited in their attacks on the Italian genre. As a matter of fact, although Cervantes thought that, by naming his work Novelas ejemplares, he was separating his texts from the poorly reputed (but indeed widely read and enjoyed) Boccaccian novellas, he was not aware that, between the years 1541 and 1553, Alejo de Venegas had used the very same term to refer both to lascivious narrations associated with the Milesian tales – the old wives’ tales condemned by St Paul – and, strangely enough, to Muslim and Jewish heresies alike (88, 93). This generally negative attitude toward the genre is perfectly understandable in a country that, under the spirit of the Reconquista, conceived of itself as the earthly guardian of Catholic dogma: the very order challenged by Boccaccio in his novellas, and, after Boccaccio, by the Reformers (Clements & Gibaldi 213).

Yet, the negative attitude towards the novella was based not solely on moral disapproval but on artistic objections too. In the cultural climate of the Renaissance, when every literary work had to be justified and evaluated through classical poetic theories, the novella stood as a non-classical genre.