Primate Of Spain Research Articles

Plenty of Fish in the Sea: The Satires of Juvenal in a Late Fifteenth-Century Analysis of Spanish Court Education

In 1492, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, the future author of “De Orbe Novo,” sent a letter to Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza, the primate of Spain, describing the state of Spanish education as Martyr took up a post as court tutor. This study argues that Martyr's letter was a satire that relied upon a close intertextual relationship with Juvenal's “Satires.” This framework allowed Martyr to offer layered analyses of Spanish Latinity, the dynamics between Spanish and Italian humanists, patronage, and the role of arms and letters in noble life. Martyr's letter revealed a complex, and sometimes contradictory, assessment of court education, as well as an active reception of Juvenal.

The Fabric of Saintly Proof: Leocadia of Toledo from Orrente to Calderón

St Leocadia, a fourth-century Toledan Christian virgin and patron saint of the city, miraculously emerged from a sepulchre in the presence of Ildephonsus, Archbishop of Toledo, and the Visigothic King Recesvintus, in the 7th century. After this wondrous event, in which a fragment of her veil was cut as proof of her public visitation, her body was removed from Toledo to be preserved from the Muslim conquest, taken to Flanders and eventually repatriated to her home town at the request of Philip II as the Lutheran threat to the Spanish northern territories escalated. A wave of literature and images concerning her figure was produced in the wake of three events: the return of her relics to Toledo in 1587, those of Ildephonsus in 1596 and the inauguration of the chapel of Our Lady of the Tabernacle, also in Toledo, in 1616. The following essays consider why and how this virgin saint became instrumental in cementing the alliance of Church and Monarchy as well as buttressing the Archbishop of Toledo’s status as Primate of Spain in the early seventeenth century. Focusing on the historical, visual and literary portraits of Leocadia, they examine the manner in which Early Modern Spanish authors—Miguel Hernández, Lope de Vega, José de Valdivielso and Pedro Calderón de la Barca—and artists—Francisco Merino, Blas de Prado, Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, Antonio de Lanchares and Pedro Orrente—imagined and recreated the narrative of her sanctity paying particular attention to the function of public witness as effected by their works as well as by their readers and viewers.

New Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War: The Gomá Archive

Archivo Goma: Documentos de la Guerra Civil. Edited by Jose Andres Gallego and Anton M. Pazos. Vols. 5-13. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas. 2003-10. Vol. 5: Pp. 628; euro47,43; ISBN 978-84-00-08149-2. Vol. 6: Pp. 704; euro49,41; ISBN 978-84-0008222-2. Vol. 7: Pp. 672; euro48,08; ISBN 978-84-00-08302-1. Vol. 8: Pp. 752; euro57,69; ISBN 978-84-00-08335-9. Vol. 9: Pp. 672; euro47,12; ISBN 978-84-00-08429-5. Vol. 10: Pp. 520; euro45,19; ISBN 978-8400-08640-8. Vol. 11: Pp. 584; euro47,12; ISBN 978-84-00-08589-6. Vol. 12: Pp. 784; euro66,35; ISBN 978-84-00-08800-2. Vol. 13: Pp. 488; euro39,42; ISBN 978-84-00-09261-0.)The publication of the final volumes of the archive of Cardinal Isidro Goma y Tomas (1869-1940), archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain dining the Spanish Civil War, concludes one of the most ambitious editorial projects in Spanish ecclesiastical history. Together with the published archive of Cardinal Francisco Vidal y Barraquer, archbishop of Tarragona and effective head of the hierarchy between 1931 and 1935 (Arxiu Vidal i Barraquer: Esglesia i Estât durant la Segonda Repulica Espanyola, 1931-1936, ed. Miquel Batilori and Victor Manuel Arbeloa, 4 vols., Barcelona, 197191), the Goma archive provides a wealth of material for the study of the Spanish Church during the most turbulent period of its modem history.1 Some of the documents have been published previously, particularly those related to the complex and difficult relations between the Holy See and the Francisco Franco regime over the extension of full diplomatic recognition. But the archive covers a broad range of subjects affecting every aspect of ecclesiastical and religious life during the Civil War. There are, to be sure, materials on minor topics such as the cardinal's intervention with the Nationalist authorities to expedite the export of olive oil to the Vatican or to secure reduced railway fares for the clergy. Some of the correspondence is formulaic such as the numerous letters of congratulation received by Goma from Spanish and foreign prelates on the occasion of the publication of the Collective Letter (1937) written by the cardinal on behalf of the Spanish hierarchy to the world's bishops to justify the Nationalist cause as a defense of Christian civilization. But there is abundant documentation on the central issues affecting the Church, including relations with the papacy, the immense task of reconstmction in the former Republican zone where nearly 7000 clergy and religious had perished, the very nature of the Nationalist regime and its ideology, the problem of the Chinch's reaction to the determination of the military to root out the autonomist sympathies of many Basque clergy in one of the country's most Catholic areas, and the educational role of the Church under Franco.Litde in Goma's background prepared him for the formidable difficulties he would face during the Civil War. Ordained in 1885 for his native Tarragona archdiocese, he served briefly as a parish priest, then received doctorates in theology and canon law. He spent more than two decades as a seminary professor before he assumed diocesan administrative posts and was promoted to the obscure bishopric of Tarazona in 1927. Pope Pius XI, using the power to appoint bishops freely as a result of the separation of church and state by the Republic, surprised ecclesiastical pundits of the day by appointing Goma archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain in 1933. It is not entirely clear why the pope did not follow the customary practice of naming the prelate of a larger diocese to the most important position in the hierarchy.But Goma possessed important strengths. Although he was sixty-six when the war began and suffered from bouts of poor health, he worked tirelessly at the monumental task before him. His correspondence with bishops, clergy, government officials, generals, diverse figures in the Vatican, and even individuals of modest social standing reached impressive proportions. …

La corte literaria de Juan de Zúñiga y Pimentel (Plasencia, 1459- Guadalupe, 1504)

Juan de Zúñiga y Pimentel (Plasencia, 1459 - Guadalupe, 1504), the last Master of the Order of Alcántara, Archbishop of Seville and Primate of Spain, brought together a group of eminent scholars in Gata, Villanueva and Zalamea de la Serena, creating an authentic literary court in Castile in a similar way to the Italian humanists. Following the example of his parents, Álvaro de Zúñiga y Guzmán and his second wife, Leonor Pimentel, who sponsored the construction of the Dominican convent of San Vicente Ferrer, a magnificent example of late Gothic art in Plasencia, developed a model of cultural patronage where a group of miniaturists, with popularity among the privileged classes, possibly were included and they executed some of the best illuminated manuscripts in Castile in the fifteenth century.

Archivo Gomá: Documentos de la Guerra Civil (review)

