by Henry Kamen
During all this time Reina was painstakingly working to realize his great dream, a translation of the whole Bible, on whose preparation he had been consulting with other exile friends. It still staggers the imagination to think of this humble monk from Seville as one of the great humanist scholars of the age of the Reformation, yet that he undoubtedly was. In later years he moved easily through the major languages of Europe, such as French and German; and as translator he was in command of Latin, Greek and Hebrew. The Spanish Protestant Bible in fact had its origins from well before Reina. A part of the New Testament was published in 1543 at Antwerp, by the Spanish exile Francisco Enzinas, who left his native Burgos with his brother Diego at an unknown date and went to northern Europe, first to the Netherlands and then to Germany, because of his sympathy with the ideas of the Reformation. Diego chose to go to Italy, where he was later arrested on a charge of heresy and burnt at the stake in 1547.
Francisco had better fortune. At the instigation of the German reformer Melanchthon, he studied at Luther’s University of Wittenberg and translated the New Testament into Spanish from the Greek edition of Erasmus, managing to get it published at Antwerp in 1543.100 On the title page Enzinas stated clearly that the edition was dedicated to Charles V, and in an interview with the emperor he did manage to obtain his consent for the publication. Shortly after the interview, however, he was detained on suspicion of heresy at the instance of Charles’s confessor Pedro de Soto, and kept under house arrest in Brussels. He escaped after a year, persuaded by now that he must identify himself with the Reformation. He spent two years in England, where he obtained a teaching post at Cambridge during the years of freethinking that marked the reign of the boy-king Edward VI. Enzinas returned to the continent two years later in order to supervise the printing of his works, but died of the plague during a visit to Strasbourg.
Enzinas’s version of the New Testament was in turn used by Juan Pérez de Pineda, another of the Seville monks, as the basis for an edition which he published in Geneva in 1556, an impressive volume of over seven hundred pages, printed in a small format (five by three inches) that could be easily hidden away. The edition formed the bulk of the cargo that a certain Julián Hernández attempted to smuggle into Seville in two huge wine casks the year after. The casks were discovered and confiscated, the smuggler was arrested and later perished in an auto de fe in Seville. Pérez de Pineda later completed his own translation of the New Testament, which he intended to publish in Paris. Unfortunately, agents of Philip II managed to seize and destroy almost all copies of the edition.
When Reina came to prepare his own effort, he was obliged to do much of the New Testament himself. He followed the guidelines of the text by Pérez de Pineda (who died in 1566), modified some of the translation, and added some explanatory notes. His version of the Bible was eventually published in the Swiss city of Basel in September 1569, the first complete translation into contemporary Castilian. It was known as the Bear Bible because of an engraving on the title page of a bear retrieving honey from a tree. Years later it was retouched slightly by Cipriano de Valera, who brought out an edition which he published in Amsterdam in 1602. Known generally today as the Reina-Valera Bible, it has been read and used for centuries by Hispanic Protestants, and remains the standard text of their Bible. It was, for example, the text that the Englishman George Borrow took with him to Spain in 1836, when he set out on a trip to sell the Bible to a population that had never seen it. Reina’s later views became thoroughly Lutheran, and he died as a pastor in the German city of Frankfurt, comforted by his wife and his numerous family.
Reina’s long and eventful life was closely tied to what went on in Spain, and he always had Spain uppermost in his mind. Above all, he seems to have been partly responsible for the first, and most deadly, work of polemic directed against the Spanish Inquisition, the Sanctae Inquisitionis hispanicae artes (Secrets of the Holy Spanish Inquisition), published in Heidelberg in 1567. The pseudonym used by the author was Reginaldus Gonzalvus Montanus, but the work appears to have been written by Reina and another exile, Antonio del Corro.101 Their direct knowledge (there were descriptions of how the monks in San Isidoro secretly read forbidden literature during their hours of prayer) gave authority to the account and turned it into an international success. Between 1568 and 1570 it was issued in two editions in English, one in French, three in Dutch, four in German and one in Hungarian. It served for a long time as a basic element in the development of propaganda directed by Protestant writers against the Spanish government. The mid-sixteenth century, we have seen, was the peak period for persecution of Protestants in Spain, though fortunately very few suffered for their beliefs, thanks to escaping overseas to freedom.
The firmness with which Spain resisted all the dissenting movements that could have threatened it confirmed its reputation as the most inflexibly Catholic country of Europe. But was it truly a Catholic country? Very many clergy doubted it even at the time (see chapter 15 below). And the Inquisition, as the figures attest, played only a small part in repressing or excluding heretics, so that it is unconvincing to give it credit for the failure of the Reformation. As we have seen, the inquisitors themselves could not understand how the frontier regions of Spain, which enjoyed intimate daily contact with Calvinist areas of France, did not fall into heresy. The inability of limpid northern theology to enter on any appreciable scale into the mindset of the Mediterranean peoples may have played a greater role in the story than we realize. Their way of thinking, rather than their religious fervor, was what protected Spaniards.
