The Badajoz-born playwright Bartolomé Torres Naharro constitutes one of the fundamental pillars of early sixteenth-century drama. Following a lengthy career in Italy, his works—and particularly the Propalladia—laid the foundations for many of the theatrical developments that would emerge towards the end of the century. The discovery of a new edition of this work (Toledo, 1535), together with a previously unknown single-play edition of the Comedia Aquilana (Seville, 1535) by García-Cervigón del Rey (2026), makes it necessary to situate both from a textual-critical perspective within the author’s editorial trajectory and to clarify several confusing bibliographical issues.
The impresa of the great Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto, showing bees being expelled from the hive by means of smoke, appeared in the earliest editions of his epic Orlando Furioso in 1516 and 1526, encircled by a frame with the motto PRO BONO MALVM with its syllables distributed on the four corners. In successive prints of the work, such frame was used on the frontispieces of several editions, and the pictura, deprived of the frame and the motto, was sometimes used in colophons. In editions of the definitive version of the poem, starting from 1532, an emblematic printer’s mark began to appear with the motto DILEXISTI MALITIAM SUPER DIGNITATEM and the pictura of a hand holding shears cutting the tongues of two serpents. The aim of this note is to examine the curious conflation established between these two emblems on books and medals associated to Ariosto.
This article analyzes a series of the annotations on sea monsters and magical animals that Gerónimo de Huerta penned in his Spanish translation, published in 1624, of Pliny the Elder's Natural History. Based on this analysis, I show how the notes contributed significantly to the dissemination of faunal knowledge in the 17th century. On the one hand, the Spanish version diffused the information collected by the Roman naturalist; on the other, the annotations incorporated and spread new knowledge, thereby establishing a sapiential dialogue between authors and eras. My study contrasts the information from Pliny the Elder's original text with the translator's extensive notes in order to assess the translation's groundbreaking contribution. Therefore, the aim of this article is to study the annotations incorporated by Gerónimo Huerta in his translation of Natural History, in order to demonstrate how these interventions, update classical faunal knowledge. In particular, de Huerta´s text first narrated monstrous sightings in various parts of the known world and the barely known seas of the Nordic lands. Likewise, the annotations describe magical remedies from the zoological pharmacopoeia present in the recently-discovered Americas, derived from unicorn horn and de bezoar stone. Both topics are expanded or incorporated to continue the encyclopedic tradition initiated by Natural History, facilitating the dissemination of both classical and contemporary knowledge of animals.
An analysis is offered of the edition and study carried out by Jesús Ureña Bracero and José Julio García Arranz of Los Emblemata de Andrea Alciato en una traducción inédita de Baltasar Porreño de Mora (1569-1639). Berlin: Peter Lang, 2025.