Reviewed by: Archivo Gomá: Documentos de la Guerra Civil William J. Callahan Archivo Gomá: Documentos de la Guerra Civil. Edited by José Andrés-Gallego and Antón M. Pazos. Vols. 7, 8. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. 2005. Pp. 666, 747. Paperback.) These volumes of the personal archive of Cardinal Isidro Gomá y Tomás, archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain during the Spanish Civil War, cover the four months between August and December of 1937. During this period, the war between the Republic and the Nationalist regime of General Franco continued unabated, although the military balance had begun to tilt toward the rebel armies. It was also during these months that Franco began to lay the institutional and ideological foundations for his "New" Spain, although the precise form that these would take was still far from clear. As the leader of the hierarchy through his position as primate and president of the Committee of Metropolitans, Gomá supported the military rising in public without hesitation, but, in private he was apprehensive about the possible emergence of a totalitarian, fascist state and its consequences for the Church. The documents published, organized chronologically, cover an immense range of topics from the trivial to the important, from the imposition of export duties on olive oil destined for the Vatican to critical questions such as church-state relations and the strategy the Church required to recover from the mass assassinations of clergy and the destruction of churches in the republican zone. Gomá's personal correspondence reveals a less self-confident figure than his public figure suggested. Often beset by bouts of poor health, he struggled to meet a multitude of challenges that taxed his energy to the fullest and, at times, left him depressed about the Church's situation in the "New" Spain of the generals. A substantial portion of the documentation revolves around the effect of the cardinal's celebrated and controversial 1937 Collective Letter to the Catholic bishops of the world. This justification of the rising against the Republic as a defense of Christian civilization produced an outpouring of letters of support from bishops throughout the Catholic world, all reproduced in these volumes. Gomá also worked unceasingly to promote the translation and publication of the letter in as many countries as possible. But, in some respects, he was more concerned with the criticism directed against the letter by clergy and laypeople, especially by Basque priests who supported the political autonomy of the Catholic Basques within the Republic and by progressive Catholic opinion in France. The documentation shows a constant sense of frustration with the refusal of his Catholic critics to accept the premises of the Collective Letter. The most important contribution of these volumes for historians is that that they reveal in abundant detail the complex and shifting relations between the Church and the Franco regime. Gomá maintained an abiding confidence in the general to restore the Church to what he saw as its rightful place within the new order. But he was not naive. For example, although his correspondence [End Page 686] was exempt from official censorship, he suspected that the authorities did not always respect the exemption. He recognized that the Church was just one of the interest groups seeking to achieve its objectives within a political system in process of formation and that not all of them, especially the regime's single party, the quasifascist party, the Falange, were disposed to allow the Church the ample autonomy that it desired, particularly in the fields of education and associational activity. On several occasions, Gomá had to appeal to the authorities to halt attacks on the Church's position in Falange publications. The cardinal's political views were straightforward. He wished the regime to restore the privileges that it had enjoyed prior to the proclamation of the Republic in 1931. He had no particular views about the constitutional form of the state, but whatever its form, he believed that the "liberty of the Church" should be respected and that it should not become a political arm of the new political order. For this reason, he objected to the clergy occupying official positions in the Falange. These were...

Los papeles perdidos del cardenal Segura, 1880-1957 (review)

Reviewed by: Los papeles perdidos del cardenal Segura, 1880–1957 William J. Callahan Los papeles perdidos del cardenal Segura, 1880–1957. By Santiago Martínez Sánchez . ( Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra. 2004. Pp. 838.) The "lost papers" in the title of this impressively documented study of one of the most controversial figures in the history of the twentieth-century Spanish Church refers to the disappearance of key documents from the cardinal's personal archive. Expelled from Spain by the Second Republic and later forced by the Vatican to resign as archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain in 1931, Segura returned to Spain in 1937 as archbishop of Seville. In spite of his conservative views, the cardinal remained a thorn in the side of the Franco regime. He mistrusted its totalitarian tendencies, especially as far as church organizations were concerned, and for being too lax, if that can be imagined, with enforcing strict moral standards and curbing what he saw as the Protestant threat in his diocese. The author has established that Segura withdrew certain documents with a view to writing a justification of his career before its abrupt end in 1955, when the pope, supported by the Franco regime weary of his anti-Protestant tirades and their effect on Spain's new American ally, appointed a coadjutor archbishop with the right of succession. After Segura's death in 1957, the papers in question passed to a nephew who allowed the cardinal's first biographer, Ramón Garriga, to consult some of them during the 1970's. Thereafter, the paper trail goes cold, although the author has some grounds for believing that the documents now rest in a Parisian safe-deposit box. This study, in spite of its title, is not based on information from the "lost papers," which are still lost as far as historical research is concerned. But the author has surmounted this obstacle through extensive research in a wide variety of public, ecclesiastical, and private archives including, for example, the remaining papers in the Segura archive, as well as those of his secretary and a prominent Carlist politican, Manuel Fal Conde, with whom the cardinal maintained close contacts during the 1930's and 1940's. Two previous biographies of Segura by Ramón Garriga (1977) and Francisco Delgado (2001) have certain merits, but the extent and quality of the research evident in this study makes it the definitive work on Segura published until now. It is not a full-blown biography in that it deals primarily with what might be called the cardinal's "political" role in the period following the proclamation of the Second Republic, his sympathy for the cause of authoritarian monarchy in the form of Carlism during the mid and later 1930's, and his frequent jousts with the Franco regime over nearly two decades. Previous studies of Segura have emphasized his commitment to the monarchy and King Alfonso XIII, who promoted his appointment to the archbishopric of Toledo in 1927. The author has taken this traditional view further by arguing that Segura's monarchist sympathies rested on more than a vague, romantic notion of the royal institution and appreciation of the contribution Alfonso XIII had made to his career. Segura idealized the monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles V, and Philip II in an era which, in his view, had seen Church and Crown work together to secure the triumph of religion. Segura believed that nineteenth-century liberal governments had undermined this happy arrangement even though they maintained the Church as the established church. Why Segura imagined that Alfonso XIII [End Page 385] would be able to realize this chimera is not entirely clear, but during the political crisis of 1930 and early 1931, the cardinal provided unabashed support to a monarchy under threat from resurgent republicanism. The departure of the king and the proclamation of the Second Republic caught Segura by surprise. The decision of Pius XI to recognize the new regime moved the bishops to publish pastoral letters accepting the "constituted authorities." Segura was among the last to do so, and when he did, he could not resist praising the departed monarch for his support of Church and religion. In...

