Introduction: A Consideration of Lay Knowledge in Early Modern Spain

In his (ironically) canonical story, "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote," Jorge Luis Borges spins an absurd yarn of a twentieth-century French intellectual who wills himself to rewrite word for word chapters 1-9 of part 1 of Don Quixote because he considers Cervantes's version contingent and unnecessary (54). Menard seeks to enrich Cervantes's text by enhancing it with Nietzschean ideas and setting it against the backdrop of 19th-century Orientalist French visions of Spain. Accordingly, the original statement that history is the mother of truth is merely an "elogio retórico de la historia" because the author is "el 'ingenio lego' Cervantes," but when Menard writes these same words, he does so as the contemporary of William James, aware that historical truth "es lo que juzgamos que sucedió" (Borges 57). Perhaps it is because Cervantes's literary works are so entertaining, or because he made himself the target of so many ironic barbs, that the image of the author as the uneducated genius proliferated. Borges has (finally) taught us one lesson well: it is dangerous to fall into the trap laid by an anachronistic understanding of the phrase "ingenio lego" as "ingenio inculto." Paul Mérimée showed over 70 years ago that, when Cervantes called himself an "ingenio lego" in the Viaje de Parnaso, the most common meaning of lego was laic, referring to someone with little education in ecclesiastical matters (453). As Covarrubias states regarding lego, "Dezimos de un hombre ser muy lego quando está poco instruydo en materias eclesiásticas" (757).

As a self-proclaimed ingenio lego, Cervantes did not write as a naïve or ignorant rube. As the articles in this issue of Cervantes show, he drew from rich, varied, and deep storehouses of learning and knowledge, but they were not necessarily or primarily those associated with traditional Scholastic and religious knowledge. Peer reviewers have selected these 11 articles for publication from those submitted by the 70 scholars who attended the 2018 Cervantes Society of America conference held at the University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada on September 27-29, 2018. The articles printed in this issue of Cervantes—and edited with the formidable assistance of Isabel Lara—deal with La Galatea, Don Quixote de la Mancha, and Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, as well as the Novelas ejemplares and his comedias. All of these scholars take as a given that Cervantes was an author engaged with his society, knowledgeable of major discourses and problematics, and in control of his art. Far from appearing as the rustic genius who wrote a masterpiece in spite of himself seen in some nineteenth-century criticism, the vanishing author of high modernism and new criticism, or the "dead" author of post-modernism, here the author Cervantes emerges as a necessary presence whose knowledge of extratextual codes of conduct or knowledge systems serves as the key for interpreting the text. How, then, did Cervantes understand himself as an ingenio lego? In order to propose a preliminary answer to that question, I will turn to Cervantes's representation of his literary persona, poetics, and work in the Viaje del Parnaso (1614). As both a statement of his poetics and a literary performance of his persona as poet, it offers meaningful statements and gestures indicating how Cervantes understood his texts to function.

In chapter 6 of the Viaje del Parnaso, the lyrical I, a voice linked to Cervantes, lays eyes in a dream upon the swollen figure of Vainglory, daughter of Desire and Fame, and impregnated by the wind. An unidentified voice identifies her to him: "A no estar ciego, / hubieras visto ya quién es la dama; / pero, en fin, tienes el ingenio lego" (Cervantes, Viaje 6.172-74). Cervantes's self-characterization, enunciated by a denigrating rival, is but one of many and varied provided in the poem that lists both his successes and his failures, subjecting the author himself to the multiple voices of polyphony and many points of view of perspectivism (Canavaggio 35-37). Nor does Cervantes limit his self-description to the (possible) gesture...