La difusión manuscrita temprana del Buscón de Quevedo, a la luz de una noticia de época desatendida

Abstract

The aim of this article is to recover a 17th-century letter, preserved in the library of the Real Academia de la Historia. Its interest lies in the fact that the manuscript includes some information about Quevedo’s Buscon. According to its text, scholars should reconsider the idea that this work had an early and profuse handwritten diffusion, previous to the first edition, published in Zaragoza in 1626. The letter is also an early testimony about the reception of the picaresque novel in Madrid at that time: it is the first critical judgment about the Buscon. In addition, it can be inferred from this letter that another edition could have circulated simultaneously, or even prior to the princeps in that place. That unknown edition differed from the other at least for having included a promise about a forthcoming second part, a detail that was only mentioned in manuscript tradition.