Fernando de Herrera's “Canciones”: Jihad Meets Holy War

Spain under Philip II was a country at war with its political and religious enemies—both real and imagined—on every side. To the north the French Huguenots and especially the Dutch Calvinists threatened the rule of this most Catholic king. To the south and east the Moslem Moors, Berbers, and Ottoman Turks were a constant thorn in the side, not just of Spain but of its Christian neighbors as well. Within the country proper, the presence of a Morisco majority in Andalucia made Christian control of the region tenuous at best, a threat made palpable by the Alpujarras uprising of 1568. Equally unnerving to the clerics of the Inquisition was the perceived threat to orthodoxy posed by the presence of conversos and alumbrados within the very hierarchy, as the deposing and imprisionment of Archbishop Carranza, the primate of Spain, suggested. As a result, the Spanish monarch increasingly saw himself and his mission in Messianic terms, and, by extension, the Spanish people as the new chosen race ordained by God to protect and extend Catholic orthodoxy in the world. 1 This perception of Spain and Philip influences two of the heroic canciones of Fernando de Herrera. In each poem, Herrera recalls the historical battles of Lepanto and Alcazarquivir in turn, addressing Philip, first in celebration of the great victory over the Ottoman Turks in 1571 and then to lament the destruction of the Portuguese expedition led by his nephew, the impetuous young King Sebastian, in 1578. By combining Biblical imagery and geographic references with the form of the heroic ode, the poet creates works which “ocupa[n] la mas alta

Archivo Goma: Documentos de la Guerra Civil (review)

