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  • A Squire’s Schooling:The Education of Sancho Panza
  • G. Cory Duclos

—Yo no quiero encarecerte el servicio que te hago en darte a conocer tan noble y tan honrado caballero, pero quiero que me agradezcas el conocimiento que tendrás del famoso Sancho Panza, su escudero, en quien, a mi parecer, te doy cifradas todas las gracias escuderiles que en la caterva de los libros vanos de caballerías están esparcidas.

Don Quijote (I, Prólogo 12)

The understanding that Miguel de Cervantes was engaged in the prominent debates of his time comes from the research committed to contextualizing his work within the production of early modern scholarship. The widespread influence of Don Quixote over the last four centuries, many would argue, is due not simply to the fact that the book is entertaining, but because it focuses on the social issues that concerned the author’s contemporaries as well as new readers today. Most works that analyze how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century humanism informed Cervantes, however, typically seek to find similarities between the author and renaissance academics (primarily Erasmus), without looking closely at how Don Quixote dialogues with the intellectual tradition. As Matthew Wyszynski has pointed out, the humorous wordplay between Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza is a satirical representation of early modern educational texts. Humanist thought appears in Don Quixote not as a simple allusion or repetition, but as part of Cervantes’s engagement with the issues of cultural conflict, in large part through his representation of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The knight/squire relationship is more complicated than they typical servant/master dynamic and can be better understood in terms of a student and teacher, in which the illiterate Sancho must learn of his squirely duties from the knowledgeable knight. Yet as a pupil, Sancho does not passively accept everything that his master teaches. Instead, he reinterprets the lessons about knight errantry to suit his own proto-capitalist outlook, [End Page 69] asserting his desire for material gain over Don Quixote’s loftier ideals. The resulting tension represents broader social clashes taking place during the early modern period, yet it is also an essential element of the metafictional nature of Don Quixote. Sancho’s resistance to Don Quixote’s idealism is not an outright affront against knight errantry. Instead, the squire strategically reuses the language of the tales of chivalry to pursue a governorship, just as early modern schoolboys reinterpreted the lessons of their teachers with subversive intent.

With a few notable exceptions, the most common approach to studying the influence of humanism on Cervantes has been to seek similarities between his work and other contemporary texts. Much of this scholarship is rooted in Américo Castro’s El pensamiento de Cervantes. Marcel Bataillon and Alban K. Forcione have also made laudable contributions to understanding the close relationship between Cervantes and Erasmus. Yet this research has not existed without controversy. Castro later recanted his work, in part, for having based his own historical analysis upon the studies of Jacob Burckhardt, which overemphasized the secular nature of the renaissance, downplaying Erasmus’s Christianity (Forcione 10). Castro’s change of opinion caused a shift in the debate regarding humanism in Cervantes. Rather than question how Cervantes interacted with other thinkers, studies dealt primarily with finding affinities between the Spaniard and the Dutchman in search of evidence of intellectual influence. Arthur Kinney, for example, dedicates a chapter of his book Continental Humanist Poetics to Don Quixote, comparing the knight to Erasmus’s Moriae Encomium (The Praise of Folly), among other texts. While Kinney does show several similarities, he does not investigate how Cervantes both reflects upon and engages with humanist thought.1

The line of inquiry into what Cervantes took from humanists began with an attempt to better understand the writer as a serious intellectual. Yet the repeated efforts to list textual similarities, which can always be criticized for their subjectivity, have done little to further the understanding of how Don Quixote participates in larger cultural debates. It is, of course, impossible to know to what extent Cervantes consciously included humanist concerns within Don Quixote. But by accepting that the author lived within a relatively...

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