ABSTRACT
There is a very great deal of critical and scholarly literature on the general theme of patronage in early modern Europe, beginning with Sir Francis Haskell's work dating from the 1960s, and in general its quality is very high. In sum, Cervantes rejected the institution of patronage at the level of discourse and wrote a hilarious parody of it. In the dedication Cervantes eases into a falsely self-deprecatory tone. The learned apparatus of the sacred and humanist archive is obviously a legitimating device for books of the kind that Cervantes avowedly wrote and defended in the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares: recreational books. The most important thrust is directed at the scholarly apparatus of Christian and humanistic learning that literally surrounds certain fictional works. Narrative fiction scarcely makes an appearance in the poetics and the discursive taxonomies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, the land where literary historiography is forever telling people that the novel was "born.".
