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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 nor 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, 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. Sanchos 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...