Background
Jean Canavaggio was born on July 23, 1936 in Paris, France, into te family of Dominique and Madeleine (De Morati Gentile) Canavaggio.
Jean Canavaggio studied at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1960.
Jean Canavaggio studied at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1960.
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1990
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2000
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2005
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2012
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2016
Jean Canavaggio was born on July 23, 1936 in Paris, France, into te family of Dominique and Madeleine (De Morati Gentile) Canavaggio.
Jean Canavaggio studied at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1960. It is also known that he received Docteur es lettresin 1975.
Jean Canavaggio is a biographer and specialist of Cervantès. From 1988 to 1992, he was president of the jury of external agrégation of Spanish. From 1996 to 2001, he was director of the Casa de Velázquez at Madrid. His work in the Cervantian domain is now authoritative. In 2001, he directed a new translation of his complete novels in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
Writer Jean Canavaggio is a renowned Cervantes scholar whose biography of Spain’s most famous writer was lauded as “a tour de force of literary biography”, by Bronwyn Drainie in the Boston Globe, and won France’s highest book award, the Prix Goncourt. As Canavaggio reveals in Cervantes, little is known about the historical Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote Don Quixote, a work considered by many scholars to be the first modern novel.
Those facts about his life that can be documented include that he fought in a famous naval battle, was captured by Turks and held hostage in Algiers for four years, worked for the crown as a tax collector upon his return to Spain, and was later imprisoned for bankruptcy. Though Don Quixote became a literary sensation during his lifetime, Cervantes earned little profit from its publication and spent the majority of his life penniless.
Mr. Canavaggio’s critical biography is marked by an extreme caution that both defines the limits of his task and proves curiously liberating. That is, in order to avoid the lure of speculation, Canavaggio recounts the documentable history of his subject, augmented by a history of Spain as Cervantes likely experienced it. The result is “a collage-like portrait” in which what is known about Cervantes is discussed in terms of the historical context for his life, according to a reviewer in Publishers Weekly.
Thus, Canavaggio describes a monarchy still intent on pursuing the goals of the Crusades centuries after the last Crusade was fought, an aristocracy that owned but improperly exploited the majority of the country’s land, and, in the wake of Spain’s demonization of Jews, the absence of an expanding, energetic middle- class of merchants and manufacturers. “The result- does this sound familiar?—was inflation, famine, disorder,” summarized Peter Conrad in the Observer.
He is corresponding member of the Real Academia de la Lengua and the Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid) and honorary fellow of the Hispanic Society of America (New York).
Quotes from others about the person
Jean Canavaggio, who knows as much about Cervantes as anyone alive, begins by dolefully confessing all that we don’t know.
Jean married an archivist Perrine Ramin on February 19, 1977. They have four children: Laure, Francois, Emmanuel, and Bertrand.
