Botanical catalogue of the Mendoza herbarium in the Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial

When a King of Norway Became a King of Russia

This article reconstructs the early stages in the history of two manuscripts from El Escorial Library containing different Jewish treatises on Kabbalah from Late-Medieval Iberian authors. Both manuscripts, copied in Italy by Sephardic scribes, were acquired in the late sixteenth century for the new Royal Library in the Monastery of El Escorial. Codicological and paleographic elements are considered, as well as the transmission of Sephardic Kabbalah, in the light of book history and manuscript production of Sephardic Jews in sixteenth-century Italy. More specifically, the material analysis of the manuscripts will reveal how each one of them came to be a book, exposing diverse processes of production and consumption of handwritten books among Sephardic Jews in Italy.

Benito Arias Montano (b. c. 1525/27–d. 1598) was a Spanish humanist, censor, polymath, and chaplain to King Philip II, as well as librarian for the royal library at El Escorial. He is best known for having produced the Polyglot Bible—also known as the Biblia Regia (Royal Bible)—printed by Christopher Plantin in Antwerp, a monumental undertaking for which it was necessary to move physically to the Netherlands for an extended period of seven years. There he became an agent of international book culture by virtue of his work on the Inquisitorial Index of prohibited and expurgated books, as well as an acquisitions broker for the Spanish royal library and a circle of prominent Spanish intellectuals including Fernando de Herrera and Francisco Pacheco. In addition to printing the Royal Bible, Plantin also received a contract from the Spanish Crown to print other devotional literature (prayer books, breviaries, missals, books of hours, etc.). Arias Montano supervised this publishing program too. The “Rey Prudente” trusted his judgement enough to request his input on important political decisions after he distinguished himself as part of the Spanish delegation to the Council of Trent, the multi-year gathering which launched the Counter-Reformation. Educated in theology at the Universities of Seville and Alcalá, he also became a Knight of the Order of Santiago. He wrote poetry and prose in both Latin and Spanish on a wide range of topics including medicine, geology, physics, architecture, botany, and even painting. His epistolary correspondence with a transnational network of merchants, diplomats and intellectuals is voluminous. In addition to the above-mentioned languages, he was also fluent in Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and French. His probable converso origins might explain some of his activities as a Hebraist, mostly focused around providing a more literal translation of the Bible than the outdated, but still standard, Vulgate.

