Juan de Valdes

Dialogue of the Christian Doctrine1529.

Juan de Valdés (Cuenca, c. 1494/1504-Naples, 1541) was a Spanish humanist, Erasmist and writer. He is considered an Evangelical or Protestant although, according to Marcel Bataillon, he died “in the bosom of the Catholic Church.” He was the brother of Alfonso de Valdés, also a writer and royal secretary.

Biography

The news of his early years is few and vague. He belonged to an important family in Cuenca: the son of Hernando de Valdés and María de la Barrera, married in 1482. His father, a nobleman in response to the writ of nobility won in 1540 by Andrés, the eldest of his children, and of convert origin by his paternal grandmother was perpetual alderman of Cuenca and city attorney in Cortes; on his mother's side he was of Jewish convert origin on three sides. His brother Fernando de la Barrera, priest of Villar del Saz, was burned to death in the Plaza de San Martín in Cuenca in 1492 as a relapsed Jew. It was a very large family: Juan he had six brothers and five sisters. The date of birth of all of them is unknown, as there were no baptismal records in Cuenca until 1510, and these were very incomplete. Due to the order in which they are mentioned in the aforementioned nobility decree, Juan would be the youngest of the boys, probably born around 1494 and, contrary to what has been presumed, there is nothing to indicate that he was the twin of a brother. In 1523 we find him in Escalona (Toledo), in the entourage and service of the II Marquis of Villena, Diego López Pacheco y Portocarrero; he was a teenager and perhaps a page. This must have been a decisive period in his literary and religious formation, as he declares in his Dialogue of the Language having read numerous books of chivalry as a young man, which he ended up detesting in his maturity:

Ten years, the best of my life, which I spent in palaces and courts, I did not use myself in more virtuous exercice than in reading lies, in the quales it takes so much taste that I ate my hands behind them. And look at what it is to have the stupendous taste, that, if you take in your hand a book of Latin romançades that are of true historians, or at least that they are had by such, I could not end up reading them with me.

He declares that he only admires the Amadís de Gaula, the Palmerín of England and the Primaleon. He praises the Romancero ("of good and clear sentence") and the Refranero for their traditional, clear and expressive style, and condemns the impure, obscure and rhetorical style of Juan de Mena and her school —she does not use her "own and natural words", but some "rude" and others "very Latin", and "she writes so obscure that it is not understood"—, compared to the more content and flat part of the lyric songbook. That is why he also dislikes the mixture of simplicity and cultism, clarity and darkness, from which La Celestina suffers. If he condemns Antonio de Nebrija's vocabularies, it is because they seem like rushed works. We also know that the secular preacher Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz moved around the Marquis of Villena, who, protected by him, spread the so-called enlightened current in Castilla, in contact with the Protestant Reformation. Alcaraz was arrested by the Spanish Inquisition in 1524 and in the same year Valdés left the court of the marquis.

Apparently he also received a careful humanistic education from the hand of the Italian intellectual Pedro Mártir de Anglería; but what is beyond any doubt is that he later studied in Alcalá de Henares, where he was documented as early as 1526. Eugenio Asensio believed that he was a disciple of Cipriano de la Huerga, but critics have already ruled out this hypothesis. In 1528 he began his correspondence with Erasmus of Rotterdam and revealed his interest in Enlightenment and reformist doctrines. He must have been well aware of Protestant ideas, since his brother Alfonso, who was highly protected by the Erasmian chancellor Gattinara, attended the diets called with the Protestants as secretary of Carlos V. When he appeared anonymous (under the name of &# 34;a religious man") his first book, Dialogue on Christian doctrine (Alcalá de Henares: Miguel de Eguía, 1529), he was denounced for heresy before the Inquisition and, despite being secret the processes of this institution, someone told him and he went to Italy, where he managed to get the Pope to accept his proposals. Under his protection he lived there until the end of his days, as he was named a gentleman of the swashbuckling court of the Medici Clement VII. However, the truth is that in that work there are numerous texts by the reformist Martin Luther and his followers translated and adapted:

• Martin Luther, Decem Praecepta Wittenbergensi praedicata populo1518.
• Martin Luther, Explanatio dominicae orationis pro simplicioribus laicis1520.
• Martin Luther, Of votis monasticis iudicium1521.
• Juan Ecolampadio, In Isaiam Prophetam Hypomnemata1525.
• Philipp Melanchthon, Enchiridion elementrum puerilium1524.

