[LLANOS, Bernardino de].
EARLY MEXICAN SCHOOLBOOK
Illustrium autorum collectanea ad usum studiosae iuventutis facta.
Mexico, Henricus Martinez, 1604.£3,250.00
FIRST EDITION. 8vo. pp. [16], 248. Italic letter, little Roman. Decorated ornaments. Light age yellowing, ink splash at central gutter of first few ll., very light water stain to gathering B, occasional minor marginal foxing. A very good, clean copy in later vellum, two of four ties, chewing to lower edges, all edges sprinkled blue, C20 armorial bookplate of Gomez de Orozco to front pastedown.
A remarkable survival of early C17 Jesuit education in colonial Spain, and a scarce early Mexican imprint by Henricus Martinez for the Jesuit Collegium in Mexico City. Born in Germany, Martinez was ‘an important figure in New Spain […]. Interpreter for the Inquisition, Royal Cosmographer for the Consejo de Indias in Mexico, author, printer and cartographer, Martinez was also the architect and engineer of the drainage system of the Valley of Mexico. […] In 1599, Martinez opened the fourth printing house in New Spain and published his first book the same year’ (Mathes, pp.62-3).
A major example of Jesuit pedagogy and the ‘Virgilian Novo-Hispanic School’, ‘Illustrium Autorum collectanea’ is a collection of five Jesuit texts on Latin grammar, oratory and rhetoric. These are: a treatise on Latin eloquence by Francisco Silva Centurio; one on letter writing and one on poetry by Bartolomé Bravo; one on rhetorical principles (e.g., narrative genres, refutation, loci communes) by Pedro Juan Núñez; and a compendium of rhetoric by Cipriano Suárez. The editor, the Spanish Jesuit Bernardino Llanos (1560-1639), was the author of ‘the only surviving pieces written entirely in Latin and performed in Mexico in the C16’, and was a teacher of Latin and oratory in Mexico (Bloemendal, p.625). Following the Jesuit method, Llanos ‘enhanced the teaching of classical Latin through the use of models of Christian rhetoric, on the one hand, and, on the other, [carried out] successful editorial work epitomized by the printing of texts by Christian authors in the printing press of the Colegio Máximo de San Pedro and Saint Paul’ (Martinez). First established in 1574, the Collegium provided university-level education in the classics, theology and philosophy to students partially descended from European settlers. Though initially conceived for the training of Jesuit priests, it was later also attended by young men acquiring education for secular offices.
From the library of Federico Gomez de Orozco (1891-1962), Mexican researcher of bibliography and manuscript studies. He owned the famous Mixtec Codex Gomez de Orozco.
Only LC and Bancroft copies recorded in the US. Not at Hisp. Soc. of America. USTC 5028288; Medina, México, 215; Wilkinson 47993; Andrade, Ensayo bibliográfico mexicano del siglo XVII (3. ed.), 15; Palau y Dulcet (2. ed.), 118446; Sabin 22815 (under ‘ESCALANTE, Francisco de la Estela’). V. Mathes, ‘Enrico Martínez of New Spain’, The Americas, 33 (1976), pp. 62-77; Neo-Latin Drama in Early Modern Europe, ed. J. Bloemendal (2013); A. Martinez, ‘El teatro jesuita novohispano’, in Lara, Luis Fernando, et al. De amicitia et doctrina: homenaje a Martha Elena Venier (2007), pp.77-102.Out of stock