The unusual typographical arrangement is immediately apparent on every opening. Each biblical book is introduced with a brief scholium identifying its author, contents and number of chapters and verses; the individual chapters are then compressed into mnemonic phrases, generally culminating in a single word printed in large type. Isaiah, for example, becomes a sequence of such words as “Bos”, “Mons”, “Septem”, “Sanctus” and “Parvulus”; Matthew opens with “Natus”, “Adoratur”, “Lotus”, “Tentat”, “Docet” and “Orat”. The result is almost a visual map of Scripture: the changing sizes of type guide the reader through the biblical narrative while allowing its structure to be committed to memory.

Castillo explains the purpose directly on the title-page: the books and chapters of Sacred Scripture, and their “medulla” or essential substance, are arranged so that they may be committed to memory with the greatest ease. The volume concludes with thirty questions intended to provide a general understanding of the Bible, together with a catalogue of the principal ancient and modern commentators on Scripture. The book was therefore conceived not simply as an epitome, but as a practical apparatus for biblical study.

Martín del Castillo (d. 1680), a Franciscan born in Burgos and subsequently established in New Spain, was a biblical scholar and linguist who served as lector jubilado and formerly as Provincial Minister of the Franciscan Province of the Holy Gospel, titles prominently given on the present title-page. Modern scholarship on learned languages in colonial Mexico has drawn attention to Castillo's considerable philological activity and describes the Ars biblica specifically as a biblical mnemonic work, or “arte mnemotécnica bíblica”, designed as a ready guide to passages of Scripture useful for biblical exegesis.

Its appearance in Mexico is particularly interesting in the context of the history of biblical printing in Spanish America. Direct vernacular access to Scripture remained circumscribed within the Catholic world after Trent, while biblical learning itself occupied a central place in clerical education. Castillo neatly accommodated these circumstances: rather than publishing a vernacular Bible, he provided students and preachers with the architecture and essential contents of Scripture in Latin, explicitly advertising on the title-page that the work had been corrected “iuxta Concilij Tridentini formam”. The present volume consequently offers an unusual material witness to how the Bible was taught, memorised and transmitted in seventeenth-century New Spain.

Its pedagogical purpose is made particularly vivid by the typography. The pages shown here are strikingly unlike an ordinary theological handbook: short phrases float around prominently printed mnemonic words, creating an almost diagrammatic condensation of Scripture. The method carries the reader successively through the Old and New Testaments; the transition is explicitly marked by the large heading “NOVUM TESTAMENTUM”, followed by Matthew. The physical survival of the book in its modest contemporary limp-vellum binding is appropriate to an object designed for repeated practical use.

The work was issued again later at Écija in 1778, that edition explicitly advertising itself as a work formerly published in Mexico (“Opus olim Mexici lucem editum”).

A particularly unusual product of the seventeenth-century Mexican press: simultaneously a biblical epitome, mnemonic system, typographical experiment and textbook, compressing the entire structure of Scripture into a small volume designed to place the Bible quite literally within the student's memory.

Extremely rare, we locate copies in OCLC at Princeton, Indiana, JCB, DIBAM, Los Angeles Public Library, and Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores.

Medina, México 1124; Palau 48165.