CONFESSIONAL IN SPANISH, Spain, 16th century, MANUSCRIPT ON PAPER.

‘Espelo de confesors’, a Confessional in Spanish, decorated manuscript on paper Spain, fifteenth century.

204 x 145mm., 261 leaves (plus one modern endleaf and 6 early endleaves at front, and one modern and 4 early endleaves at back), wanting frontispiece and bifolium from 23rd quire, else complete, catchwords, near-contemporary foliation on recto (main text: i-cclvi, the index at end without folio nos.) and some quire signatures on verso, collation: i-v10, vi9 (leaf
cancelled after 7th leaf, but no break in text or contemporary foliation), vii-xxii10, xxiii8 (wants fols. ccxiv and ccxv), xxiii-xxv10, xxvi14 (probable only, the last leaves of this quire restored with silk and mounted on guards), written in single column of 24 lines of a rounded Spanish bastarda hand, uppermost and lowermost lines often with ornamental penwork
cadels, red rubrics, initials in red with purple penwork, first leaf and many leaves in section in fols. cviii-cclix affected by some ink-burn (but almost all still quite legible), last leaves with additional material with same damage (but worse, and burnt through in places: hence repair with silk to two leaves), some stains to edges and small spots, else in fair and presentable
condition; bound in dark brown Italian leather over heavy wooden boards, tooled with ropework and half-circle pendant designs filled with foliage (for similar see outermost central ring on the binding of the Missal of Cardinal Domenico della Rovere, made in Rome c. 1495: reproduced in A. Hobson, Humanists and Bookbinders, 1989, pl. 68), sewn on two large
thongs, this binding greatly restored with old leather laid over new leather, and spine and edges completely replaced, some scuffs and scratches

Provenance:
1. Evidently written by the scribe ‘Franciscus’ who names himself in an abbreviated colophon at the end of the main text on fol. cclvi(recto). At the end of the book, an early owner added several pages of short legal arguments in Spanish on the issue of clerical concubinage (the entering of priests into forbidden marriage-like unions with women). This practise seems to have been entrenched in the late medieval Spanish Church, and even tolerated by ecclesiastical authorities in some regions there (see M. Armstrong-Parida, ‘Priestly Marriage: The Tradition of Clerical Concubinage in the Spanish Church’, Viator, 40, 2009, pp. 221-53).
2. From the collection of Adolf Lagerfelt (1897-1967), vice-consul to the Middle East; from his library at Säbylund.

Text:
This large and comprehensive confessional announces at the beginning of its contents list that it is named the “Espel[h]o de confesors” (‘mirror of confessors’), and is likely to have been translated from a ‘speculum confessorum’ text. Its frontispiece is missing, but the opening words of the prologue here are “Aqui comenca un memorial de los pecados [***] y veniales ...”. Its contents are arranged in eight books and it has an extensive chapter list at its end, to which a near-contemporary hand has added folio nos. (as well as, most probably, the folio nos. throughout the volume). Such works were popular in Spain in the second half of the fifteenth century and the opening decades of the sixteenth century, both in manuscript and in
early printings.
Our thanks to Dr. Timothy Bolton for assistance in cataloguing this item.

See text.