Printing Sacred Texts in Early Modern Barcelona (1480–1530)

As in other European urban centres, in Renaissance Barcelona religious texts represented an important part of the bibliographical output published in the city. Publication and ownership of sacred works in early modern Barcelona has, of course, attracted the interest of several eminent scholars.¹ Yet, to the best of my knowledge, critics have tended to concentrate exclusively on vernacular literature and very seldom has publication of these writings been related to a wider European context. This essay, accordingly, seeks to redress the balance by examining Latin and vernacular texts, and – wherever possible – by drawing parallels between the work of local printers, scholars and lecturers and their European counterparts. I am fully aware that an exhaustive survey of sacred literature published and read in Barcelona at the time would exceed the limits of this essay. I would therefore like to concentrate on devotional and hagiographical works, and to attend to the circulation of early Christian and humanistic poetry in early modern Barcelona. These are two interrelated issues which have very often been neglected, or, at best, examined in isolation. In what follows I have decided to focus on the period from 1480 to 1530, transitional years in which Humanism and Erasmianism were finding their feet in the city. Although my survey concentrates on editions published in Barcelona, I will also make occasional references to other Catalan towns and to Valencia, since the activity of some of the printers portrayed here spread across several locations.

From the last two decades of the fifteenth century local printers produced editions of spiritual treatises and devotional works. As Albert Hauf has shown, interest in this kind of text is closely related to movements for spiritual renewal such as the Devotio Moderna, a development based on personal connection to God and the active showing of love towards Him. Printed circulation of this corpus in early modern Catalonia is not only restricted to vernacular products. Inner spirituality is, for example, highlighted in the title of an edition of Bernard of Clairvaux's Meditationes de interiori homine, which appeared in Barcelona in 1499. One of the earliest books published at Montserrat was also a Latin edition of Pseudo-Bonaventura's Meditationes vitae Christi, which came off the press of Joan Luschner in April of 1499. Just over a month later Luschner himself issued an edition of another apocryphal work of Bonaventura, the De triplici via sive incendium amoris. As attested by the colophon, the volume is directly relevant to the religious life at the Benedictine monastery: 'ad permaximam utilitatem in vita spirituali proficere cupientium in Monasterio Beatae Mariae virginis de Monte serrato'.

Local attention to Pseudo-Bonaventura pre-dated, however, Luschner's printing activity at Montserrat and went beyond ecclesiastical and monastic circles. This is clearly the case with a bilingual Latin-Spanish edition of the Meditationes vitae Christi published in 1493 by the printer, historian and Royal archivist Pere Miquel Carbonell (1434–1517), which presents the text in parallel columns. Barry Taylor has noted that here 'the line-lengths have been carefully coordinated to ensure that translation and original are perfectly aligned' (Taylor 2006: 150). It therefore seems safe to assume that the volume was aimed at a reader whose level of proficiency in Latin must have not been very high. For Latin-less readers or for those who did not need the assistance of a translation, that same year Carbonell prepared separate Spanish and Latin editions, from the same typesettings. With the turn of the sixteenth century interest in the Meditationes vitae Christi did not decrease and lay readers soon had at their disposal a Catalan rendering of the text – 'per un devot religios del monestir de Montserrat' – in, at least, two editions published by Joan Rosembach in 1518 and 1522.

The detailed evocations of moments from the Gospels included in the Meditationes vitae Christi occur in writings of similar subject matter also published in Barcelona at the time. The sufferings of Our Lord are described in several Latin texts (an edition of the Passio Domini nostri was issued by the printer Pere Posa in 1498), but, above all, in works written...