[WORKS] Sus obras con la declaracion magistral en lengua Castellana, por el Doctor [Juan] Villen de Biedma.

INSCRIBED BY THE RECTOR OF SEVILLE'S ENGLISH SEMINARY

Folio (268 x 180mm). 2nd title-page on f.168 (rectè 158) ‘Los Sermones’. Contemporary limp vellum, title in manuscript at head of spine, lacking ties, endpapers renewed (wear to head of spine exposing endband, large stain to lower cover).  

Granada: Sebastián de Mena, at the expense of Juan Díaz,  

This is the first complete edition of Horace to appear in Spain, and with a Spanish translation and commentary. Horace was known to have been read and imitated in Spain, and yet no edition of his works was printed in Alcala de Henares or Salamanca in the sixteenth century or in the next, nor at any of the Giunta presses between 1514 and 1628. By contrast, the Ars Poetica, also present here, was a popular text, with four Spanish translations – or discussions –of it, including this one, printed between 1591 and 1600.   

The present work is dedicated (with the woodcut coats of the recipient’s arms) by the editor Juan Villen de Biedma to Francisco Gonzalez de Heredia (ca.  1542-1614) secretary to Felipe II & Felipe III and an important administrator. Dated 30 March 1597 and followed by verses in Spanish addressed to the same recipient (‘Elogio a las armas’), the dedication contains a passage about the division of the works of Horace into four, conforming to the division of man’s life, which is slightly reminiscent of Jacques in As You Like It: the first, Odes, the games, jokes and pastimes of youth, the springtime of life; the second, Sermons; the third, Epistles; and the fourth, the instructive Ars Poetica, the equivalent of maturity and old age, in which wisdom matures and makes men teachers.    

The text of the poems is printed centrally in italic within the prose translation and commentary. The Ars Poetica here has a number of manuscript annotations referring to another edition by Francisco de Cascales (ca. 1559-1642), the 1617 Tablas poeticas; these annotations must presumably postdate 1617 and may be by the Jesuit owner.  

Whilst there is no explicit evidence of the link, it is likely that the present edition of Horace’s works were known to Cervantes. In part 2, Chapter 53 of Don Quixote (published 1615) is the following passage: ‘Give way, gentlemen, and suffer me to return to my ancient liberty: suffer me to seek my past life, that I may rise again from this present death. I was not born to be a governor, nor to defend islands, or cities, from enemies that assault them. I better understand how to plough and dig, how to prune and dress vines, than how to give laws, and defend provinces or kingdoms. St. Peter is well at Rome. I mean that nothing becomes a man so well, as the employment he was born for…’ (Don Quixote, pp. 964-965). This passage is discussed by Daniel López-Canete Quiles in relation to the influence of one of Horace’s Letters, that addressed to Maecenas (Epistolae I, 7).  A further possible influence of Biedma’s edition on Cervantes’ final work, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617) has also been identified (see Colahan, pp. 173-186), as has a link between Horace’s works and the Isidro and Jerusalén of Lope de Vega (Jameson).   

Title page stained, with paper repairs to inner margin on verso, worming to title page and outer blank margin of first twenty leaves, crudely repaired with paper, minor browning, final leaf dusty.  

 Provenance: "Habet ad usum Franciscus a Peralta", contemporary inscription at foot of title-page (probably the Jesuit who was rector of St. Gregory’s, the English College of Seville, c.1594-1621/2 (see Sommervogel VI, 481a). Francisco de Peralta (1554-1642) was appointed rector of St. Gregory’s by the famous English Jesuit Robert Persons who had founded the seminary in 1592. The English students at the college were to be trained for Jesuit missions to England. Henry Walpole, one of the founders, was martyred in York in 1595 and in 1600 Thomas Hunt was the first St. Gregory’s graduate to be executed in England. As Melo notes, Elizabethan authorities began to “regard the Colegio de los Ingleses as potential platform for ‘popish’ conspiracies organised by English Catholics with the help of Spain”. For a brief history of St. Gregory’s see the article by João Vicente Melo, ‘Catholics Abroad: Seville and El Colegio de los Ingleses’, in Travel, Transculturality, and Identity in England c. 1550-1700 (online project, 2017). Printed booklabel of D. Jose Maria Fernand[-] (covered by blank pastedown). 

Palau y Dulcet 116030; Menandez Pelayo Bibliografía hispano-latina clásica, Santander: Aldus, 1950-53, vol. 6, esp. pp. 86-88.   

Ref: Clark Colahan, ‘Auristela y Cenotia, personalidades horacianas en el Persiles’: Anales Cervantinos, xliv, (2012) pp. 173-186.  A.K. Jameson, ‘Lope de Vega’s knowledge of classical literature’, Bulletin Hispanique 38.4 (1936), pp.444-501. Daniel López-Canete Quiles, ‘Adiós a Barataria:?Horacio?y el "Quijote", 2.53 (y 2.58)’ in Cuadernos de filología clásica. Estudios latinos, 2019, Vol.39 (1), p. 111-127. Don Quixote de la Mancha trs. Charles Jarvis (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1999), pp. 964-965.

Stock Code: 251177