Omelia sobre lo psalm "de profundis"

Omelia sobre lo psalm "de profundis"

A monument of Spanish book printing: the first Spanish woodcut, which originated in Valencia and depicts the Virgin of the Rosary flanked by two of the most important figures of the medieval church: an iris-wielding St. Dominic (1170–1221) and a book-wielding St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), while Pope Benedict III (d. 858) and a knight girt with a sword kneel at her feet – all four figures surrounding the Holy Virgin hold rosaries in their hands. This woodcut adorns a devout work in the style of an allegorical romance by Jeroni Fuster, partly in verse, which was printed in an elegant Gothic script. It was published by the Valencian printing house of Lambert Palmart (b. 1440) in 1490 and, according to M. de Riquer, was influenced by the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265–1321). This incunabulum, a printed book predating 1501, is a fine testament to the genesis period of Spanish printing.

The Birth of Spanish Book Printing

After first emerging in the Mainz workshop of Johannes Gutenberg (ca. 1400–68) in 1452, the printing press and those with the knowledge to use them spread across Europe in the following decades. As a result, most of the first generation of printers were Germans. Spain’s first printing press was established in Valencia by a German trading company from Ravensburg in 1473. The man responsible for printing this codex, Lambert Palmart, appears to have been born in Cologne and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris before working in Valencia as a printer between 1474 and 1494. During that time, Palmart printed the first works in Valencian and Catalan respectively as well as printing the first work of literature in all of Spain.

The Only Surviving Copy

The only known copy of this incunabulum was bequeathed to the Historical Library of the University of Valencia by Vicente Hernández Máñez, who served as a librarian between 1852 and 1865. Jeroni Fuster’s homily is printed 28 lines per page in a Gothic typeface on 8 sheets without foliation and the engraving appears on the last page below the colophon, which includes the author, publisher, location, and date. It appears that the engraving predates the rest of the codex by three years and appeared in another work also concerned with the Virgin of the Rosary. Thus, this woodcut is considered the first to be used in Valencian incunabula. Little is known about the life of the author aside that he was a writer of poetry and prose with a master’s degree in theology and was a beneficiary of the Cathedral of Valencia. He participated in poetry contests in 1486 and 1511. His 1490 sermon is prose on Psalm 130 consists of two parts: the first section is allegorical and influenced by the Divine Comedy while the second is a gloss of the sixth Penitential Psalm.