LORCA'S FIRST BOOK

GARCÍA LORCA, Federico. Impresiones y paisajes. Granada, P. V. Traveset. [1918].

8vo, pp. 264; half-title creased and restored at inner margin, some annotations in pencil and red crayon, light water-stain to lower margin of middle section; still a good copy in the original green and cream illustrated wrappers by Ismael de la Serna, restored with slight loss to spine and lower cover renewed, lower outer corner of upper cover cut away, a few small chips and tears; in a folding cloth box. £8500

First edition of Lorca’s first book, extremely rare. Lorca was 19 when he published this collection of prose sketches about Spain, dedicated to his old piano teacher. His father financed the book, having first consulted with several respected figures in the town as to whether or not the book deserved to be published. They were unanimous in their enthusiasm for the book and for Lorca’s future as a writer.

‘Impressions and Landscapes went on sale in the second week of April 1918. To the Castilian evocations, which form the core of the book, and those of Baeza, Lorca had added some impressionistic sketches of Granada, some meditations on gardens and a medley of pages on various topics. The book was reviewed in the local newspapers, and it was generally agreed that a talented new writer had appeared on the scene. Impressions and Landscapes could not hope for any success nationally, however, and Lorca foresaw in his prologue that, after a few days in the windows of local bookshops, it would disappear from sight for ever, the victim of the most absolute public indifference. The prognostication was right on target, and not long after publication the poet withdrew the book, the hundreds of unsold copies being stacked in the family attic’ (Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca, 1989, p. 72).

Laurenti & Siracusa 146. OCLC records two copies, at Harvard and the University of Pittsburgh; NUC records a copy at the University of Puerto Rico, and there is also a copy at Yale; not in the British Library catalogue.

INQUISITOR AND LAWYER

ALBERTINUS, Arnaldus. Tractatus de agnoscendis assertionibus catholicis et haereticis. Palermo, 1554 (colophon dated 1555).

Folio, 148 leaves, printed in roman letter in double columns, woodcut of the Crucifixion on title, full-page woodcut of the Trinity on leaf A4v; large initial P with a cardinal’s hat and coat of arms on leaf A6r; foliated and criblé initials in several sizes; some paper repairs to title, small repair to extreme outer margins of half a dozen succeeding leaves, clean tear mended in leaf H3 without loss of text, occasional light browning; a good copy in green morocco gilt, by Brugalla, 1987.

First edition of this legal treatise, a comprehensive manual of the arts of in the Inquisition, a Mirror for Inquisitors.

The title-page bears the full title of the work, ‘A Tract on distinguishing Catholic assertions from heretical ones, published by the reverend father lord Arnaldus Albertinus of Majorca, Doctor of civil and canon laws (Iuris Vtriusque Doctor), Bishop of Patti and Apostolic Inquisitor against the heretics among the Sicilians of Nearer Sicily’.1

Sicily had been under Aragonese control since the War of the Sicilian Vespers in 1283-84. With the rapid growth of the Spanish Inquisition under the leadership of Tomás Torquemada in the 1480s, inquisitors began to be sent from the homeland to Aragonese dominions overseas, first in Sicily early in the sixteenth century.2 Our author was born in 1480 at Muro in Majorca.3 He early took holy orders, studying at Lérida and at the university of Pavia, where in 1509 he was awarded a doctorate in canon law; he is further said in Catalan sources to have held a chair in law at the university of Lérida. His early career was spent as a canon of the cathedral of Majorca (1510) and Inquisitor there (from c. 1517) till 1527, when he was appointed to the same position at Valencia. Nominated Bishop of Patti in Sicily in 1534,4 he became Inquisitor general of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Naples and Sicily). Initial good relations with the Viceroy of Sicily, Ferrante Gonzaga, led to Albertini acting as the Viceroy’s President, or deputy, while Gonzaga was absent from the island in 1538-39. But his tendency to arrogate more and more power to the Inquisition led to increasing friction with the secular authorities and eventually Gonzaga had him removed from his inquisitorial office at the end of 1543. This was not before Albertini had carried out two autos-da-fé (the public penance of condemned heretics and apostates, often associated with subsequent executions) in Palermo. At the first of these events the first Lutheran victim of the Sicilian Inquisition was burnt. As with the Spanish Inquisition in the homeland, attention to signs of apostasy had hitherto been concentrated on converted Jews and Moors, conversos and moriscos, and much of the present book is in fact given over to the detection of judaizing. Albertini’s inquisitorial activity also embraced the issue of an edict establishing censorship of all material printed in or imported into Sicily. He died at Patti on 7 October 1544 and is buried in the cathedral there.5

Albertini’s training in the law had earlier been in evidence in two works published in his lifetime, a tract on the legal aspects of secrecy (Tractatus seu quaestio de secreto, Valencia, 1528) and a commentary on the first chapter on heretics in the corpus of canon law (Repetitio nova sive commentaria rubricae et c. j de hereticis, Valencia, 1528, reprinted there in 1534).

