A compelling sammelband of two rare and incendiary anti-Catholic works by a Spanish Protestant in exile, with layers of contemporary English provenance.
Bound together here are the first edition in Spanish of Reformation historian Johannes Sleidanus’ (1506-1556) anti-Romanist Orations, translated by ‘one of the most active and effective propagandists’ for the cause of the Reformation in Spain, the emigré writer, translator and pastor Juan Pérez de Pineda (c.1500-1567); along with Pérez’s seditious and revolutionary Letter to Philip II of Spain. Both are rare: of the Dos Informaciones we have identified no copies in institutions outside Europe; of the Carta embiada.. we have found just three.
Johannes Sleidanus’ addresses to the German states and to the Emperor were first printed anonymously in 1541 and 1545. Informed by the religious and political negotiations he witnessed as envoy to diets and colloquia in the fervid years immediately after the Reformation, they constitute an intensely critical assessment of the Papacy and a call to arms to the rulers of Germany’s constituent states, and the Holy Roman Emperor himself, in the face of the corruption and avarice of the established Church. “Of similar tenor to Luther’s 1520 tract To the Christian Nobility, [Sleidanus] traces the development of the Pope into the greedy Antichrist. … [It] ends with an appeal to the political leaders to insist on a council (the old idea of the ‘gravamina’ of the German nation), fight the Turk and live up to their obligations as rulers. […]The second tract follows a similar line to the first oration, calling the Emperor to action in the face of papal abuse” (Kess, pp.31-32).
The addresses were immediately immensely popular, much reprinted and translated into vernacular languages across Europe – and placed on Indices of banned books in Paris, Louvain, Portugal, Spain, Rome and Venice over the next forty years. After the first German edition, and Sleidanus’ own Latin translation the same year, it was translated into French in 1542 (Knobloch: Strasbourg, followed by Girard in Geneva the following year), Italian in 1544 and this first Spanish edition by Jean Crespin in Geneva in 1559, likely from Crespin’s French edition of the previous year. That this Spanish translation was printed comparatively late - and survives in such small numbers - is an unsurprising testament to how effectively and ruthlessly Protestantism and Reformist sympathies were suppressed in staunchly Catholic Spain in this period, as well as the modest size of the Spanish Protestant community in exile elsewhere on the continent.
The translator of this work, Juan Pérez de Pineda arrived in Geneva in 1555, after fleeing Spain in 1549 for Paris, hot on the heels of fellow Spanish Protestant sympathisers who had already left for France and Flanders. An ordained clergyman and sometime secretary at the Spanish Embassy in Rome in the 1520s, Pérez was “an enthusiastic follower of Erasmus, …[and] very critical of the laxity he found in the papal curia, to the point of seeing the hand of Providence in the sacking of the Eternal City by imperial troops, an episode he personally experienced. Shortly after his return to Spain, on an uncertain date but not long after 1530, he was appointed rector of the Seville College of Doctrine, a position he held for almost two decades. During this time, he met and interacted with Doctors J. Egidio and Constantino Ponce de la Fuente, whose Lutheran-inspired reformist ideas he sympathized with. When a dissident movement emerged in Seville with the trial of Doctor Egidio, Pérez was not initially involved and was able to remain in the city” initially, though as we know, left soon after. After Paris, in Calvinist Geneva, Pérez found “other Spaniards from earlier immigrant backgrounds who were sympathetic to the Reformed faith. With them and with those who were arriving, he formed a Castilian-speaking Protestant congregation, expressly authorised by the Geneva magistrates in 1558”.
Pérez wrote and translated prolifically in exile in Geneva, promoting the Reformers’ cause and writing deliberately in his mother tongue, presumably so that his works could be smuggled and ‘used for spreading evangelical ideas in his homeland’ (Kinder, p.244). They included a Spanish translation of the New Testament dedicated to Philip II (Crespin, 1556), and a didactic Summary of Christian Doctrine the same year.
The present translation into Spanish of Sleidanus’ work was completed by Pérez in a ‘feverish’ few years of preaching and writing in Geneva after a visit to Frankfurt with Calvin in 1556, where he stayed for two years, met Melanchthon, and was a signatory of the Frankfurt Recess, an attempt by the fractious Protestant movement to present a united front after the death of Luther. That ‘fever’ is reflected in the Dos Informaciones… in Pérez’s impassioned address to Philip II prefacing the translated text, in which he condemns the contempt for Holy Law and the idolatry and superstition overrunning contemporary Christendom; and asks Philip to show compassion and understanding for the Protestant cause - ‘what father does not desire and seek the best he can for his children, does not guide them on the best path?’ Significantly, he openly condemns the Inquisition as the tool of Philip’s downfall - ‘all the actions of the Inquisitors - their cruelties, secret counsels…and burning desire to shed Christian blood - are secretly directed toward the utter dishonour and abasement of Your Majesty, and the ruin of your kingdoms’.
This prefatory address is a shortened version of Perez’s earlier open letter to Philip II, Carta embiada a nuestro augustissimo senor principe don Philippe, Rey de España, which is the second work bound here. It is thought to be have been printed two years before, in 1557, also by Crespin, though it has neither printer or date (per GLN: “L’attribution à Juan Pérez de Pineda remonte à Luis de Usoz y Rio et elle a été acceptée par Wiffen et Boehmer (Spanish Reformers, t. II, p. 62). La date est fixée en fonction de deux éléments: la rédaction est antérieure à la bataille de Saint-Quentin d’août 1557 et d’autre part Pierre Bellère avoue, au début de 1558, avir ramené cette Carta de la foire de Francfort. Il s’agit sans doute de la foire d’automne 1557”).
