Moria de Erasmo Roterodamo : a critical edition of the early modern Spanish translation of Erasmus's Encomium moriae

In Early Modern Spain, only a limited number of the works by Erasmus was available in vernacular, due to inquisitorial censorship. In the first Spanish index of forbidden books any translation of the "Praise of Folly", Erasmus' most famous work, was explicitly prohibited, which led many scholars to believe that a Spanish "Moria" must have existed. Efforts to find the text were hitherto unsuccessful. The present edition, based upon the discovery of a seventeenth century manuscript of a Spanish translation of "Moria" extant at Ets Haim/Livraria Montezinos (Amsterdam) offers the presently only surviving proof of the existence of that translation. The existence of a early Spanish translation of Erasmus’s Encomium Moriae has been matter of speculation and unsuccessful research for over a century. This volume offers for the first time the edition of a seventeenth-century manuscript discovered at Ets Haim/Livraria Montezinos (Amsterdam) by its editors. They demonstrate that it is not only the first known early modern Spanish translation of Erasmus’s chef-d’œuvre, but a copy of a much earlier version, composed in mid-sixteenth century. This scholarly edition has been arranged for an easy textual collation with the canonical edition (ASD IV: 3) and translation (CWE 27) of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and includes an extensive apparatus of footnotes devoted both to this version and to Erasmus’s Moriae Encomium itself.