Catalán and the Book Industry in the Crown of Aragón, 1475–1601

Abstract

In common with a small number of other areas in Europe, Catalonia and Valencia stand as intriguing examples of regions where the language of the everyday and the language of published vernacular discourse were quite different. Using Iberian Books as a starting point, this article attempts to trace publishing trends in these regions during the first great age of print. For Catalonia and Valencia to share in the cultural and commercial opportunities presented by the broader world of the Iberian book, they had to do so at the expense of their own language - Catalán. Nonetheless, the decline of Catalán-language literature in this period has perhaps been overstated. Per head of population, Catalonia and Valencia produced twice as much printed material in their native vernacular than Portugal. The nature of what was produced in Catalán was, however, to change in some dramatic ways over the course of the sixteenth century.

Notes

¹Marc Antoni Ortí i Ballester, Siglo Quarto de la Conquista de Valencia (Valencia: Juan Bautista Marçal, 1640), f2^v.

²Philippe Berger, Libro y lectura en la Valencia del Renacimiento (València: Edicions Alfons el Magnànim, 1987), 198.

³Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press As an Agent of Change. Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1979).

⁴There has been no comprehensive overview of Catalán-language publishing during the Siglo de Oro since the appearance of Mariano Aguiló y Fuster, Catálogo de obras en lengua catalana impresas desde 1474 hasta 1860 (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1923). Margarita Bosch Cantallops, produced a very useful bibliography of the output of the Valencian presses, ‘Contribución al estudio de la imprenta en Valencia en el siglo XVI’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral thesis, Facultad de Filología, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, 1988). A more limited survey has also been undertaken of printing in Barcelona, see Agustín Millares Carlo, ‘Introducción al estudio de la historia y bibliografía de la imprenta en Barcelona en el siglo XVI. Los impresores del período renacentista’, Boletín Millares Carlo, 2:3 (1981), 9–120 and Agustín Millares Carlo, ‘La imprenta en Barcelona en el siglo XVI’, in Historia de la imprenta hispana (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1982), 491–644. There have also been several very important studies of the culture of print in the city, not least the outstanding work of Manuel Peña Díaz who has systematically exploited post-mortem inventories, a much underused resource. In particular, see ‘La circulació del llibre a Barcelona en el segle XVI’, L'Avenç. Revista de Història i Cultura, 199 (1996), 28–31 and Cataluña en el Renacimiento: libros y lenguas (Barcelona, 1473–1600) (Lleida: Milenio, 1996).

⁵Alexander 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 o en la Península Ibérica antes de 1601 (Leiden: Brill, 2010) [hereafter IB].

⁶Aguiló y Fuster, Catálogo de obras, recorded around 440 relevant items for our period.

⁷Bosch Cantallops, Contribución al estudio de la imprenta en Valencia, lists 1,166 items for the sixteenth century; IB records 1,607 items. Although difficult if not impossible to quantify, one major issue relates to the question of survival of works in Catalán. It is probable that a higher proportion of Latin and Castilian works have survived to the present day, compared with works in Catalán. For instance, 66 per cent of Castilian items published before 1601 have at least one surviving copy outside of Spain. Of Catalán works, that figure drops to 44 per cent. It is likely that works in the Catalán language did not circulate as widely as works in Castilian and/or that they have not been as widely sought after by the major research collections since the sixteenth century. For a sense of the importance of rates of survival and loss, albeit in another print domain, see Alexander S. Wilkinson, ‘Lost Books Printed in French before 1601’, The Library, 10:1 (2009), 188–205.

⁸Javier Burgos, using the inventories produced by Millares Carlo, identified 817 items published between 1501 and 1600. This information is analysed in R. García Cárcel, Las culturas del Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Historia 16, 1989), 139, cited in Peña Díaz, Cataluña en el Renacimiento, 288. IB records 1,131 items for these same years.

⁹There are 65 items without a stated place of publication which have not yet been subjected to typographical analysis to determine their origin.

¹⁰ IB; see ‘Introduction’, xiv–xvi.

¹¹See Jordi Nadal, La Population catalane de 1553 à 1717. L'Immigration française et les autres facteurs de son développement (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1960); Jordi Nadal and Emili Giralt, La población española (siglos XVI a XX) (Barcelona: Ariel, 1966); and Primitivo J. Pla Alberola, ‘La población valenciana en la segunda mitad del siglo XVI’, in Felipe II y el mediterráneo. Congreso Internacional ‘Felipe II y el Mediterra'neo’.Barcelona, 23 a 27 de noviembre de 1998, coordinador Ernest Belenguer Cebrià, 4 vols (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoración de los Centenarios de Felipe II y Carlos V, 1999), I, Los recursos humanos y materiales, 99–117.