It was ‘a turning point not only in the work of this author but also in the Spanish Protestant public writing of the exiles in general, which became radicalized from that moment onward’. Given the controversial nature of Carta embiada… and by extension the abbreviated version of it that introduces the Dos Informaciones… it is interesting to note that a single leaf, a3, has been deliberately excised from Perez’s introduction to the Dos Informaciones…, the roughly-cut stub still visible. Comparison with the version digitised at the Bibliothèque de Genève indicates that the text of the removed leaf concerns the responsibilities of the princes and rulers of Christendom to rule according to God’s will, and specifically according to scripture: “Declarase en esto que los governadores del pueblo de Dios, devenser estudiosos y bien entendidos en las cosas contenidas en el libro de su ley, pro las quales quiere que sea governado y regido sanctamente” [“It is here declared that the rulers of Christendom must be diligent and well-versed in the matters contained in the book of His law, and govern and rule in holiness”]. Sola scriptura - that the Bible is the highest, infallible authority on faith, more authoritative than any imposed interpretation i.e. that of the Church - was one of the key doctrinal tenets of the Protestant Reformation. It was deemed heresy by the Catholic Church for its potentially revolutionary implication, that anyone able to read scripture could live according to its rules, without the mediation of the established church.
There are layers of annotations in English and Spanish throughout this volume, in both works and in multiple early hands. The earliest look to be those of Nathanael Kelk, who has written his name on the front and rear endpapers; a Nathaniel Kelke matriculated as a student at Trinity, Cambridge in 1575. His notes can be found most densely on pp.101-2 - extensive notes on Charlemagne, and the lineage of the Holy Roman Emperors; p.147 - ‘other men have but one hart and therefore must shew one and neglect the other. But a legend saith that the cardinalls have too harts’; as well as scattered throughout.
Alongside Kelk’s notes are those of student, and later Anglican churchman Tertullian Pyne or Pine (c.1555-1597), whose pen-trials and practice signatures cover the blank space of the pastedowns and endpapers; Pyne was a Devonian, educated at St John’s, Oxford, and at Basel**,** where he studied for his doctorate in law (his thesis was published by Oporinus in 1581). While it is not a leap to imagine that Basel may have been where Pyne purchased this book as a student, the English binding and even earlier English provenance, as well as the rather juvenile trials and script, more convincingly suggest he bought it at Oxford when a student there. The two universities were served by a thriving second-hand book-trade in this period. His scribbles to the front and rear paste-downs here are mostly his name, as well as attempts to decipher Nathanael Kelk’s surname, and the aspirational phrase ‘non est mortale quod opto’ (‘what I desire is not mortal’) written twice; his neat and finely inked marginal notes throughout are generally translations of Perez’ Spanish, with words highlighted in the text and their translations numbered in order below: ’doblegar, ‘To doble or bende twofolde’; desapoderados, ‘headstrong or headdy’; rebotar, ‘to make dull’; disparate ‘folishnesse’; torvellinos, ‘a whirle wynde’ (p.151).
Also written on the recto and verso of the front endpaper is ‘Christo. Streamer’, possibly English merchant in Livorno Christopher Streamer (c.1583 - after 1614), who was arrested by the Pisan Inquisition in the city in 1610 for having declared that he believed that neither God nor the Devil, nor Heaven nor Hell existed, and “that only asses and the mad have religion, given that all things come from nature and that laws and religion were created to trick men” (Villani, ‘Una finestra…’, p.160). Streamer avoided imprisonment by converting to Catholicism; his possible ownership of the present - staunchly anti-Catholic - work would presumably date from before his arrest and conversion. A Devonian, like Pyne, it may have been there that this volume changed hands.
By 1604, this book was in the hands of a George Bredenham - his ownership inscription to the verso of the title - who records in a neat hand having purchased it on 12 October of that year, for fourpence. Another note in the same hand to the verso of the rear free endpaper gives references from the Bible; Bredenham may also be the source of the occasional marginal annotations in darker ink in both works, in English and Spanish, as well as the extensive, numbered notes in Spanish to the front pastedown, which reference page numbers in the first work.
Title page and preliminaries a little thumbed, very light waterstain to outer margin in final work, but overall in very good condition.
I. GLN-1658. USTC 450282. Gilmont, Crespin, no. 59/10. II. GLN-1612. Palau 219320. Gilmont, Crespin, 57/13. Adams, P 1014 (“[By J. Perez?]…[Geneva? 1558]“).
I. GLN 15-16 (Bibliothèque de Genève) lists four copies in Europe: Göttingen, Vienna (Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek), Paris (Bibliotheque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français), and the Bibliothèque de Genève; OCLC adds no further copies outside Europe. II. GLN 15-16 lists 2 in Germany (Göttingen, Hanover), 1 in Spain (Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid; this copy digitised), 2 in UK (Cambridge, BL), 1 in Canada (Fisher); OCLC adds no further copies.
A.H. Kess, ‘Johann Sleidan and the Protestant Vision of History’, PhD thesis, subsequently published London: Routledge, 2017. A.G. Kinder, ‘Juan Pérez de Pineda’ in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation Vol III, p.244. ‘Juan Perez de Pineda’, Real Academia de Historia [open access: https://historia-hispanica.rah.es/biografias/36680-juan-perez-de-pineda].
