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Abstract
In sixteenth-century Barcelona, printing houses mainly produced books in Catalan, Castilian, and Latin. At times, imprints contained combinations of these languages. This analysis of a printed compilation of Passion-centered poetry employs metonymy to study the intersections of whole and partial texts within La dolorosa passio del nostre redemptor Jesuchrist (Barcelona, 1518) alongside the identities of its readers as individuals and as members of an ecclesiastical whole. I argue that the Latin fragments and Catalan verses in La dolorosa passió guided readers through individual and collective modes of Catholic devotion, including personal compassion for Christ’s suffering and remembrance of communal liturgical celebrations. A unique aspect of this printed book is that the printer, Pere Posa, was the one who inserted Latin phrases before and after the Catalan poems. His decision to mingle Latin fragments with Catalan poetry points to the existence of an early modern Iberian readership that performed personal and collective devotional practices in both languages. Mukul Saxena’s concept of lifestyle diglossia illustrates how lay Catholic readers tailored their use of Latin and Catalan on La dolorosa passió’s folios to match religious practices they as individuals and their society as a whole were cultivating. The presence of contiguous Latin fragments and Catalan verses demonstrates that, far from compartmentalizing their communal and individual religious experiences, early modern Iberian Catholics enacted overlapping collective and personal identities while reading printed devotional books. I contend that we can trace these intersections by putting content in dialogue with materiality using imprints like La dolorosa passió.
Acknowledgments
I thank Pau Cañigueral Batllosera for helping refine my translations from Catalan to English; any mistakes are my own. Thanks are also due to Yasmine Beale-Rivaya, Veronica Menaldi, and Donald W. Wood, whose comments and suggestions improved this article.
Notes
1 Only four extant editions, all dated 1518, bear the name of Pere Posa the younger, a master printer in Barcelona. His more prolific uncle of the same name was active in Barcelona from 1481 to 1505 (Delgado Casado 558–59).
2 “The Story of the Passion of our Master and Redeemer Jesus Christ.” Translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. In transcriptions from La dolorosa passió, I have expanded the abbreviations and preserved the original spelling, adding modern diacritical marks or punctuation only where needed for clarity. I have modernized the spelling of the abbreviated titles of “La dolorosa passió,” the “Contemplació” and the “Oració.”
3 “Devout Contemplation of Jesus Crucified, Made by Monsignor Joan Escrivà, Financial Officer, and by Monsignor Fenollar.”
4 “Devout Prayer to the Holiest Virgin Mary Having her Son Lord Jesus on her Lap Descended from the Cross.”
5 Fenollar’s and Escrivà’s “Contemplació” appeared in various compilations in addition to La dolorosa passió in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The first instance of its inclusion in a manuscript compilation of cançoner poetry was the Jardinet d’orats in 1486 (Garcia Sempere 168).
6 Reading in the late medieval and early modern periods included listening to others read aloud. For the purposes of this article, I focus on those who held the book in their hands and made meaning from the words and images printed on the folios.
7 Alejandro Coroleu provides a representative study and bibliography of affective spirituality texts that highlight the linguistic variety of such books printed in the Crown of Aragon (for his lists, see 749–50).
8 The Biblioteca Nacional de España catalogues it under the rubric of the first poem (a4r), as the Istoria de la passió de nostre senyor deu Iesu Christ ab algunes altres piadoses contemplacions seguint lo euangelista Sant Iohan.
9 The woodcut appears once on the folio preceding “La hystoria” (a3v) and again prior to the “Contemplació” (k1v).
10 “Amen,” a Hebrew word, entered Latin and other languages via transliteration (Cruden 16, Cross and Livingstone 51).
11 See bibliographic descriptions of the Biblioteca Colombina’s intact witness to La dolorosa passió, for which other scholars use the title Lo passi en cobles, by Wilkinson (Iberian Books no. 8668), Garcia Sempere (183–85), Martín Abad (no. 673), Norton (no. 210), and Aguiló y Fuster (no. 2099).
12 “some devout contemplations in verse.”
13 “[Here is] Finished the Woeful Passion of Our Redeemer Jesus Christ, Newly Printed by Master Pere Posa, Catalan.”
14 “Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy great mercy.”
15 “You who suffered for our salvation, have mercy on us.”
16 “To the most illustrious and most devout lady Dona Isabel de Villena, worthy abbess of the Monastery of the Holy Trinity in Valencia.”
17 Albert Hauf opines that Fenollar’s request that Isabel de Villena improve their poetry was in earnest (312).
18 That Isabel de Villena’s Vita Christi was well-received may be surmised from the sixteenth-century reeditions that followed its initial printing in 1497: an edition by Jorge Costilla in Valencia in 1513 and another by Carles Amorós in Barcelona in 1527.
19 “Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy great mercy, and according to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my iniquity. Wash me yet more from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin” (Psalm 50:3–4).
20 “Your wave of blood washes the stains from us, / and after so many years, / your torments give us rest.”
21 “God, the one who contemplates you from the cross on the tree / hanging between thieves for our salvation.”
22 I became aware of Saxena’s reformulation of diglossia and how it could apply to Latin phrases in sixteenth-century vernacular texts thanks to Donald W. Wood’s “Yā Maryam/Ave Maria.”
23 Other references to an altarpiece appear in the first poem, “La hystoria”: “Puix donchs tal retaule ab tinta vermella / pintat fos d’açots, ab tan greus pinzells, / portant yol recort de vostra querela / sostinga greus penes ab força novella, / puix tant mos peccats son causa daquells [Since, then, such an altarpiece with red ink was painted with lashings, with such broad brushes, / I bearing the memory of your complaint/ sustain great sufferings with new force, / since my sins are so much their cause]” (fol. 22v); “Moriu donchs vos deu per que lom contemple / Tostemps per retaule en vostre sanct temple / A vos enla creu ab digne recort [You die, then, O God, so that man may contemplate / Always on the altarpiece in your holy temple / You on the cross with worthy remembrance]” (fol. 25v).
24 “A perfect altarpiece in our sight
are you, nailed on the cross, so stretched out,
your body all wounded, with the soul saddened,
aflame with great love,
praying for those who made a trial against you.
You show us, in such a case, a humble example
of giving forgiveness to those who persecute us;
Therefore, everyone should contemplate you well,
[as you are] placed in difficulty,
since you are the administrator of the good that nurtures us.”
25 These ideas are Isidro Rivera’s; I am indebted to him for bringing the Retablo de la vida de Cristo to my attention and for his analysis of visual and devotional elements across its multiple editions.
26 “Having pardoned those who tormented you / healing the wounds of those who wounded you; / you have given your life to the men that killed you.”
27 “Therefore the eyes cry and the hard heart sighs, / We beat our chests going barefoot, / and our soul gazes intently at yours / giving you chase.”
28 “We adore you, Christ, and we bless you, who by your holy cross you redeemed the world. You who suffered for us, Lord, Lord, have mercy on us.”
29 “You who suffered for our salvation, have mercy on us.”