The Beatrice Psalter (Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Cod. Guelf. 39 Aug. 4º) belongs to the problematic part of the Corvina library, to pieces that are hard to date or localize as regards place of origin. As Matthias Corvinus's coat of arms on the cover proves, the binding was made for the Hungarian king, yet it deviates in character from the typical gilded leather Covina bindings and is unique in the history of 15th century Italian manuscript bindings. There is a single analogous Corvina, the Bible once bound for Matthias (Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek, Ms. 6). The presently accepted view on the binding is based on the researches of Tommaro de Marinis and Antony Hobbson. De Marinis published a Livy manuscript once in the Aragonese royal library of Naples whose binding, or its central part, is identical with the binding of the Beatrice Psalter. In de Marinis's view the bindings of both manuscripts are of Neapolitan origin. Probing deeper, Hobbson associates the origin of the two manuscripts with the circles of Giovanni d'Aragona, and identifies their bookbinder as Felice Feliciano. He names Rome as the location where the binding was made. Most probably, neither researcher ascribed any significance to the edges of the Psalter, which was described by earlier Hungarian research as gilded and decorated in colour, without being subjected to more thorough analysis. Thus, the Psalter edges were not identified with the Buda type of the gilt and painted edges, although they conform to this types, its constituents being easily recognized among the motifs of similar pieces. This fact alone may ascribe great probability to the hypothesis that the binding of the Psalter was not made in Naples or Rome but in Buda. This does not necessarily contradict Hobbson's results, for Felice Feliciano stayed in Hungary from autumn 1479 to summer 1480 accompanying Giovanni d'Aragona. The hypothesis is supported by other specificities of the manuscript, too. As regards the quality of the parchment, the size, and the person of the scribe, the Psalter is part of a triple group within the Corvinae. The Plato in El Escorial (G. III. 3.), the Aristeas manuscript in Munich (BSB, Clm 627) and the Beatrice Psalter are three small manuscripts of similar size, all three written on rougher parchment than the Italian type and the scribe of all three was Gundisalvus Hispanus, who stayed in Italy in the mid-1470s until 1478 when he was appointed bishop of Barcelona. Albina de la Mare already asked: Are we to presume that Gundisalvus visited Buda, too? For the time being, this cannot be verified. It is, however, thought-provoking that the calendar taking up the first leaves of the Psalter is of a Hungarian, more precisely a Zagreb type with minor Pauline features, and the litany at the end of the manuscript also contains the major Hungarian saints. An additional coincidence is that the Plato in El Escorial and the Aristeas in Munich are proven to have been illuminated in Buda around 1480. On the basis of their style they belong to the circle of the manuscript decorated for Domokos Kálmáncsehi around that time. As for the inner figural initials of the Psalter, the Buda origin is highly likely, too. The one-line initial capital letters are very close to those in the Kálmáncsehi breviary (Budapest, OSzK, cod. Lat. 446). The title-page of the manuscript is in Florentine style, but the attribution is uncertain. Earlier the name of Francesco Antonio del Cherico, more recently Francesco Rosselli and the Master of the Medici Iliad are mentioned. Rosselli also stayed in Buda in 1478/79–80, but in my view the leading illuminator of the title-page was not he but a better painter who might be identical with the leading artist involved in the Medici Iliad. The latter, however, probably never visited Buda. To sum up: the writing of the Psalter may support a Buda origin, but this is questioned by the presumable illumination of the title-page in Florence. The inner part of the manuscript, however, was most certainly decorated in Buda, and on the basis of the specificities of the edges and other features of the binding, it must be seen verified that the rare binding was made in Buda. The latter must have been an inspiring, model example for the elaboration of the gilded leather bindings of Matthias's corvinae. The available data suggest that it can be dated to the very end of the 1470s or around 1480. The phases of the making of the Psalter shed light on the activity of the Buda workshop around 1480s, revealing a surprising complexity and exuberant activity there.

In 1612, a Spanish fleet captured a French ship whose stolen cargo included the entire manuscript collection of the Sultan of Morocco, Muley Zidan. Soon, the collection made its way to the royal library, El Escorial, transforming the library into an important repository of Arabic books, which, since then, Arabists from across Europe sought to visit. By focusing on the social life of the collection, from the moment of its capture up through the process of its incorporation into the Escorial, this article examines three related issues: the first regards the social trajectories of books and the elasticity of their meaning and function, which radically altered in nature. The second part of the article examines the circulation of the Moroccan manuscripts in relation to a complex economy of restrictions over the reading and possession of Arabic manuscripts in early modern Spain. Finally, the third part focuses on the political and legal debates that ensued the library’s capture, when the collection became the locus of international negotiations between Spain, Morocco, France and the Dutch United Provinces over Maritime law, captives, and banned knowledge. By placing and analyzing the journey of Zidan’s manuscripts within the context of Mediterranean history, the paper explains (1) why Spain established one of the largest collections of Arabic manuscripts exactly when it was cleansing its territories of Moriscos (Spanish forcibly converted Muslims), and (2) why the Moroccan collection was kept behind locked doors at the Escorial.

