Did Cervantes Stutter?

The connection between written literature and its oral forms has long interested scholars. Literary scholars, however, have paid little attention to stuttering and its relationship to literature. The stutterer is keenly aware of the difficult world between the written and the spoken word; between the word on paper and speech itself.1 The stutterer accords his own speech an extraordinary degree of attention and the stutterer’s way of thinking about language differs remarkably from that of a non-stutterer. Indeed, the difficulty that stutterers have in speaking can cause them to focus on written language and inspire literary brilliance. A few scholars write that Miguel de Cervantes was a stutterer. Cervantes’ biographer Luis Astrana Marín (I: 332) briefly explains that Cervantes stuttered as did Aristotle. George Shipley and Adrienne Laskier Martín make passing mention to Cervantes as a stutterer. Recently, the medical historian Angel Rodríguez Cabezas asserts that Cervantes stuttered, but his conclusion has not inspired significant study from literary circles. Biographers generally do not treat the question and no literary scholar has dedicated a full-length study to the question. The following article examines the current state