Seis cartas inéditas de fray Luis de Leónen torno a la polémica sobre la Vulgata y la invitación a participar en la Nueva Imprenta Vaticana de Sixto V en Roma

Resumen

One of the main objectives of the Council of Trent was to spread Catholic doctrines and fight against heresy, which had been making good use of the benefits of the printing press. With this purpose in mind, Pope Sixtus V created in 1587 a new Vatican Printing Press to bring out new editions of all kind of religious works. From this project would emerge the so-called ‘Sistine Vulgate’, which was short-lived. This Pope also proposed the names of eight scholars, all of them theologians and experts in their own language, as correctors for the press. This article analyses how one of the scholars chosen was the Spanish writer fray Luis de León, just a decade after his own inquisitorial process, motivated precisely by his public declarations about some textual errors of the old Vulgate. A fundamental resource for this article is a corpus of six unpublished autograph letters by fray Luis, which provide us with unknown information about the circumstances of the invitation to Rome and which are published here for the first time. The correspondent is Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, an Italian nobleman who was a student at the Universities of Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares, a benefactor of writers (well known because Miguel de Cervantes dedicated his first novel, La Galatea, to him), and a future cardinal and viceroy of Aragon. The correspondence of Philip II with his ambassador in Rome, the Count of Olivares, provides us with the political and economic context surrounding the debate on the new Vatican Printing Press, a project that perished with the death of Sixtus V in 1590.