Bibliofilia humanista en tiempos de Felipe II: la biblioteca de Juan Páez de Castro (review)

Juan Páez de Castro (c. 1510–70) is little remembered today, largely because his works remained only in manuscript. Like many humanists of his time he was both a figure at court and an active correspondent with colleagues in Spain and Italy. At Alcalá he studied under Alonso de Zamora, editor of the Hebrew and Aramaic text of the Complutensian Polyglot, hence his knowledge of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and ‘Chaldean’ (Aramaic). He also owned Arabic manuscripts.

He was at Trento in the entourage of Francisco de Vargas. On the recommendation of Gonzalo Pérez, translator of Homer into Spanish, he was introduced to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, ambassador and poet, whose library he used. Domingo Malvadi pronounces him a formative influence (p. 22). He was secretary to Bishop Francisco de Mendoza in Rome. In 1555 he was appointed Latin chronicler and chaplain to Charles V (and later Philip II). To Philip he addressed his ‘Memorandum on how to form a library’ of 1556 (first printed in 1749 and most recently in 1883 — a new edition is overdue), in which he urged the King to create a royal library, stocking it in part with manuscripts from decayed Italian religious houses (p. 35). He was frankly offering his own services, which the King did not take up. Páez followed his own advice and acquired Greek manuscripts from a monastery in Sicily, swapping Greek manuscripts the monks could not read for printed books (p. 67). In Flanders he knew various Spanish intellectuals, among them Archbishop Carranza. For his Chronicle he asked Philip for documents of ‘weight and authority’, unwilling to rely on ‘letters of soldiers or what people say in the squares’ (p. 41).

Much of his work took the form of contributions to the publications of others — he worked on Sepúlveda’s De correctione anni (Venice, 1546), on Carranza’s Catechism (1558) (pp. 35, 41), and did other editorial work. He was commissioned to revise Gómez de Castro’s life of Cisneros (p. 41). His correspondence, until now published only in part, is in the Real Academia de la Historia. He corresponded with Jerónimo de Zurita, author of the Anales de Aragón, often writing from abroad for material from Spain (p. 66). He also alerted Zurita to libraries that were coming on to the market. He writes from Brussels in 1555:

Here died an English friend of mine who has left 10,000 books, unprecedented in a poor man, including 600 manuscripts. He had them thus: in the disturbances in England many great libraries were robbed and burned. He bought them cheaply and kept them in Malines. There are many portraits and maps and paintings. I intend to buy what I can and send it via Burgos to Alcalá . . .

The bibliophilic vulture in Páez is on show in a letter to Zurita of 1555:

Here it has been said how Florián Docampo died. May God forgive him. It would not be a bad idea to make moves to get his things, at least his books, both his works and others’, as I still think he had some good things.

Arantxa Domingo Malvadi reconstructs Páez’s library on the basis of: four inventories, his manuscript annotations (shown in plates 1–21: note his ownership inscription ‘Io. Paccii Castrensis’), and references in his correspondence. Five inventories are in Escorial MS &.II.15: Inventory A lists books belonging to Zurita that were in Páez’s hands when he died; Inventory B is of books from Páez’s library that Ambrosio de Morales cherry-picked for the Escorial; Inventory C covers books glossed by Páez; Inventory D is Morales’s inventory of Páez’s books; Inventory E is those books in Inventory...