Philological analysis of Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum transmitted by the six manuscripts of the b-class preserved in the Spanish libraries, in order to clarify its relationship with the textual tradition. They are these codices: El Escorial, N.III.22; Granada, BU Caja B-17; Madrid, BN Ms 10054, BN Ms 12867 and BN Ms Res 242; Valencia, BU Ms 396; they are all of Italian origin and were written in the fifteenth century. The examination of the paratextual elements (tituli and colophons) and the textual variants allows to distinguish between two kinds of readings: on the one hand, the conjunctive variants with the old textual tradition, that show the connection with the manuscripts of the a-class, and particularly with B, the oldest witness of Bellum Gallicum; on the other hand, the separative errors of these manuscripts, unknown unti now, that prove their origin from a common hyparchetype, closely connected with the codex Leidensis Vossianus F 90 (s XIV c.). All this allows us to reconstruct the history of this branch of the tradition. We also analyse the separative errors, in order to establish their critical value; these significative readings are shared by other recentiores and the old editions of Bellum Gallicum.

ABSTRACTThe twenty-one maps of Spain that comprise the Escorial atlas (El atlas de El Escorial) and the later notebook compiled by Pedro de Esquivel for another map of Spain have long been confused. Recently identified documents in the Royal Library, Stockholm, have allowed us to recognize the two works as completely separate and to shed new light on each. In this article we describe their respective histories, starting with the Escorial atlas, now known to have been commissioned by Emperor Charles V from the Sevillian cosmographer Alonso de Santa Cruz, who between c.1538 and 1545 produced an index map and 20 regional sheets drawn to the scale of 1:400 000. We then go on to show how, later in the century (between c.1552 and 1565), Pedro de Esquivel was using a version of the topographical methods described in Peter Apian’s Cosmographia to assemble data for the map of Spain commissioned by Philip II before and just after he became king in 1556. Esquivel died in 1565 before all the data had been collected, his map was never drawn, and his notebooks, with all his astronomical measurements and calculations of angles and distances, took a curious journey that ended in Stockholm in the archives of the Royal Library of Sweden.

A study and edition of the anonymous Catalan translation of the history of Theophilus of Adana, translated in the fourteenth century from the ninth-century Latin version of Paul the Deacon of Naples, who in turn translated its sixth-century Greek original. The Catalan text has been preserved in the Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial Library Ms M-II-3, dated in the first third of the fifteenth century, which also includes a life of Saint Mary of Egypt belonging to the same tradition. The work includes the pact with the devil topic (M210-219 of the Thompson’s index and 3566-3572 of Tubach’s), of long-enduring artistic and literary fame, running through the Middle Ages in diverse literary genres and culminating in the myth of Faust as treated by Marlowe and Goethe. This Catalan translation and the Latin tradition from which it derives are analysed. The study includes the critical edition of the Catalan text, previously unpublished, annotated from the Latin text edited by Meersseman (1963) and Ms Thott 128 of the Royal Library of Copenhagen, closer to the underlying model followed by the Catalan translator, representing, in turn, the universal collection of miracles that Gonzalo de Berceo must have used as a source in the Milagros de Nuestra Señora.

