Criticón (Jan 2015)
El Libro de Agricultura de Gabriel Alonso de Herrera: un texto en busca de edición
Abstract
Just over five hundred years ago the Libro or Obra de Agricultura by Gabriel Alonso de Herrera was published. Written by order of Cardinal Cisneros, this agricultural treatise — the first one written in a Romance language — sparked a surprising interest, since twelve editions were prepared in Castilian and five in Italian only in the sixteenth century. The text, elevated to the status of classic, continued seducing many printers until the nineteenth century — some enlightened thinker, in a somewhat immoderate way, compared it to the bestseller of Don Quixote— and since 1970 it has been published, in whole or in part, up to eight times. However, some of these works have distorted the original text. For example, in the edition prepared by Francisco del Canto in 1569, autobiographical references that Herrera had made in his book were deleted, which made Mariano Lagasca (1819) suspicious that other passages could have been omitted or added. Furthermore, this distorted version ended up corrupting others which, in turn, are based on it (Pamplona, 1605, Madrid, 1620). With regard to the modern transcripts, it is noted that practically all —except for the work done by Eloy Terrón in 1981— have been based on the 1513 text. This means that out of the six editions of the work carried out during the lifetime of Herrera, on which the author made steady and sometimes major changes, critics have paid attention only to the first one. This obscures the successive stages through which the text was going to its final configuration. On the other hand, the work of Terrón, which tries to correct these deficiencies, provides little confidence, not only because of the lack of coherence of the transcript, but because he tried to retrieve the text of 1539 through the reprinting held in Madrid in 1620, i.e. one of the distorted editions that have been mentioned. On top of delving into the history of the publication of the Libro de Agricultura and the consequences this may have for the transmission of the text, this paper presents a proposal of a critical edition based on the printings supervised by Herrera. It shows how a strictly philological work is the most appropriate way to retrieve text and to guarantee to the scientific community a reliable access and the best chance for proper development of future research.
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