Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Life of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra). Book V of the edition of Don Quixote (Biblioteca Nacional de España) [659]

Martín Fernández de Navarrete was Cervantes’s most influential biographer, at least throughout the whole of the 1800s and much of the 1900s. His network of librarians, archivists, scholars and friends enabled him to access 31 unpublished documents which shed light on very specific aspects of Cervantes’s life that were hitherto unknown or widely debated. It may be deduced from his way of working that he was a biographer who never moved from his study, as he did not see the original documents but worked with transcriptions sent by his friends and correspondents.
In 1819 the Real Academia Española published its fourth edition of Don Quixote. The main novelty was its new biography of Cervantes by Martín Fernández de Navarrete, which made up the 644-page long fifth volume accompanied by transcriptions of the new documents discovered. This biography provides so much new information that Navarrete proudly claimed “to have shed so much new light on the events of Cervantes’s life that it seems to be the life of a different person if compared with the previously published [biographies]”.

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