Whatever services the Holy Office may have rendered to keeping heresy at bay, in the end it was not Protestant but Catholic Spaniards who undermined the established religion. In the nineteenth century, for the first time, the Spanish people began to express their detestation of the official Church. This opened the doors wide to an unprecedented spectacle, a huge upsurge of opinion against the established faith that for the first time in its history created a massive emigration of clergy from the peninsula, and in certain parts of Spain brought the practice of the Catholic religion to a halt.102 The early twentieth century underscored this trend in fire and blood, on a scale that surpassed any savagery committed in the epoch of the Inquisition.
6
THE IMPACT ON LITERATURE AND SCIENCE
The times are such that one should think carefully before writing books.
—ANTONIO DE ARAOZ, SJ, SEPTEMBER 1559
In its early years the attempts of the Inquisition to identify and control erroneous beliefs were directed mainly against ideas, practices and words, rather than against writings. In pre-modern Europe culture and belief were primarily expressed orally; only occasionally did the inquisitors find it necessary to attack the objects through which ideas could be transmitted, namely, books.
Since medieval times, books were produced in manuscript form and copied by hand where necessary; they were rare, expensive and hard to find, but in a Europe where illiteracy was the order of the day the demand was small. Still, the inquisitors by no means neglected their significance. When Hebrew books and the Talmud were found in the possession of conversos, they were seized and destroyed. The inquisitors also seem from an early period to have frowned on books about magic and astrology. There is a reference, probably from the late 1480s, to the burning of a large quantity of such items found at the University of Salamanca.
The diffusion of the printing press in Europe at the end of the fifteenth century revolutionized the art of communication, made it cheaper and easier to produce and distribute works, and facilitated the spread of both news and ideas. Authorities in both Church and state became aware of the need to oversee the output of books, and also welcomed the opportunity to tax them. In Castile, controls by the government over printing date back to Ferdinand and Isabella. On 8 July 1502, they issued a pragmatic by which licenses were made obligatory for the printing of books inside the realm as well as for the introduction of foreign books. Licenses could be granted only by
the presidents of the Chancillerías (high courts) of Valladolid and Granada, and by the prelates of Toledo, Seville, Granada, Burgos and Salamanca.1 Publishing was in its infancy, and the law had little effect. Outside Castile, that is to say in approximately one-third of Spain, printing remained free of government control.
The intervention of the state in pre-publication was new, but there was no intention of censorship since there were already controls available. The Lateran Council in 1515, and in particular the Council of Trent in 1564, granted bishops in Europe a general power to license books for printing. In the early 1500s printing was still a novelty, printed books were few and controls were lax. The coming of the Reformation, by contrast, unleashed a flood of controversial literature, which authorities everywhere attempted to curb.2 In England the government produced licensing laws in 1538, and in the 1540s various Italian authorities passed similar edicts. All over Europe authors found their wish to publish freely being hindered by irksome interference. Spain came late into the field of controls: the earliest measures were taken by the state, not by the Inquisition or the Church, and were, as we have seen, valid only for Castile, not for the other realms of Spain.
The Holy Office was given no formal powers to license books, though between 1520 and 1550 it informally managed to issue a few permits to print.3 After the 1550s it limited itself exclusively to the new field of post-publication censorship. Since there were in Spain no existing guides to heretical books, the tribunal had to rely at first on foreign direction. It was a papal order that provoked the first ban on Lutheran books in Spain, issued by Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht in April 1521 in his capacity as inquisitor general. Thereafter prohibitions of individual books were notified through letters (cartas acordadas) sent to the tribunals, and from 1540 regular lists of banned works were issued by the Holy Office. When feasible, a catalogue of prohibited works, the famous Index, was issued.
Before entering into the complex theme of controls over the printed word, it would be wise to clarify some important issues. The measures described here took the form of attempts to control; we cannot be sure that the attempts succeeded, or were even put into effect. Every European country was a mass of autonomous jurisdictions, not always bound by the decrees of a central authority. At no point were the officials who issued the measures in possession of the means to carry them out. The Inquisition, moreover, was not the only state body taking part in the process, though it certainly had an exceptional role in being able also to censor the spoken word, since verbal utterances were the basis of the greater proportion of its prosecutions.
In the 1530s and 1540s the Inquisition attempted to stop the entry of heretical literature into the peninsula. As the only state tribunal that could operate throughout Spain, it was able to act in areas (such as seaports) and in regions (such as the Basque country) where Castilian state officials could not. The government, however, took no direct initiative over controlling literature until the shock discovery of Protestants in 1558, an event that stung the regent Juana into action. On 7 September 1558 she issued a radical decree of control (valid only for Castile and not for the rest of Spain). The law banned the introduction into Castile of all books printed in other realms in Spanish, obliged printers to seek licenses from the council of Castile (which in 1554 had been granted control over such permits), and laid down a strict procedure for the operation of censorship. Contravention of any of these points would be punished by death and confiscation (a formal penalty that, as it happened, was never imposed). At the same time the Inquisition was allowed to issue licenses when printing for its own purpose. According to the new rules, manuscripts were to be checked and censored both before and after publication, and all booksellers were to keep by them a copy of the Index of Prohibited Books. So wide-ranging was the decree of 1558 that it remained theoretically in force until the end of the ancien régime.4
Philip II at that date was in Brussels, from which he wrote approving all the measures taken by his sister. Heresy was spreading through European universities. As a consequence, just before returning to Spain the king banned his Netherlands subjects from studying in France. When he arrived in the peninsula in 1559, he issued a similar order on 22 November to all subjects of the crown of Castile studying or teaching abroad to return within four months. An exception was made for those studying at three named colleges in Italy—Bologna, Rome, Naples—and one in Portugal (Coimbra). No Castilians were in future to be allowed abroad to study except at these.
