Gregorio Mayans y la invención mitificadora de Cervantes

This essay revisits the Vida de Miguel de Cervantes, written by Gregorio Mayans and included in the monumental London edition of Don Quixote (1738), sponsored by Lord Carteret. Here, on the one hand, I explore the way in which lord Carteret as well as Mayans manipulate Cervantine cultural capital to advance, respectively, their own agen-das; on the other hand, as a result of factual coincidences between Mayans’s life and Cervantes’s biography, I analyze the emphasis Mayans places on aspects of Cervantes’s life—i.e., his poverty, elites’ indifference, contemporaries’ envy, the lack of financial sup¬port from both the aristocracy and the royalty—that will become unquestionable and unquestioned features of an invented image of Cervantes.