ol. 4: Marzo de 1937. Edited by Jose Andres-Gallego and Anton M. Pazos. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas. 2001-2002. Pp. 589; 540; 393; 366.) The first four volumes of documents from the personal archive of Cardinal Isidro Goma y Tomas (1869-1940), archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain between 1933 and 1940, cover the period between July, 1936, when the military rising against the Second Republic began, and March, 1937. Few prelates in the Spanish Church's modern history faced greater challenges than the elderly Goma, who had been promoted to the most important position in the hierarchy from the obscure diocese of Tarazona. It is not entirely clear even today why Pope Pius XI surprised ecclesiastical pundits of the day by passing over more well-known and experienced bishops in favor of Goma, who had become a bishop only in 1927. Coma's reservations about the policy of accommodation between the Church and the Republic attempted by Cardinal Vidal y Barraquer, the hierarchy's leader since the republican authorities forced the resignation from the archbishopric of Toledo of Cardinal Pedro Segura in the fall of 1931, may have moved the pope, frustrated by the strong anticlerical legislation passed by the Republic in 1933, to make the appointment. As these first volumes in a projected multi-volume series show, Goma was a meticulous record keeper who kept virtually every document that passed over his desk. Unfortunately, his archive for the period prior to July, 1936, was destroyed in the anticlerical disturbances that swept republican Toledo in the aftermath of the generals' rising on July 18,1936. Goma was more fortunate than his archive. When the conflict began, he was absent from his diocesan seat in an area dominated by the Nationalists, thereby escaping certain arrest, if not worse. The new archive that he began to assemble includes a wide range of documents including his communications with the Holy see and his correspondence with officials of the Franco regime and his fellow bishops as well as with other ecclesiastical and lay figures. Some of the documents in the collection have been published before, particularly Goma's reports to and correspondence with Cardinal Pacelli, the papal secretary of state. But publication of the archive now makes it possible to follow with some clarity the Spanish Church's reaction to the rapid unfolding of events during the early months of the Civil War. Goma wore many hats as he confronted what often seemed to him an impossible task. As archbishop of Toledo, he worried about the fate of his diocese, where priests were subject to a wave of persecution. As president ex-officio of the Committee of Metropolitans, he had to confront the terrible reality of massive executions of bishops, priests, and religious in the republican zone. He conducted often difficult negotiations on ecclesiastical matters with a regime that was by no means free of a regalist view of church-state relations. As Pius XI's personal representative to General Franco (from December, 1936), he engaged in a delicate, sometimes tense, juggling game between the Vatican and the Nationalist government over the extension of full diplomatic recognition. As an apologist, he defended the rising against the Republic as necessary to save the country from Communism and atheism. he was the author, for example, of the hierarchy's 1937's Collective Letter to the world's bishops exalting the war as a religious crusade. The cardinal's correspondence with his fellow bishops with respect to the Collective Letter reveals the evolution of his ideas over several months, although it also shows that more bishops expressed reservations about the project than once was thought because they feared that its publication might worsen the already desperate situation of clergy and laity in the republican zone. Goma's role as an apologist for the rising against the Republic in the name of religion caused controversy during the Civil War. …

Pedro Segura: Un cardenal de fronteras (review)

In the political and ecclesiastical history of Spain during the first half of the twentieth century, few figures were more controversial than Pedro Segura y Sáenz (1880-1957), bishop of Coria (1920-1927), archbishop of Burgos (1927-1928), archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain (1928-1931), and archbishop of Seville (1937-1955). His ingrained hostility toward the democratic reforms of the Second Republic and his monarchist sympathies led to his expulsion from the country within weeks of the Republic's proclamation [End Page 318] (1931). The Vatican, anxious to safeguard the Church's position as best it could in the new political order, forced his resignation from the primatial see a few months later. After six years of Roman exile, Segura returned as archbishop of Seville. Although deeply conservative in his political views, his resentment at the limitations imposed on the Church by what he perceived as an emerging totalitarian regime led to a series of pastoral letters and confrontations with the regime's quasi-fascist party, the Falange, between 1938 and 1940 that made him persona non grata with Franco.

The Vatican and the Red Flag: The Struggle for the Soul of Eastern Europe by Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch

