Miguel Servet: Obras completas (review)

These are the four volumes of the projected six of a project to publish all the works of Michael Servetus which were either previously published or remain as manuscripts together with documents related to his life, death, and influence on the further development of ideas in Europe. The edition includes the works and documents in their original Latin together with translations into Spanish. A few of the Servetus works were translated into Spanish previously: Geography of Ptolemy, 1932; Syrups, 1943, 1995; Astrology, 1981; The Restoration of Christianity, 1981. Into English, there were translated only his On the Errors of the Trinity, 1932, and his geographical and medical works in 1953. When Servetus was burned alive in Geneva on October 27, 1553, all copies of his major work, Christianismi restitutio, went up in smoke together with him. Today only three surviving copies of the original publication are known: (1) one in the National Library of Austria in Vienna; (2) one in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (this copy was most likely used by Germain Colladon, attorney acting on behalf of Nicolas de la Fontaine during Servetus' trial in Geneva); and (3) one copy in the library of the University of Edinburgh. The latter lacks the first sixteen pages and the title page. These were replaced by manuscript pages reproduced in the sixteenth century from another manuscript.

Restitutio was circulated after Servetus' death in the form of copied manuscripts. In 1790 the German erudite, Dr. Christoph Gottlieb von Murr, a follower of Unitarianism, made a handwritten copy of the exemplar from the National Library in Vienna and published almost an exact replica of the original book in Nürnberg. There are about fifty-three exemplars of this publication in various libraries. The Murr reprint was reproduced in 1966 by a new photographic technique and serves today as the research tool for Servetian studies. A reprint of selected fragments from Restitutio concerning the kingdom of Christ, the kingdom of the Antichrist, pedobaptism and circumcision, was also published by Giorgio Biandrata in Transylvania in 1569. The first translation of a small tractate attached to the Restitutio and titled Sixty Signs of the Antichrist was made by Grzegorz Pawel/ in Poland in 1568. The book was translated into German in three volumes by Bernhard Spiess from 1892 to 1896 and into Spanish by Ángel Alcalá in two separate volumes in 1980 and 1981. Except for a fragment of a few pages concerning the famous discovery of pulmonary circulation, the book was never translated into English. The present bilingual edition of all the works of Servetus together with pertinent documents is an ambitious and long-overdue project. The last two volumes containing a new edition of Christianismi restitutio are due to appear in 2006.

Servetus remains an obscure figure in history mainly due to the fact that his memory was erased from historical annals by his opponents; his works were destroyed and were never translated before the twentieth century. He is, however, a key figure for the evolution of culture and religion in Western Europe. He saw that the Reformation with all its positive sides did not go far enough in overhauling the Christianity of his epoch, corrupt morally and ideologically. Just as Anabaptists and other reformers demanded radical changes in the social structures...