Manuscript 48 E 33 at the Ets Haim Library/Livraria Montezinos in Amsterdam, with the first-known translation into Spanish of Erasmus’s Encomium Moriae, had already been cataloged and briefly described in 1975, but it had never been published until now. The most important contribution of this volume is therefore to facilitate access to a text of significant historical and cultural relevance. The powerful influence of Erasmus in the Iberian Peninsula during the sixteenth century has been profusely documented and studied, but this critical edition enriches the picture by patently demonstrating that translation was one of the channels through which the stylistic capital of Erasmus’s Latin was appropriated for Spanish prose. The translation flaunts passages of impeccably wrought prose (e.g., 57–59 or 138–39, among many others). A seventeenth-century copy of a sixteenth-century original, the manuscript has been found in a Jewish library in the Netherlands, which turns it into an important document in the history of Jewish Iberian diaspora, and thus sheds some light on the transnational intersection of translation with related phenomena like textual transmission, exile, and censorship.

In their introduction, the editors briefly survey the main milestones in the history of Hispanic Erasmism and its interpretation. They nod in the direction of the great authors (e.g., Bataillon) and they also direct readers to some other primary and secondary sources for those interested in more detailed information about recent readings of this unavoidable subject for any student of the Hispanic sixteenth century. The introduction also engages in a tantalizingly succinct but informative comparison between the translation they are presenting and contemporary renderings into other European vernaculars. A more comprehensive and detailed study of all these texts and their means of transmission is still a desideratum that could bear fruit as a monograph in the style of Burke’s The Fortunes of the Courtier. One of the achievements of the edition is, therefore, to highlight the need for further comparative research on the vernacular translations of the Moria in the sixteenth century. The editors conclude that among all sixteenth-century translations this anonymous Spanish version is the one that lies closest to the original. Although they cannot provide evidence to establish its authorship, they conclude that the translator’s accuracy in rendering even the most subtle references to classical texts reveals that he must have been a well-read humanist. Some other references were also domesticated for a mid-sixteenth-century audience of Castilian readers who must have been reasonably well educated, but who had little or no Latin.

The editors also acknowledge that their volume poses more questions than it answers. Besides authorship, some of the remaining questions include the material conditions, the circumstances, and the historical context of its production, as well as its eventual transmission. This accounts for the speculative hypotheses that the editors are led to propose. In some of them, however, they tread on more solid ground, for instance, when it comes to dating the manuscript around the mid-sixteenth century on the basis of the original editions that the translator appears to have used. The editors also elicit important information from the linguistic features of the manuscript. Their abundant and detailed critical apparatus — one of the principal virtues of the volume — contextualizes and clarifies the translated text as much as Erasmus’s original.

This Spanish Moria demonstrates the need for an interdisciplinary approach that can combine cultural history, traditional philology, book history, translation studies, or the history of ideas, among others, to do full justice to complex artifacts like this one. This carefully prepared edition facilitates a text unexpurgated of its linguistic quirks and of the peculiarities introduced by the copyist. It also poses important questions and suggests topics for further research for those interested in interrogating this translation in search of answers about its origins, history, cultural import, and eventual fate as it circulated throughout European networks of exchange. As such, the edition constitutes an important milestone in the discipline of Erasmian studies in general, and of Hispanic Erasmism in particular.