BOOK REVIEWS651 regime's imposition of autarchy as an economic doctrine, which Richards argues , was done not so much for economic reasons as for cultural ones, namely, to keep out foreign influences and, further, to make Spaniards suffer for having supported the Republic. Much of the regime's rhetoric, and Richards' as well, is biological: liberalism "infects" and the "cure" is hard work and austerity. Furthermore , the Church's view of suffering as necessary for salvation was placed in a political context. The destruction of the Spanish economy by the war and the resultant widespread starvation after 1939, led Franco, with the approval of some clergy, to claim that this suffering was a "spiritual punishment, the punishment which God imposes upon a distorted life, upon an unclean history." Richards has found every embarrassing clerical statement and sermon to back his view, again ignoring those clergy who opposed this rationale, including Cardinal Isidro Goma, the Primate of Spain. As a corrective to Richards' unbalanced views, there is Stanley Payne's objective and measured The Franco Regime (1987). Reading Payne's chapters on the war and the immediate postwar period and comparing them with Richards' book makes one wonder if they are writing about the same period. José M. Sánchez Saint Louis University The Vatican and the Red Flag: The Strugglefor the Soul ofEastern Europe. By Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch. (New York: Geoffrey Chapman. 1999. Pp. xiv, 351. $39.95.) Historians have generally not studied religion, and, as a result, the dynamic impact of religion upon significant events has been underestimated. This book, written by a journalistjonathan Luxmoore, and his wife,Jolanta Babiuch, who is a lecturer at Warsaw University's Institute of Sociology, helps to shed light on the pivotal role that the Catholic Church played in bringing down the Soviet empire. With verve and drama, the authors tell the story of Catholicism's confrontation with Marxist-Leninist ideology in the twentieth century. Using the life of John Paul II, from his birth in Wadowice, Poland, to his present reign as pope, as a thread to weave their story, Luxmoore and Babiuch explain how the Church at first failed to address the problems precipitated by the industrial revolution and thereby helped to open the door to radical ideologies that promised social and economic justice, then suffered horrific persecution at the hands of the ideologists, then endured marginalization as Franklin D. Roosevelt aligned himself with one of the chief ideologues,Joseph Stalin, even after Hitler was going down to defeat, and finally moved to a leadership position in the struggle against Communism under Pope John Paul II and soon brought the Iron Curtain down. The story is interesting and based on church documents and mainly secondary sources, but it is somewhat one-dimensional. It covers church policy, to 652BOOK REVIEWS be sure, and shows where the Church had shortcomings and where it had strengths, but it never really comes to grips with the dynamic role of the Catholic Church in world history. As a result, it fails to explain the fundamental role of religion in sustaining the West against Communism and, by the same token, in weakening Soviet society because the Communists attacked religion and thus cut the taproot of social order. Furthermore, while the study rightly places John Paul II at the head of the drive to bring down the Soviet empire, it does not appreciate that the pope, like earlier popes, still had no troops or weapons to move the Communist authorities, and so had to wait until a leader appeared in the most powerful of the Western states who would take a moral stand against Communism and use the threat of force to back up his words. As it turned out, two leaders emerged: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In combination with the pope, they abandoned the policy of debilitating compromises with the Communists, and Communist society quickly imploded. The book does make the cogent point that the entire century was largely a struggle between religion and ideology, a fact that most historians fail to grasp as they focus solely upon economics, politics, or national security. However, the authors do not develop and explore their insight. Religious...

Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados.

Alastair Hamilton presents the intriguing history of the alumbrados, the 'Enlightened Ones', investigated and condemned by the Spanish Inquisition. These various groups, though different from one another, were regarded at the time as parts of a single heresy. The first, known as the alumbrados of Toledo, developed a doctrine which closely resembled Protestantism. The later movements, discovered in the south of Spain, distorted the teaching of the great Spanish mystics and indulged in debauchery and ecstatic worship. The Spanish Inquisition, on whose records this study is largely based, first investigated the alumbrados because so many of them were conversos, descendants of converted Jews, the purity of whose Christianity was suspected. Subsequently, inquisitors used the charge of alumbradismo as a means of attacking other liberal and powerful conversos at the imperial court and at the Spanish universities.Hamilton deals with the spiritual climate of enthusiasm encouraged by the great cardinal and primate of Spain, Jimenez de Cisneros, in which the alumbrados of Toledo first flourished. He examines the beliefs of those accused of being alumbrados and the way in which accusations were used to discredit a far wider circle of intellectuals. The first study in English to survey all the different alumbrado movements between 1510 and 1630, it also presents major events in Spanish ecclesiastical history, including the reception of the writings of Erasmus, the rise of the Jesuits, and the first reactions to the writings of mystics such as St Teresa of Avila.

