Cruz de Cristo: A Strange Case of Printing in Sixteenth-Century Seville

Abstract

This article examines a puzzling edition of three devotional/mystic treatises compiled by the Franciscan Francisco de (H)Evia and published under the title of Cruz de Cristo , which, according to its colophon, was printed by the Cromberger press in Seville in 1543. Typographical analysis suggests that the edition was in fact the earliest known product of the press which Estacio Carpintero was setting in that year at Seville. Drawing upon archival material as well as the results of bibliographical analysis, Griffin speculates upon the reasons why the Cromberger firm, at that time under the stewardship of Brígida Maldonado, the resourceful widow of the famous printer Juan Cromberger, might have chosen to outsource [KEY WORD: outsourcing] to a jobbing printer the production of this popular compilation that would eventually be banned by the Spanish Inquisition. The article illustrates how wary ambitious synthesising undertakings like the Iberian Book Project should be of taking at face value information contained in bibliographies as well as in the colophons of early printed books.

Notes

¹This article was written under the auspices of the ‘Proyecto de Investigación “Inquisición, cultura y vida cotidiana en el Mundo Hispánico (XVI–XVIII)”’ (HAR2011-27021).

²It is very likely that Hevia was not just the editor but also the author of the treatise entitled Cruz de Cristo; see Francisco de Hevia O.F.M., Itinerario de la oración, ed. Manuel de Castro y Castro O.F.M., Serie A—Textos 29 (Madrid: Univ. Pontificia de Salamanca/Fundación Universitaria Española, 1981), 59, 66, 71–72. Hevia/Evia is recorded as two different authors in Alexander S. Wilkinson, Iberian Books. Libros Ibéricos. Books Published in Spanish or Portuguese or on the Iberian Peninsula before 1601. Libros publicados en español o portugués (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 8559–8561 and 10279–10281 (hereafter IB).

³Hevia, Itinerario, 45–103. On the prohibition of Hevia's works see J. M[artínez]. de Bujanda, Index de l'Inquisition espagnole 1551, 1554, 1559, Index des Livres Interdits 5 (Sherbrooke: Centre d’Études de la Renaissance, Université de Sherbrooke/Genève: Droz, 1984), 430–31, 499–500, 545; J. M[artínez]. de Bujanda, Index de l'Inquisition espagnole 1583, 1584, Index des Livres Interdits 6 (Sherbrooke: Centre d’Études de la Renaissance, Université de Sherbrooke/Genève: Droz, 1993), 586–87. Vicente Bécares Botas’ Librerías salmantinas del siglo XVI, Colección Beltenebros 15 (Segovia: Fundación Instituto Castellano y Leonés de la Lengua, Caja Segovia, 2007), 71, 79, bears witness to this process: up to 1565 Salamanca bookshops stocked copies of the Cruz de Cristo but not, it seems, afterwards.

⁴Melquíades Andrés, La teología española en el siglo XVI, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos 13–14, 2 vols (Madrid: Editorial Católica, 1976–1977), II, 570.

⁵Pedro M. Cátedra & Anastasio Rojo Vega, Bibliotecas y lecturas de mujeres, siglo XVI, Serie Mayor 2 (Soria/Madrid: Instituto de Historia del Libro y de la Lectura, 2004), 128–29.

⁶Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España, trad. Antonio Alatorre, 2^a ed. (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1966), 572.

⁷Cátedra & Rojo Vega, Bibliotecas y lecturas de mujeres, 129, 149, 266–67, 297.

⁸R. 314, folio a₁ ^v. A copy of the 1545 Cromberger edition of the Cruz de Cristo printed at Seville (see below) and now in the British Library (shelfmark C.63.e.11) was once owned by another woman, possibly a nun, called ‘Joana da Crus’ (folio a₂ ^r).

⁹I take this information from Mercedes Fernández Valladares, La imprenta en Burgos (1501–1600), 2 vols (Madrid: Arco Libros, 2005), I, 165–66, and Pedro M. Cátedra, Liturgia, poesía y teatro en la Edad Media, Estudios y Ensayos 444 (Madrid: Gredos, 2005), 40, 87–88, 122, 598–602. I am grateful to Mercedes Fernández Valladares for drawing my attention to this copy of the Sacramental, providing me with digital images from it, and for recommending Pedro M. Cátedra's study.

¹⁰For a history of the Cromberger press, see Clive Griffin, The Crombergers of Seville. The History of a Printing and Merchant Dynasty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

¹¹For a recent study of that Mexican office see María Isabel Grañén Porrúa, Los grabados en la obra de Juan Pablos, primer impresor de la Nueva España, 1539–1560 (México D.F.: Apoyo al Desarrollo de Archivos y Bibliotecas de México/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011).

