Two volumes, folio, (318 x 220 mm). 351 ff. (title, ff. 4, 5 and 351 in good quality facsimile); 351 ff., (title, ff. 2, 344, 345, 346 and 351 in good quality facsimile), lacking f. 83. Mid-20th century retrospective calf in Mudejar style, boards heavily tooled in blind with a heavy mix of tools, raised bands to spine, also tooled and lettered in blind, excellent condition. Generally a reasonably good copy of this impressive Spanish publication, cropped by binder in many quires affecting headlines, scattered worm holes sometimes in text (especially for the supplied leaves), title to second part with small piece removed affecting text and supplied in pen facsimile sometime in the 18th or early 19th century, scattered staining, oxidation to initial in second volume causing paper loss, foxing, evidently restored at the time of binding, edges tinted in red, other small condition issues.

Palencia’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives was a very influential text not only on Spanish literature of the 16th and 17th centuries but also as Aurelio Pérez Jiménez points out ‘His influence has been felt in historical accounts, biographies (for which those of Plutarch were models), chronicles and, above all, treatises on instruction, religion, philosophy and ethics’ (p. 606) ‘The Lives and the Moralia proposed themes, topics, characters, grammatical examples and literary models for the Spanish intelligentsia during the Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: it had a bearing on the formation of the modern states, Spain included, by opening up new geographical horizons, and providing fodder for new political or administrative theories, as well as doctrinal ideals to religious movements of this time, either directly or via Erasmus’. Ibidem, p. 609. Plutarch is quoted ‘next to prestigious authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Lucian, Seneca or Tacitus, either as a display or erudition or as an instrument of authority and confirmation of Platonic-Christian orthodoxy’, Ibidem, p. 607 ‘The Lives inspired characters (Cleopatra, Mark Antony, Alexander, Caesar) and themes of famous playwrights such as López de Castro, Calderón or Lope de Vega, and the literary structure of biographers and historians such as Pérez del Pulgar, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and several chroniclers of the Indies, who saw in them a model for the integration of the New World in a European, that is, Spanish, cultural framework’. (Ibidem, p. 610). Cervantes mentions Plutarch 12 times in Don Quixote.

Alfonso López de Palencia’s translation from Latin into Spanish of 1491 was the first to be printed. Several other translations into Spanish appeared subsequently in 1547, 1551, 1554 and 1562 but they are only partial. This is also the case, of the translation by Francisco de Quevedo of Vida de Marco Bruto (1644).

This is an important fact for the understanding of the transmission of the text of our copy. It contains manuscript glosses of the later the 16th or early 17th century in a fine humanist hand that we have been unable to identify, to the lives of Alcibiades and Coriolanus, more substantially on the second. It is important to note that these two lives did not appear again in Spanish translation until they were reissued in the next edition of Plutarch’s complete works in the late 18th century. This raises interesting questions: since it was not infrequent to pair two of the lives for publication, could these annotations on the lives of Alcibiades and Coriolanus be meant as preliminary annotations for a future edition that was not published? Was there some reason why the lives of Alcibiades and Coriolanus were thought unsuitable for publication 16th and the 17th centuries? These are questions to which a close study of the annotations by the humanist reader may give us clues. Aurelio Pérez Jiménez, ‘Plutarch’s Fortune in Spain’ in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plutarch, (Leiden, Brill, 2019), 606-621 pp. Series: Brill’s Companions to Classical Reception, Volume: 20.

The text is set in gothic type in two columns, chapter headings printed in red.

Rare, according to ISTC, only 4 copies in North America.

Palau 229191; CCPB000111934-6; IBE 4699; IBPort 1488; HC 13133; BMC X 34; Goff P-837; Salvá 3490; Escudero 19).