Nevertheless, the text of this publication had been so carefully measured to avoid theological suspicions that it had even been meticulously expurgated by the canon Dr. Hernán Vázquez; in time, the printer would also be prosecuted by the Inquisition. In 1534 he went to Rome, but that same year his protector, the Medici Clemente VII, died and he was replaced by Paul III, a Farnese Roman pope, an enemy of that Florentine lineage, so the following year Valdés went to Naples. In both places he was the emperor's political agent, although he must have been for a short time, since the anti-Erasmian reaction of the Spanish Inquisition soon caught up with him. In Naples he treated Garcilaso de la Vega, a member of the Pontanian Academy. In the years that followed until his death, he wrote copiously pious considerations, exegetical works, partial translations of the Bible and some dialogues intended to clarify concepts and expand the conversations he had with the adherents of his religious doctrines in the gathering he held at his home., a true circle of enlightened reformists and religious. All these handwritten works were preserved and transmitted by the most famous of his disciples: Giulia Gonzaga. This mystical and liberal evangelism was to inspire the Roman circle of Vittoria Colonna at the time of her friendship with Michelangelo Buonarroti, around 1540.

In his house he received, among others, the Archbishop of Otranto, Pietro Antonio di Capua; Galeazzo Caracciolo; to Caterina Cybo; the vicar general of the Capuchin order Bernardino Ochino; the Bishop of Bergamo, Vittore Soranzo; to Bartolomeo Spadafora; the heretical bishop of Cheronissa (Crete), Giovanni Francesco Verdura; or the theologian converted to Protestantism Pietro Martire Vermigli. According to testimony rendered on March 7, 1564 by Francesco Alois, condemned as a Lutheran, among the sympathizers of Juan de Valdés one could also include Nicola Maria Caracciolo (1512-1568), Bishop of Catania, who in the text of his diocesan synod, written in vulgar language, it demonstrates a spirituality close to that of the enlightened. But the most prominent were Pietro Carnesecchi, Marcantonio Flaminio, Mario Galeota —a friend of Garcilaso— and the aforementioned Giulia Gonzaga.

Cover of the work Language dialogue. Manuscript guarded at the National Library of Spain.

With Naples, at that time, being a city under the rule of the Spanish crown, there was a lack of books to learn Spanish, and it seems that, when writing his Dialogue of the language, Valdés tried to please to a group of friends who wanted to improve their knowledge of Spanish, as stated in this same work. This is his most famous, although critics have disputed its authorship and have sometimes attributed it to Juan López de Velasco and others to Juan Luis Vives. It was composed around 1535 and was not printed until the middle of the century. xviii, when the illustrated Gregorio Mayans y Siscar published it as an appendix in his Origenes de la lengua española (1737), although with the title Dialogue of languages. It contains all kinds of judgments on normative issues of the purest Castilian language, estimating that of proverbs as such and showing himself to be very opposed to Antonio de Nebrija, whom he considered too affected by Andalusianism. As for his best style, he is fully renaissance when writing:

To tell you the truth, very few things I observe, because the style I have is natural and without any shaving. I write as I speak; I am only careful to use of vocablos that sync well what I want to unzip, and say it as plainly as possible, because, in my opinion, in no language is the affectation good. Quanto when making a difference in alçar or abaxar the style, according to what I write or to whom I write, I keep the mesmo that you keep in the Latin.

This ideal was also echoed by his friend Garcilaso when he praised Juan Boscán, in the prologue he dedicated to his translation of The Courtier, by Baltasar de Castiglione:

He kept one thing in the Castilian language that very few have reached it, that it was to flee from the affectation without giving with him in any dryness; and with great cleansing of style he used of very courteous and highly admitted terms of the good ears, and not new or apparently unearthed of the people.

Valdés insists even more on issues of style, formulating precision and non-conceptual conciseness as the maximum virtue:

That all good to speak Castilian is that you will say what you want with the least words that you can, in such a way that, applying well the concet of your mind, and giving to understand what you want to dezir, of the words that you put in a clause or reason can not be removed any without offending the judgment of thela, or the carelessness, or the elegance.