¹²Clive Griffin, ‘Un libro sevillano en el camino a Emaús’, in ‘Geh hin und lerne’. Homenaje al profesor Klaus Wagner, ed. Piedad Bolaños Donoso, Aurora Domínguez Guzmán & Mercedes de los Reyes Peña, 2 vols (Sevilla: Univ. de Sevilla, 2007), I, 229–42.

¹³ IB lists all three Seville editions: 4206 (under ‘Cruz de Cristo’), 10709 (under ‘Jesu Christo. Bonaventura, santo’) and 18662 (under ‘Tractado. Tratado … llamado Cruz de Christo’).

¹⁴The unique copy of the Suma de doctrina cristiana is in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (shelfmark: D-14820). This work was among several by Constantino Ponce de la Fuente that were placed on the Valdés Index (M[artínez]. de Bujanda, Index de l'Inquisition espagnole 1551, 1554, 1559, 458–62).

¹⁵The excellent series of ‘tipobibliografías’ for the sixteenth century, published by Arco Libros, has been discontinued. It is to be hoped that the one for Seville, which is currently being prepared by Arcadio Castillejo Benavente, will soon be published elsewhere.

¹⁶Mercedes Fernández Valladares warns against the attribution of unsigned and undated Spanish imprints on insufficient grounds in her ‘Historia y política en las relaciones góticas de la colección Medinaceli (Descripciones: segunda parte)’, in Las ‘Relaciones de Sucesos’ en España (1500–1750). Actas del Primer Coloquio Internacional (Alcalá de Henares, 8, 9 y 10 de junio de 1995), ed. María Cruz García de Enterría, Henry Ettinghausen, Víctor Infantes & Augustin Redondo (Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Univ. de Alcalá/ Publications de la Sorbonne, 1996), 133–55 (p. 140).

¹⁷Trujillo is frequently said to have printed a Spanish translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses in about 1542, Los cuatro libros del muy noble y valeroso caballero Félix Magno in 1543, a further edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses in 1546, and Pope John XXI's Tesoro de los pobres in 1548. It transpires that the first Ovid is a ghost; the incomplete copy of the Félix Magno now in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (shelfmark 40.R.24), which is the supposed evidence for Trujillo's edition of 1543, is in fact the third volume of his 1549 edition of that title and is wrongly listed by IB 16596; the second edition of the Metamorphoses was printed at Seville by Andrés de Burgos (correctly listed as IB 14060); and finally, although the Tesoro de los pobres was indeed printed at Seville in 1548, it was—as IB 10880 correctly maintains—a product of Dominico de Robertis’ press. It appears, then, that Francisco Escudero y Perosso, Tipografía hispalense. Anales bibliográficos de la ciudad de Sevilla desde el establecimiento de la imprenta hasta fines del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1894), 22–23, was right many years ago to suspect that Trujillo did not begin printing until 1549. Indeed, it is significant that the earliest known document he signed in Seville dates from February 1550; it was for the purchase of paper. See María Carmen Álvarez Márquez, Impresores, libreros y mercaderes de libros en la Sevilla del Quinientos, 3 vols (Zaragoza: Libros Pórtico, 2009), I, 252. I am grateful to Arcadio Castillejo Benavente for his help with my study of the early history of Trujillo's press and to María Carmen Marín Pina for kindly sharing with me her reproductions of the Vienna copy of the Félix Magno.

¹⁸María Carmen Álvarez Márquez, La impresión y el comercio de libros en la Sevilla del Quinientos (Sevilla: Secretaría de Publicaciones, Univ. de Sevilla, 2007), 55–56. The printers among them were Dominico de Robertis, Andrés de Burgos and Bartolomé Pérez. Significantly, Sebastián de Trujillo's name does not appear in the 1542 challenge to the Crombergers’ monopoly.

¹⁹The copy of Relacion muy verdadera de las rebeliones que ha auido en el reyno d[e] inglaterra (Sevilla: Simón Carpintero, 1554) now held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (shelfmark 4° H 44(1) Art. BS), has one type and a single ornamental initial in common with the Cruz de Cristo. IB 15652 lists only the edition of this title signed by the Seville printer Juan Canalla on 24 March of the same year, wrongly assuming that the Bodleian's copy is from Canalla's edition. For the latter see Aurora Domínguez Guzmán, ‘Veinte años de impresiones sevillanas (1551–1570)’, Cuadernos Bibliográficos, 37 (1978), 1–57 (p. 19).