Understanding the relationship between nature and the divine in the second half of the sixteenth century in Europe was a spiritual imperative mired in epistemological uncertainty. Benito Arias Montano (c.1525–1598) is an important, if largely forgotten, figure in such debates as to the relationship between word and world. His contributions can now be assessed by English-speaking readers thanks to this latest monograph by María M. Portuondo. A historian of science, Portuondo’s prior book, Secret Science (U of Chicago P, 2009), revealed the long obscured contributions of Spanish cosmographers to the development of novel methodologies for the study of the natural world. Spanish cosmographers pioneered empirical methodologies for the study of American flora and fauna, Portuondo revealed, which put further into question the commonplace account of a Scientific Revolution centered on Protestant Europe. In her latest book, Portuondo demonstrates how textual hermeneutics and empirical observation were wedded together in the biblical natural philosophy of Benito Arias Montano. The book offers a biography of the life and times of Arias Montano as well as a critical analysis of his major published works on natural philosophy and their relation to his labors as a Hebrew philologist.Best known for his role as Philip II’s librero mayor at the royal library of El Escorial and for his editorial contribution to the Antwerp Polyglot Bible, Arias Montano also cultivated throughout his life an interest in nature that intersected in curious ways with his philological studies. Dissatisfied with the natural philosophies of his day, as Portuondo shows us, Arias Montano developed an idiosyncratic program of reform in which “piety and natural philosophy could be reconciled based on the authority of the Bible,” as the revealed Word served as “a font of knowledge about the natural world” (79). Trained as a Christian Hebraist at the University of Alcalá, he dedicated his life to the study of Hebrew, which he believed was “a natural language that reflected the true nature of things” (60). Unraveling the etymology of Hebrew words was the cornerstone of both his approach to biblical philology and natural philosophy. As Portuondo shows, what distinguished Arias Montano’s approach to the study of nature from the hexameral commentaries and natural theology of earlier Christian thinkers was his novel valuation of empirical methodologies. His biblical natural philosophy thus reflected “the empiricist approach characteristic of his Sevillian milieu as well as the disquiet of the broader community of European philosophers who questioned the ability of ancient natural philosophies to interpret nature” (154). This latter phenomenon, which Portuondo labels a “Spanish disquiet,” reflected a dissatisfaction with two prominent approaches to the study of nature: on the one hand, “a natural theological approach to the study of nature popular in sixteenth-century Spain,” and, on the other hand, “a purely empirical methodology and didactic organization of knowledge that seemed to grow increasingly disconnected from philosophy and theology” (31). She argues that Arias Montano responded to this disquiet by attempting to harmonize these two approaches. Dissatisfied with the natural historical debates of his day, he dedicated his life to distilling from the Hebrew Bible a series of metaphysical principles verifiable by empirical observation that could harmonize humanity’s understanding of the world with the revealed Word.The fruits of Arias Montano’s labors in reconciling the Bible with nature resulted in a magnum opus that comprised three parts. Only the first two parts made it to print: the Book of the Generation and Regeneration of Adam, or Anima (1593), and the History of Nature, or Corpus (1601). The final part, entitled the Vestis, was unpublished and is perhaps now lost or was never written (15). The seeds of this project appear in Arias Montano’s earlier work as principal editor of the Antwerp Polyglot. Charged by Philip II to guide this monumental scholarly undertaking through the theologically and politically fraught waters of Post-Reformation, Post-Tridentine Europe, Arias Montano included among the many appendices of the Antwerp Polyglot a treatise on the interpretation of Hebrew etymologies. Entitled De arcano sermone, Portuondo shows how this appendix, which poses as a glossary of biblical terms in Hebrew, “is informed by the notion that biblical Hebrew—properly deciphered—reveals the arcane and occult properties of things and their natures and forces” (107). Arias Montano first articulated in the sermone the central intellectual preoccupation of his later life: to recover “the relation between word and things that existed when the Bible was written” (113). What Arias Montano produced was “a comprehensive and non-Aristotelian/Ptolemaic cosmology” based primarily on his philological analysis of the Hebrew text of Genesis in conjunction with his empirical studies. While conventional in many respects—his insistence on the Earth being at the center of the universe being a case in point—Arias Montano argued in favor of some radical propositions. For example, he “did away with the notion of an unbreachable boundary between the different parts of the heavens and between the heavens and the earth, [and] reduced matter to a single liquid with a dual nature” (245). Arguing against the long-held conviction that the planets and stars were incorruptible entities, Arias Montano argued for their fundamental materiality. The planets and stars, like every earthbound entity, were composed of varying degrees of two primordial liquids that accounted for the distinctive properties of plants, animals, metals, and waters. While his methodology was unconventional from the perspective of the New Sciences, he shared with thinkers like Bacon and Galileo a dissatisfaction with the prevailing systems of natural philosophy that merited the need for serious reform.Portuondo’s study is an invaluable guide for those interested in exploring the great diversity of approaches to the study of nature at play in the sixteenth century. She paints a detailed panorama of competing systems that deftly differentiates between natural theology and natural philosophy, empiricism and Aristotelian-Thomism, hexameral commentary and cosmography. Perhaps Portuondo’s greatest contribution is arguing for Arias Montano and his syncretic methodology to be included as part of a larger reform movement within natural philosophy alongside the more famous proponents of the New Sciences. “Only when we divest ourselves of the notion that the triumph of the New Sciences was inevitable,” Portuondo argues, “can we appreciate the variety and richness of these system builders’ projects and appreciate the uncertainty of the whole enterprise” (52). Nevertheless, Portuondo’s focus on Arias Montano’s commitment to empirical methodologies downplays his links to the esoteric culture of the late Renaissance that developed around the Hermetic Corpus and the Orphic Hymnes (235). While there are key differences, both Arias Montano’s alchemical knowledge as well as his methodological valuation of textual hermeneutics point to a productive convergence of seemingly contradictory approaches to the study of nature in the period. While textual hermeneutics is no longer permitted today as a methodology in the natural sciences, hermeneutics in the time of Arias Montano was fruitfully cultivated by natural historians of all stripes. This is precisely the angle that brings literary historians to the work of Arias Montano. To draw lines in the sand differentiating the more esoteric beliefs of the sixteenth century from Arias Montano’s biblical natural philosophy risks perpetuating the blind spots of a traditional historiography of the Scientific Revolution that largely ignored approaches to the study of nature that did not feed into later developments in the natural sciences. This is nevertheless a magisterial study and a touchstone for understanding how science and faith converged productively in sixteenth-century Spain.