The censorship law of 1558 and the ban on studying in some countries were intended to be radical measures. They have often been misconstrued as affecting all Spain, and converting it into a police state in the area of literature.5 There were, in reality, several weaknesses in the legislation.
The biggest loophole in both measures was that they only affected Castile, not the whole of Spain. Philip was able to issue his decrees through the council of Castile; in the other realms of Spain, by contrast, he would have had to summon the Cortes, which he did not do at this time. The entire eastern half of the peninsula, and the whole length of the Pyrenees as well as the Basque coastline—that is to say, precisely the most vulnerable frontiers of the country—were consequently exempt from the law. Any author who had difficulties getting a license to publish in Madrid retained the option of going to one of the other peninsular realms. A case in question was the king’s former tutor, the humanist Sepúlveda, who in 1565 felt frustrated by the censors in Castile and tried to get one of his works published in Aragon or, failing that, in Venice.6
The crown of Aragon, in effect, enjoyed considerable freedom in publishing. In Catalonia, the king complained in 1568, “the printers publish many new books without having our license.”7 Not until many decades later in the reign did the government manage to claim some degree of control over licensing in the crown of Aragon: in Catalonia from 1573, in Valencia from the 1580s, in Aragon from as late as 1592.8 Even in Castile the 1558 law exempted most ecclesiastical books (which constituted the most important part of regular book production) and Inquisition publications from the need to obtain state control.9 Over a large part of Spain, consequently, the 1558 law was either not in force or ineffective. Where it was not in force, printing normally had to be licensed by the local bishop.
A second loophole was that the control of imports was operative in Castile alone. The 7 September law regulated the import of books only “into these realms” (Castile and León). The other realms, namely, “Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia and Navarre,” were excluded from the law.10 Books coming from them to Castile were subject to control, but there was no legislation to restrain books coming to them from outside. The stores of Barcelona, for example, imported freely books published in foreign countries in Spanish and other languages.11 In 1561 the bookshop of the Barcelona printer Joan Guardiola held a stock of over nine thousand volumes, of which “ninety per cent came directly from publishers in Lyon, with several from Paris and others from Antwerp and Venice.”12
Third, the 1558 measure in Castile did not in principle involve the Inquisition. As a state law, its implementation lay in the hands of municipal authorities, who had to oversee such matters as book imports and censorship of texts, but found they lacked the experience to do so. Bundles of imported books were held up for months because cities had no officials trained in inspecting them (nor, evidently, did officials have the expertise to analyze texts in French, Greek, Latin or foreign tongues). Eventually, nearly thirty years later, at the instance of the leading Madrid bookseller Francisco López, the council of Castile agreed that each city should contract a professor from the local university to carry out the work.13 Outside Castile, by contrast, the government was obliged to rely on the Inquisition in its attempts to oversee the book import trade.
Fourth, the printing controls had to contend with the reality that Spain relied heavily on foreign imports for its access to literature.14 When the tutor of the future Philip II went book shopping for the prince in Salamanca in the 1540s, most of the boo
ks he bought were printed abroad. Imported volumes on humanities (including the complete works of Erasmus), literature, science and art featured in the list.15 It became impossible to apply effectively the law controlling imports, because bookshops in Spain depended for their living on supplies from outside, and there were not enough officials or experts to examine every single volume entering the country. Foreign presses continued to dominate the printing of religious works not only in Bibles but also in mass books and works of devotion.16 Both public and clergy continued to favor imported books. In Seville, Fernando Colón, son of the explorer, included in his library over five hundred editions of works by Reformation writers, including Luther and Melanchthon.17 In 1561, three years after the 1558 law was supposed to be in place, a city official in Alcalá insisted: “for some years foreign booksellers have come to this town and university from France and other parts, in order to sell their books, which are of better quality and also cheaper.”18 The flow of foreign books was desired by booksellers and never restricted, as the case of Barcelona shows. No attempt was ever made by the Inquisition to interfere with trade in this city. Ten years after the restrictive decrees of 1558–59, Catalan booksellers continued to rely for their income on the uninterrupted import of hundreds of foreign books, many of which went on to Castile. “The books that enter through this frontier are very numerous,” the inquisitors reported from Catalonia in 1569, “and even if there were many inquisitors we would not be enough to deal with so many volumes.”19