²⁰Two of the few studies to concentrate on him and his son are: Klaus Wagner, ‘Los impresores sevillanos Estacio y Simón Carpintero. Una documentación de noticias conocidas e inéditas’, Archivo Hispalense, 2^a época, 58:178 (1975), 135–42; and Jaime Moll, ‘El taller sevillano de los Carpintero y algunas consideraciones sobre el uso de las figuritas’, in Siglos dorados. Homenaje a Augustin Redondo, ed. Pierre Civil, 2 vols (Madrid: Castalia, 2004), II, 975–83. See also Klaus Wagner, Martín de Montesdoce y su prensa. Contribución al estudio de la imprenta y de la bibliografía sevillanas del siglo XVI, Serie Filosofía y Letras 63 (Sevilla: Univ. de Sevilla, 1982), 123–24, 126-27, and Álvarez Márquez, Impresores, libreros y mercaderes de libros, I, 49–57.

²¹Moll, ‘El taller sevillano de los Carpintero’, 976. For a correction of IB 8585: ‘Faleiro, Francisco, Carpintero, Estacio. Cartilla para enseñar a leer. [Sevilla], Dominico de Robertis, 1543, 4°. C33 [= Houghton Library, Harvard]’, which should read ‘[Anonymous] Cartilla para enseñar a leer. [Sevilla, Juan Cromberger, 1532–1537?], 4°. C33’, see Víctor Infantes, ‘Un impreso wagneriano que aparece y vuelve a desaparecer. El Arte para monstrar [sic] a leer con una institución christiana de Francisco Falero (Sevilla, Simón Carpintero, 1545)’, in ‘Geh hin und lerne’, ed. Bolaños Donoso, Domínguez Guzmán & Reyes Peña, I, 243–57.

²²José Gestoso y Pérez, Noticias inéditas de impresores sevillanos (Sevilla: Gómez Hermanos, 1924), 102; Wagner, ‘Los impresores sevillanos Estacio y Simón Carpintero’, 141–42. It is not known whether the book in question was ever printed; see Infantes, ‘Un impreso wagneriano’, 250. In 1529 a typesetter called Estacio owed money to the recently deceased Jacobo Cromberger. If this were Estacio Carpintero, it would suggest that he had long been associated with the Cromberger press; see Gestoso y Pérez, Noticias inéditas, 47.

²³Wagner, ‘Los impresores sevillanos Estacio y Simón Carpintero’, 136.

²⁴Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid; shelfmark: R 40628. The Tragedia aurea was prohibited in the Valdés Index (M[artínez]. de Bujanda, Index de l'Inquisition espagnole 1551, 1554, 1559, 209–10, 478).

²⁵Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid; shelfmark: R 1740. There is no indication of the day or month when this edition of Lectiones de Job was completed. It is probable that it is this anonymous little work which was banned in Valdés’ Index under the entry ‘Lectiones de Iob en metro de romance’ (M[artínez]. de Bujanda, Index de l'Inquisition espagnole 1551, 1554, 1559, 502–03).

²⁶Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid; shelfmark: R. 314. In addition to this copy, the second one in that same library which wants its title-page (shelfmark: R. 7475), and the one in the Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon (RES. 1461 P.), I currently know of three more copies: Biblioteca Pública Episcopal del Seminario de Barcelona which is incomplete and wants the title-page (shelfmark: R. 10.014), Hispanic Society of America, New York, which retains its title-page (shelfmark: BT 453.T73 1543), and one in a private collection in Spain which also has the title-page.

²⁷Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, R. 314 is tightly bound so it is difficult to discern any stub between gatherings ‘a’ and ‘b’; however, there are clear traces that the title-page had been pasted on to folio a₂ ^r. In the copy now in private hands the stub is clearly visible. The loss of title-pages may be a result of their having been pasted into the book after it was printed and therefore were more liable to come loose. However, all copies of the Cruz de Cristo show signs of heavy use by readers, which could provide a simple explanation for their being incomplete. On the other hand, books banned by the Inquisition often lack their incriminating title-pages as owners reluctant to hand them into the authorities attempted to render them unidentifiable.

²⁸It is just possible that the Cromberger press lent Estacio Carpintero the decorative material and also the types for the reprinting in his press of the title-page.

²⁹We know of a case which took place in 1550, at Salamanca, where a printer illegally published a title on which another printer held the privilege; when the former was discovered, he undertook to hand over half of his edition to the latter. However, neither the Crombergers’ 1545 edition of the Cruz de Cristo nor their later one of 1547 mentions their holding a privilege on this title, so infringement of such a privilege is unlikely to have been the problem with the 1543 edition; see Fermín de los Reyes Gómez, ‘Con privilegio. La exclusiva de edición del libro antiguo español’, Revista General de Información y Documentación, 11:2 (2001), 163–200 (pp. 189–90).