An Early Life of Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros

AN EARLY LIFE OF FRANCISCO JIMÉNEZ DE CISNEROS The town of Torrelaguna is located on the Castiüan meseta, in the province of Madrid, some thirty miles north of the capital. Its major claim to fame is that it was the birthplace and childhood home of Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436-1517), perhaps the outstanding figure in a period of Spanish history that was hardly lacking in eminent men and women. The magnitude and variety of his accomplishments were such as to defy summary. A Franciscan who was renowned for the austerity and rectitude of his personal life, he enjoyed an unparalleled reputation for personal integrity in a tumultuous and grasping age, and this in spite of the fact that he held the most powerful secular and ecclesiastical posts in the land. Confessor and chief advisor of Queen Isabel, he became Archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain, Cardinal, Grand Inquisitor, and, near the end of his life, Regent of the Realms. He was an indefatigable administrator and monastic reformer who nevertheless found time to excel in yet other areas. As a miUtary planner he directed the eminently successful expedition against the MusUm city of Oran that gained for Spain a valuable outpost on the coast of North Africa. As a scholar he encouraged the growth of Spanish humanism, estabUshing the university at Alcalá de Henares (later moved to Madrid) which quickly became and has remained the foremost institution of higher learning in Spain. Here he established the press which raised Spanish letters to new heights, leading the way with his own project, the Complutensian Polyglot Bible. In addition to all this, he was constantly involved with endowing and overseeing the foundations of numerous charitable and ecclesiastical establishments. Among these was the monastery of La Madre de Dios in Torrelaguna, founded by Cisneros in memory of his birthplace. Needless to say, such a career has inspired many biographers, chief among them Alvaro Gómez de Castro, whose De rebus gestis a Francisco Ximenio Cisnerio... libri octo (Alcalá, 1560? and 1569; An Early Life of Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros157 Frankfurt, 1581 and 1603-08) has been called the "fons et origo" of later studies. It would be impossible in the confines of this communication to present even the broadest outUne of this scholarly tradition, but it would not be inappropriate to mention the works of Eugenio de Robles, Compendio de la vida y hazañas del Cardenal... Cisneros... (Toledo, 1604) ; Michel Baudier, Histoire de l'administration du Cardinal Ximenes (Paris, 1635); and Pedro de Quintanilla y Mendoza, Archetype de virtudes, espexo de prelados, el venerable padre... Fr. Francisco Ximenez de Cisneros (Palermo, 1653) as setting the high standard of scholarship that has prevailed among Cisneros' biographers down to the present. Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros was an extraordinary man in extraordinary times, and it is unlikely that this long tradition of biographical studies will soon end. In 1974 the Kenneth Spencer Research Library of the University of Kansas acquired a small volume, measuring some 210 ? 150 mm, which it has catalogued as MS C238 under the title of "The Manuscript of Torrelaguna." The codex is comprised of fourteen gatherings of varying numbers of leaves, containing a number of items, dating from 1521 to 1809, relating to the monastery of La Madre de Dios of Torrelaguna. Although all of the material is of interest, the most exceptional feature of this collection is that it commences with six folia devoted to a brief biography of the founder of the community. The possible antiquity of this account makes it worthwhile to establish the date of its composition. The terminus post quern is a relatively clear matter established by internal evidence. On folio 5r the author refers to "el enperador don carlos." Given that Charles did not succeed to the title until 1519, it follows that the account must have been written in or after that year. There is no such internal evidence, however, to establish a firm terminus ante quern, although a strong presumptive case may be made on the place of this particular gathering in the structure of the volume as a whole. The biography is written in a typical...

Narciso Tomé's "Transparente" in the Cathedral of Toledo (1721-1732)

IN the afternoon of 9 June 1732 D. Diego de Astorga y Cespedes, Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain, solemnly exposed the Blessed Sacrament in the inner shrine of the new and magnificent Transparente of the cathedral of Toledo (Figs. I and 2). From that date on, this extraordinary structure, unique in character within the framework of Spanish architecture of the period, became the object of the most diverse evaluations, ranging from exorbitant praise to fierce personal detestation. Our purpose in taking a closer look at this much discussed but never fully studied work is twofold: first, it is to provide a more com-