He abhors hyperbaton, so widely used in the last century xv, and much prefers the more current, normal and natural of the language.

Juan de Valdés died in 1541. In his praise, the humanist Iacopo Bonfadio called him "compiuto uomo" ("complete man"). But the fact is that a second inquisitorial process was being prepared for him, frustrated, but not stopped with his early death, since a bull of 1542 caused the diaspora of the most powerful Waldesians (Pier Paolo Vergerio, Pietro Martire Vermigli, Bernardino Ochino). and the prosecution of others (including Pietro Carnesecchi, who was burned at the stake in 1567).

His name, along with that of his brother Alfonso, has been considered as one of the possible authors of Lazarillo de Tormes, but the idea seems to be ruled out by current studies. Regarding his religious concerns, which were the ones that occupied the most his writings, they are halfway between Catholicism and the Lutheran Reformation. Despite the coincidence of names and doctrine, Juan de Valdés should not be associated with the Italian pre-Protestant movement of the valdesi or Waldensian Church, which began in the xii by Pedro Valdo.

The conception of the norm: Valdés as a representative of the anti-normative position

The norm is a capricious institution that develops in languages. As it is something irregular, that breaks the characteristic, the authors have traditionally been concerned with adopting a prescriptive point of view, insulting the forms that, due to having chosen one model or another of the ideal language, are not considered correct. In this way, the author Zamora Salamanca distinguishes two points of view regarding the norm:

• Axiological point of view: It is a prescriptive point of view. A community of speakers is identified as an ideal language model and the use of the rest of the forms is penalized. The authors therefore seek to find the ideal model according to different criteria according to the time when we meet.
• Objective point of view: The language is defined from the descriptive point of view, as the set of realizations of a given language at a certain historical moment.

Valdés represents in the 16th century the anti-normative tendency, expressed in his Dialogue of the Language, although with nuances:

• Valdés identifies the language with the people, for it transmits purity.
• In the end, he is interested in the language of the court, but devoid of his artifices.

Thus, although he selects an ideal language, he is considered anti-normative because he rejected the prescriptive statement that insulted the language itself according to a social group. His ideal was clean language, as manifested in the people combined with the culture of the court. Therefore, he already advanced the interest in the evolution of the norm among the speakers and not as mere deviations that must be corrected.

It could be said that with this position he left traces of what would be the linguistics of the xx century and the development of the system from the language of Eugen Coşeriu.

Work

1. Language Dialogue (written in 1533; first impression, Madrid, 1737; reprinted in 1860, 1873).
2. Qual Maniera if devrebbe tenere a il jornare... gli figliuoli de Christiani delle Cose delta Religione (without date or place; before 1545, since it was used by the Italian translator Catechism of Juan Calvino, 1545). No Spanish original.
3. TreatedBonn, 1881, of a manuscript of the Palatine Library, Vienna; in Italian, Cinque Tratelli EvangeliciRome, 1545; reprinted in 1869 in English by J. T. Betts, in XVII Opuscules1882.
4. Alfabeto Christiano (written in 1537), in Italian, Venice, 1545; in English, by Benjamin Barron Wiffen, 1861; the original Spanish is unknown.
5. One hundred and ten divine considerations; all copies of the original Spanish were deleted by the Spanish Inquisition; thirty-nine of the Considerations were published with the Treatedfrom a manuscript in Vienna.
6. Seven Doctrinal Letters (Originally published with the Treated of the manuscript of Vienna), in English by J. T. Betts, with the Opuscules.
7. Comment Brief... on the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans, Venice, 1556 (edited by Juan Pérez de Pineda); reprinted in 1856 in English by J. T. Betts, 1883.
8. Comment Brief... on the First Epistle of Saint Paul to the CorinthiansVenice, 1557.
9. The Gospel of St. Matthew (text and commentary), 1881, of the Vienna manuscript; in English by J. T. Betts, 1883.
10. The Salter (Psalms of the Hebrew in Spanish), published with the Treated of the manuscript of Vienna.
11. Comments in Spanish to Psalms 1 to 41.
12. They are mentioned Comments Al Gospel of Saint John that have not been located or do not exist.
13. Christian Doctrine Dialogue.