³⁰I am aware of only two other cases where the Crombergers may have commissioned another printer to carry out work for them, but those were many years earlier under the founder of the press, Jacobo Cromberger (see Griffin, The Crombergers of Seville, 67, 188). Outsourcing or cooperation between printers was not uncommon in some other European centres.

³¹The books coming from the press during that period were invariably signed: ‘en la imprenta de Juan Cromberger que Dios perdone’, ‘en casa de Juan Cromberger difunto que Dios haya’, ‘en casa de Juan Cromberger que santa gloria haya’ or simply ‘en las casas de Juan Cromberger’.

³²On Brígida see Natalia Maillard Álvarez & Clive Griffin, ‘Doña Brígida Maldonado, la familia Cromberger, y la imprenta sevillana’, in Muses de la impremta. La dona i les arts del llibre segles XVI–XIX, ed. Marina Garone Gravier & Albert Corbeto López (Barcelona: Museu Diocesà de Barcelona/Associació de Bibliòfils de Barcelona, 2009), 99–128; on her mother Juana see Marta de la Mano González, Mercaderes e impresores de libros en la Salamanca del siglo XVI, Acta Salmanticensia, Estudios Históricos y Geográficos 106 (Salamanca: Univ. de Salamanca, 1998), 107, 114–15.

³³The Cruz de Cristo ends on i₈ ^v, the Mística teología beginning on k₁ ^r. The fact that the Biblioteca Pública Episcopal del Seminario de Barcelona's copy lacks all gatherings before ‘k’ lends weight to the supposition that the edition may have been designed to be desglosable.

³⁴Ian Maclean, Learning and the Market Place. Essays in the History of the Early Modern Book (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 179–80.

³⁵In 1545 the Audiencia of Mexico and the Viceroy complained that the Crombergers were not supplying the colony with printed material, but this was not necessarily the case two years earlier (see Griffin, The Crombergers of Seville, 127).

³⁶Cesáreo Fernández Duro, Armada española desde la unión de los reinos de Castilla y de Aragón, 9 vols (Madrid: Museo Naval, 1895–1903), I, 430–31; Huguette & Pierre Chaunu, Séville et l'Atlantique (1504–1650), 8 vols (Paris: École Pratique des Hautes Études, VI^e Section: Centre de Recherches Historiques, 1955–59), II, 348–57; Ernst Schäfer, El Consejo Real y Supremo de las Indias. Su historia, organización y labor administrativa hasta la terminación de la casa de Austria, trad. Ernst Schäfer, rev. Miguel Ángel González Manjarrés, 2 vols (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, Consejería de Educación y Cultura/Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2003), II, 321. From 1564 the convoy system was established definitively, the fleet bound for New Spain leaving each year in April or May; see J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World. Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale U. P., 2007), 110.

³⁷Simón seems on occasion to have worked as an employee in other Seville presses and also travelled to Córdoba to print; see Wagner, ‘Los impresores sevillanos Estacio y Simón Carpintero’, 139, and Moll, ‘El taller sevillano de los Carpintero’, 977–78.

³⁸On the unreliablility of colophons, see Clive Griffin, ‘El colofón en el libro impreso sevillano de la primera mitad del siglo XVI’, in El libro antiguo español. Actas del Segundo Coloquio Internacional, ed. María Luisa López-Vidriero & Pedro M. Cátedra (Salamanca: Ediciones de la Univ. de Salamanca/Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid/Sociedad Española de Historia del Libro, 1992 [repr. 1993]), 247–61.

³⁹The fact that the Cromberger 1545 edition uses less paper suggests that the ‘1543’ edition was at least printed before 1545. The appearance of the same date—1543—both in the colophon and on the new title-page would tend to strengthen the argument for that date being accurate.

⁴⁰Fortunately, colleagues, in particular in the Iberian Peninsula, have been generous with their advice and the fruits of their own research. I would like to thank for their help with this article: María Carmen Álvarez Márquez; Arcadio Castillejo Benavente; Pedro M. Cátedra; Isabel de Colmenares Brunet of the Biblioteca Pública Episcopal del Seminario de Barcelona; Aurora Domínguez Guzmán; Mercedes Fernández Valladares; Tyler Fisher; Idalia García Aguilar; Maria Isabel Goulão Ferreira of the Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon; María Carmen Marín Pina; Julián Martín Abad of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid; John O'Neill of the Hispanic Society of America; Terry O'Reilly; Dennis Rhodes; and Pedro J. Rueda Ramírez.

⁴¹This description is made from Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, R. 314 which wants folios a₃ and i₈, and from the copy now in private hands in Spain.