This dictionary offers readers the chance to survey Cervantes’ life and oeuvre as they please through more than 130 entries that make it possible to focus on his family environment, the cities he lived in, his military campaigns and captivity in Algiers, his intellectual background, his attitude to the world and the Spain of his day, his literary output and his posthumous fame.

Anyone who browses through its pages will find current knowledge – divested of legend – where as yet unresolved debates are cautiously addressed: Cervantes’ origins, his departure for Italy, his attempts to escape, his love affairs, his imprisonments, his ideological choices, his lost or attributed works, his poetic disillusionments and his frustrations at the success of more fortunate rivals.

The appeal Cervantes continues to hold today is due above all to Don Quixote. His masterpiece and the mark it has left on those who have reflected on it are accordingly given the space they deserve: the book examines its reception in art (Goya, Doré, Dalí, Picasso), music (Purcell, Telemann, Massenet, Strauss, Falla), film (Pabst, Welles, Gutiérrez Aragón), criticism (Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Mann, Marthe Robert, Foucault) and literature (Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Galdós, Kafka, Borges).

Jean Canavaggio (1936–2023) was professor emeritus at the Université Paris Nanterre and one of the most prestigious international scholars of Cervantes. Prominent among his contributions in this field are Cervantes (1986, latest ed. 2015), Cervantes entre vida y creación (2000), Don Quijote, del libro al mito (2006) and Retornos a Cervantes (2014). He coordinated Historia de la literatura española (1994−95) and collaborated on Francisco Rico’s edition of Don Quixote. He was editor of a French translation of Cervantes’ works of prose published in 2001 at Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, as well as a translation of Don Quixote brought out in 2015 as part of the same series. He is also the author of Les Espagnes de Mérimée (2016).

“Jean Canavaggio’s Diccionario Cervantes is a rich book, filled with reliable and interesting material on the world’s greatest novelist. Textually, and especially visually, it is worth every minute one spends with it”, Howard Mancin, The Cervantes Society of America

“Una obra pulcramente editada, donde la hermosura del “continente” va en consonancia con la riqueza del contenido, en un interesantísimo diálogo de textos e imágenes. […] constituye una obra de referencia fundamental en el marco de los estudios cervantinos, y su lectura es una forma tan enriquecedora como amena de entrar en conocimiento de la figura y la obra de Miguel de Cervantes”, Carlos Mata Induráin, Hipogrifo

“Canavaggio, maestro de cervantistas, nos sorprende nuevamente con un libro editado con primor […] Un monumento al saber y esfuerzo de síntesis de lo que se ha escrito sobre el autor del Quijote”, Abraham Madroñal, Anales Cervantinos

“Recomiendo con verdadero empeño la lectura de esta obra, quintaesencia del trabajo de un hispanista que ha consagrado seis décadas de su vida al estudio de la biografía y de la obra del más grande escritor de la literatura española y, ¿puedo decirlo?, universal”, Francisco Florit Durán, La Occidental

“Estamos ante un magnífico trabajo, que no podía haber sido posible sin el vasto saber y la espléndida pluma de uno de los más prestigiosos cervantistas del hispanismo internacional”, Esther Borrego Gutiérrez, Nueva Revista

“The Diccionario Cervantes by the subject’s pre-eminent scholar, the French biographer Jean Canavaggio, is a richly illustrated compendium of the writer’s life and Works”, Isambard Wilkinson, The Times