¹²See J. Nadal and E. Giralt, ‘Ensayo metodológico para el estudio de la poblaciónCatalana de 1553 a 1717’, Estudios de Historia Moderna, 3 (1953), 239– 84; and Carla Rahn Phillips ‘A Model for the Economy of Early Modern Spain’, The American Historical Review, 92:3 (1987), 531–62.

¹³Rahn Phillips, ‘A Model for the Economy’, table 2, 537.

¹⁴Robert S. Smith, ‘Barcelona “Bills of Mortality” and Population, 1457–1590’, The Journal of Political Economy, 44:1 (1936), 84–93. There were plagues in 1519–20, 1530–31, 1580 and 1589.

¹⁵For a more detailed discussion of this, see the introductory article to the present volume, 489–90.

¹⁶Peña Díaz, Cataluña en el Renacimiento, 113.

¹⁷On the University of Barcelona, see Antonio Fernández Luzón, La Universidad de Barcelona en el siglo XVI (Barcelona: Univ. Autònoma de Barcelona, 2005). This is the published version of the author's thesis.

¹⁸See Ricardo García Cárcel, La revolta de les Germanies (València: Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 1981), 103.

¹⁹See James Casey, The Kingdom of Valencia in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1979), 247.

²⁰ IB 11265.

²¹ IB 9852.

²² IB 12586–12587.

²³ IB 16754–16756.

²⁴ IB 9796.

²⁵ IB 15485. A translation of an Italian text on the life of Alexander the Great.

²⁶ IB 12840.

²⁷ IB 8667.

²⁸ IB 14329.

²⁹ IB 19425.

³⁰ IB 18536–18537.

³¹ IB 17161.

³² IB 3552 and 3554.

³³ IB 736 and 740.

³⁴ IB 2058.

³⁵ IB 14056.

³⁶ IB 12842.

³⁷ IB 3612–3613.

³⁸ IB 8669.

³⁹ IB 3458.

⁴⁰ IB 19615.

⁴¹ IB 12121.

⁴² IB 18757.

⁴³ IB 2486.

⁴⁴ IB 17721.

⁴⁵ IB 2954–2961.

⁴⁶ IB 16768. Originally a French work, this was translated from the Castilian—probably an earlier sixteenth-century edition. For a modern edition, see Historia del esforcado cavallero Partinobles, conde de Bles, ed. José Torner (Whitefish: Kessinger Legacy Reprints, 2010).

⁴⁷ IB 12326–12327.

⁴⁸ IB 17704.

⁴⁹ IB 15408.

⁵⁰ IB 8670.

⁵¹ IB 17810.

⁵² IB 17811.

⁵³ IB 3474.

⁵⁴ IB 3478.

⁵⁵Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, Història de la literatura catalana, 3 vols (Barcelona: Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat, 1985), II, 8.

⁵⁶ IB 6786–6788.

⁵⁷ IB 12120.

⁵⁸ IB 19616–19618.

⁵⁹ IB 11775–11786.

⁶⁰ IB 2103–2104.

⁶¹ IB 18343 and 18346.

⁶² IB 8666 and 8668.

⁶³ IB 1752.

⁶⁴ IB 13946–13949.

⁶⁵ IB 8977, 8980, 8981 and 8987.

⁶⁶ IB 3611–3613. On the authorship of this work, the title and possible variations between manuscript and printed versions of the text, see Pep Valsalobre, ‘De l’Spill de la vida religiosa al Desitjós. Notes a una novel·la al·legòrica del segle XVI’, Caplletra, 31 (2001), 11–24 and the same author's ‘Una cort “ferraresa” a València: els Centelles, Ariosto i un programa de substitució de la tradició literària autòctona’, Caplletra, 34 (2003), 171–94.

⁶⁷ IB 8865–8866.

⁶⁸ IB 8671. On the 1493 edition, see Marinela García-Sempere, Lo passi en cobles (1493): estudi i edició (Alacant/Barcelona: Institut Interuniversitari de Filologia Valenciana/Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat, 2002).

⁶⁹Rubió i Balaguer, Història de la literatura catalana.

⁷⁰Rubió i Balaguer, Història de la literatura catalana. See also Antoni Ferrando, Els certàmens poètics valencians del segle XIV al XIX (València: Alfons el Magnànim, 1983) and Albert Rossich, ‘Els certàmens literaris a Barcelona, segles XIV–XVIII’, Barcelona Quaderns d'Història, 9 (2003), 83–108.

⁷¹Marinela García-Sempere would like to acknowledge the generous financial assistance of the Generalitat Valenciana (Ref. BEST/2010/054) and the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (FFI2009-11594) which supported a year's sabbatical at the Centre for the History of the Media, University College Dublin in 2009–2010.