Paleografía española, que contiene todos los modos conocidos, que ha habido de escribir en España

Madrid: En la Oficina de Joachin Ibarra, calle de las Urosas,, 1758. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. 4to (190 x 145mm). [iv], 160pp. Signatures: *(2); A-V(4). 18 engraved plates (1 folding) of handwriting samples from charters, diplomas and bulls by Francisco Javier de Santiago y Palomares. Modern vellum; (internally very clean, wide margins, only slightest spots, title lightly browned). Early ownership stamp “MINTOSA” (?) on title. Twice stamped by St. Francis Xavier College Library, 1847 (NY) on p. 98 and final leaf.

First Edition of this rare manual on the history of Spanish handwriting. Excellent small and handy survival as such reference works are not easy to come by, often issued in small runs and tending to be well used. Although chronologically this is the second manual of Spanish paleography to have been published (the first appeared twenty years earlier) the lexicographer and Jesuit professor of mathematics Esteban de Terreros y Pando’s Paleografía española was the first truly useful reference work to appear. This edition also preceded by a sister edition of 1755, which was published within a Spanish translation of the French encyclopedia Le spectacle de la Nature by Noel-Antoine Pluche (1688-1761). Although some authorities attribute primary authorship of the Paleografía to the Jesuit historian Andrés Marcos Burriel (1719–1762), no one disputes Terreros y Pando’s greater or lesser involvement in the production of this work, also owing to the fact that it is his name printed on the title page. The text of the treatise is somewhat ambivalent in this regard, but the conclusion, written in the voice of Terreros y Pandos acknowledges the help of Burriel stating he had provided the eighteen plates drawn by Francisco Javier de Santiago y Palomares (1728-1796). Prints of documents and antiquities were rare in Spain, and the quality of the reproductions in the Paleografía were unprecedented and unparalleled; and as Palomares later remarked of this work in his own treatise on paleography, “Even though they have some defects, they are the most accurate that have been engraved until now.” For instance, no accurate reproductions of a text in Visigothic script had ever been printed before. On the first plate, a letter of Queen Isabel dated 19 January 1481 illustrates two of the scripts employed in Spain during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the cortesana or “courtesan script” and the procesada, a term for which there is no English equivalent, both of which demonstrate why a manual of paleography or guide to the decipherment of “old writings” had become necessary. For Terreros y Pandos, the history of the script was one in the same with the history of Spain. Rare and fine copy.