Arabic edition and the Spanish translation of an anonymous short scientific treatise, Dissertation on the hair, included in the miscellaneous manuscript no 888 of the Royal Library of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, providing reasons for hair growth and significance in the body, differences between hair of men, women and children, and characteristics and qualities of people with curly, straight, blond or dark hair and capillary diseases. The whole manuscript consists of fourteen parts written by the same copyist in 170 folios under the general title of The book of medical and philosophical curiosities and utilities, covering several subjects from both branches of knowledge.

This article addresses the fate of the Royal Library of the Nasrid Sultans at the Alhambra. Several royal manuscripts once belonging to the Nasrid sultans of Granada survive to this day, despite having been thought burned by the cardinal Cisneros (d. 1517). One of the volumes is a personal manuscript of the last sultan of al-Andalus, Muḥammad XI (Boabdil; reigned 887–888/1482–1483, 892–897/1487–1492) and is currently held in the Royal Library of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. This codex abounds with manuscript notes telling the story of its creation and its first owner, the Sultan, until it was incorporated into the current collection. The author examines its journey in the context of the Sultan’s life and the Nasrid manuscript and book culture, arguing that it was this ruler who moved the royal books out of the Alhambra to his place of exile in North Africa. The article is accompanied by an edition and translation of an ijāza given to Muḥammad XI by the mufti and khaṭīb of Granada al-Mawwāq (d. 897/1492). It is the sole surviving royal teaching certificate from the Nasrid period of Andalusi history.

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En la Real Biblioteca de El Escorial existe un manuscrito (G-II-5) que contiene una obra gramatical atribuida a R. Abraham ibn ⁽Ezra⁾ (ca. 1092-1167). La obra desarrolla la morfología del verbo hebreo: generalidades, verbos sanos y verbos defectivos. El autor de este artículo examina algunos puntos característicos de este Sefer Diqdûq y los compara con sus paralelos en obras que pertenecen con seguridad a Abraham ibn ⁽Ezra⁾, llegando a la conclusión de que no se puede atribuir a Ibn ⁽Ezra⁾ el mencionado Sefer Diqdûq. Para ilustración del lector se presentan algunas páginas del manuscrito todavía inédito.