The odd and interesting circumstances of the present Tractatus on heresy are revealed in the letter to the reader on the verso of the title page. The letter was written by Albertini’s successor as Bishop of Patti. Bartolomé Sebastián de Aroitia was another Spaniard and another Inquisitor. He succeeded to Albertini’s position as Inquisitor general of Sicily in 1546 before being nominated (on 9 January 1549) also to his bishopric, the seat having remained vacant for more than four years. He tells us in the letter that he also succeeded to Albertini’s books and library. Here amid great confusion he found the present excellent treatise of this ‘prince of jurisconsults’ in scattered manuscript leaves.6 With much effort and at his own expense he had prepared this work of singular utility for publication. How it got into such a state is explained by an unsigned introductory note to the author’s prologue on the opposite recto. The writer, it says, had produced a three-part work to be known as the Speculum inquisitorum, but while it was being taken for printing, the boat on which it was being carried was shipwrecked and the manuscript largely perished: all that could be recovered was the present set of quaestiones, here printed lest the author’s labours be wholly lost.7

The preliminaries are taken up by the author’s preface (A2-A3r) setting out in general terms the present imminent dangers to the faith (among them Mahometanorum bestialitas and Luterana insania) and the means herein to combat them, with supporting quotation of scripture and canon law. The book proper begins on fol. 1 with various ‘Praeludia’, including an apologetic preamble in which the author unwittingly quotes as St Jerome’s Haec est fides a tract now accepted to be the Libellus fidei of Pelagius, who had been condemned as a heretic more than 1,100 years before. The Tractatus itself is a dense treatment in scholastic fashion of the definitions (Quid sit …?), conditions and consequences of the various types of heretical error, typically laying out in numbered sequences the questions to be asked (Quot sunt …?) and the answers to be given, all bolstered with supporting authorities. Finding the appropriate material for each case is eased by a Summarium preceding each section and a full index (Repertorium alphabeticum) on unnumbered leaves at the end. There is no doubt that Albertini regarded his work in a practical light, and that when whole it was intended to be a comprehensive manual of the arts of the Inquisition, a Mirror for Inquisitors.8

It is not known where the original manuscript of the Speculum Inquisitorum was being taken for printing when it suffered the mishap recounted above – perhaps Rome, where Cardinal Del Pozzo was resident. When Bishop Sebastián recovered the remains of the work he had it printed locally, at Palermo where he was based, and indeed it has a pleasantly provincial air about it. There had been very little printing at Palermo until the 1520s (one incunable of 1478 and nine tenuously surviving books in the period 1501-20: Norton, Italian Printers, 1958, pp. 65-68). From 1522 the Palermitan printing dynasty of the Mayda produced a steady stream of books – more than ninety are extant – over the next sixty years, most prolifically the son of the founder Antonio, Giovanni Matteo Mayda, who was active from 1544 to 1576 at an establishment denominated ‘Apud Sanctum Dominicum’.9 Eighteen copies are now recorded: ten in Spain and six in Italy (four of those Sicilian). Elsewhere, one is found at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris and another at Harvard, Houghton Library. No copies are recorded in the UK Copac, nor in NUC, World Cat, or the Hand Press Book database. The British Library, like many others, has only one of the two later reprints, Venice, 1571 and Rome, 1572. It was also included in the vast compilation Tractatus universi iuris, Tom. XI, Venice, 1584, but not thereafter reprinted.

1 Sicilia Citerior strictly means the kingdom of Naples, the island itself being Sicilia Ulterior.
2 See H. C. Lea, The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies, London and New York, 1908, Chap. 1, ‘Sicily’; V. La Mantia, Origine e vicenda dell’inquisizione in Sicilia, Palermo, 1977; R. Canosa, Storia dell’inquisizione spagnola in Italia, Rome, 1992. 
3 His name in his native Catalan was Arnau Albertí, Latinised as Albertinus. But in library catalogues and biographical dictionaries outside Spain he is always listed as Albertinus, Albertino or, most commonly, Albertini. See e.g. his life by R. Zapperi in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, I (Rome, 1960), pp. 722-23, s.v. Albertini. Less accurate is the short biography in Diccionari biogràfic, I (Barcelona, 1966), p. 44, s.v Albertí.
4 Patti is on the north coast of Sicily between Cefalù and Messina, in the archbishopric and present-day province of the latter. 
5 According to J. F. von Schulte, Geschichte der Quellen und Literatur des canonischen Rechts von Gratian bis auf die Gegenwart, 3 vols, Stuttgart, 1875-80, III.713, wth a short account of Albertini’s works.
6 ‘… inter plurimos eius, aliorunque manibus Archetypos hinc inde diffusos’. Archetypos here means ‘originals’, i.e. the authors’ own MSS of their works, from the hands of Albertini and others. But the work as he found it was ‘indigestum’, in confusion, and ‘scriptoris incuria non modica sane animadversione indigens’, needing no small correction thanks to the carelessness of the scribe.
7 It appears from a letter of Jeroni Nadal to Ignatius of Loyola of 11 December 1552 quoted in M. Batllori, Les reformes religioses al segle XVI, Valencia, 1996, p. 324, n. 110, that Nadal had procured a transcript of the entire work for printing at the request of the Majorcan cardinal Jaume Pou i Berard (Giacomo del Pozzo). At that time the MS was ‘más de 350 hojas’, more than 350 leaves. None of these persons is mentioned in the printed book, nor has this intervention of Del Pozzo hitherto been connected with the editor’s preface. 
8 Recent works that consider Albertini’s treatise include F. Renda, La fine del giudaismo siciliano: ebrei marrani e Inquisizione spagnola prima durante e dopo la cacciata del 1492, Palermo, 1993, pp. 143-47, and N. Zeldes, “The Former Jews of this Kingdom”: Sicilian Converts after the Expulsion, 1492-1516, Leiden, 2003, pp. 222-24.
9 The count derives from the online EDIT 16 files. For a general account of the Mayda, see F. Ascarelli and M. Menato, La tipografia del ’500 in Italia, Florence, 1989, pp. 262-63.