Russian Abstract: В работе впервые в отечественной и мировой научной литературе на основе широкого круга источников (в том числе – ранее не публиковавшихся архивных) убедительно опровергается утвердившийся в медиевистике историографический миф об использовании «Естественной истории» Плиния Старшего (ок. 23-79) в качестве одного из источников средневековой хроники «История Испании» (Estoria de Espanna), составленной на разговорном (средневековом кастильском) языке при дворе короля Кастилии и Леона Альфонсо Х Мудрого (1252-1284) после 1270 г. Прямых рукописных свидетельств использования плиниева текста в королевском скриптории не сохранилось. В испанских собраниях отсутствуют рукописи «Естественной истории», датируемые периодом создания хроники. Исследование рукописных каталогов и описей важнейших рукописных собраний XIII – XVI вв. (в первую очередь – Библиотеки капитула толедского собора), осуществленное в таком объеме впервые в отечественной и мировой науке, убедительно доказывает факт отсутствия копии плиниева текста в этих собраниях до второй половины XIV в. В этот период в Толедо появилась рукопись «Естественной истории», принадлежавшая толедскому архиепископу, а позднее кардиналу и папскому легату в Италии Хилю Альваресу де Альборнос-и-Луна (1303-1367). В работе на основе широкого круга источников (в том числе – архивных) впервые в отечественной и мировой науке неоспоримо доказывается, что речь идет о манускрипте MSS/10042 из собрания Национальной библиотеки (Мадрид), и что именно эта рукопись принадлежала кардиналу Альваресу (ранее этот факт ставился под сомнение). Анализ текста хроники показывает, что, несмотря на наличие ряда прямых ссылок на труд Плиния в «Истории Испании» (как, впрочем, и во «Всеобщей истории», создававшейся в том же скриптории), заимствования из «Естественной истории» имеют явно вторичное происхождение. Вместе с тем, результаты проведенного исследования говорят о высоком авторитете главного труда Плиния Старшего в Кастилии и Леоне указанного периода, которое стало следствием общего роста интереса к античной культуре в контексте «долгого XII века». Именно поэтому, не имея физической возможности воспользоваться сочинением Плиния напрямую, Альфонсо Х и его соавторы не могли обойтись без отсылок к знаменитому труду, пусть даже заимствованных из третьих рук. English Abstract: The article focuses on overcoming the historiographic myth that the “Natural History” (NH) written by Pliny the Elder (c. 23-79) was used as one of the sources in the process of the medieval chronicle “Estoria de Espanna” (EE) composing. The EE was written in the vernacular (Castilian) language after 1270 at the court of Alfonso X the Wise, king of Castile and Leon (1252–1284). Manuscript materials of the period do not contain any direct evidence of Pliny’s book using in the royal scriptorium. Spanish manuscript collections have no medieval copies of the NH dated by the period of the end of the 13th century or before. Manuscript catalogs and descriptions of the greatest Castilian medieval libraries (including the famous Capitular library of the Toledo cathedral) composed from the 13th to 15th centuries don’t contain any information about any manuscript copy of NH belonged to any kind of public/ecclesiastical institution or any private person (lay magnate or prelate). The earliest copy of the NH in Toledo (and may be the earliest in all the kingdom of Castile and Leon) was the manuscript MSS/10042 (now in the National Library of Spain, Madrid). This manuscript belonged to Gil Alvarez de Albornoz y Luna (1303-1367), who was the archbishop of Toledo and then cardinal and pontifical legate in Italy; in the paper this fact is proved firstly in world historiography (before it seemed doubtful). The analysis of the EE text demonstrates that the direct and indirect allusions to the text of the NH were not taken directly from this source. But the great prestige of Pliny s text in Castile and Leon of the 13th century is obvious; it was one of the consequences of the “long 12th century” culture. Vivid interest to the Natural History explains why Alfonso the Wise and his co-authors who had no physical possibility to use the NH directly, but who were sure that this text must be citated in the chronicles, had to “construct” the fragment of the NH, taken from the works written by other medieval authorities. This forced falsification was a prelude for the active use of NH since the middle of the 14th century, when the Capitular Library of Toledo received some manuscripts of NH (MSS/10042 (National Library of Spain), Ms. Q-I-4 and R-I-5 (Royal Library of El Escorial) and some others) during a very short period. This interest concurs with the time, when the Primitive Version of the EE (which contained some falsified citations of Pliny’s work) was already finished.