Juan Pablo Martir Rizo

Juan de Courbes, calcographic cover History of the Very Noble and Leal City of Cuenca, directed to the immortal soul of Don García Hurtado de Mendoça, Marquis de Cañete. By Juan Pablo Martyr Riço. In Madrid for the heirs of the widow of P.o de Madrigal, 1629.

Juan Pablo Mártir Rizo, often confused in his time as Martín Rizo (Madrid, 1593-1642) was a humanist, priest, political writer, historian and poet Spanish.

Biography

Mártir Rizo was the tutor of Melchor Hurtado de Mendoza and in 1636 he entered the Congregation of natural priests of Madrid. He translated Aristotle's Poetics from a Latin version, a version that has only been edited recently (see & # 34; Works & # 34;). This inspired his classicism in aesthetic matters and that is why he confronted Lope de Vega and his theater writing anonymously with Pedro Torres Rámila the Spongia (1617), a libel that he intended to discredit him. He was a friend of Francisco de Quevedo, neostoic like him; in fact he translated a biography of Seneca the Younger from French. Likewise, he supported Quevedo when he faced the supporters of making Santa Teresa de Jesús patron saint of Spain and defended that he was better a male patron like Santiago.

He signed his works with the last name "Mártir", as the grandson of the famous historian and humanist Pedro Mártir de Anglería and eager to print in his pure humanism the lineage of the famous intellectual at the service of the Catholic Monarchs, but already in his own time his last name was confused with that of "Martín". As a political writer, he wrote a Norte de Príncipes (1626) that is part of the numerous European treatises that sought to refute political Machiavellianism, opposing it to tacitism. Essentially a historian, or rather a biographer, he was curious as a humanist about the exemplary figures of antiquity in the manner of Suetonius and Plutarch, writing or translating biographies such as those of Romulus, Maecenas, Seneca, and Sejanus; His translations were made from French, a language he was fluent in. He also tried to translate and left incomplete the History of Henry IV of France, which was written by his great model, Pierre Matthieu; he also wrote the history of the Duke of Birón and that of Philippa of Catania or Catanea, a washerwoman from Naples referred to by Giovanni Boccaccio in his De casibus virorum illustrium , lib. IX, but which Mártir translated from the Histoire des prosperitez malheureuses d'une femme Cathenoise (Paris, 1617) by Pierre Matthieu, with an interesting prologue by Quevedo; the theme was so suggestive that it also inspired other seventeenth-century Spanish playwrights.

The examples that Mártir used in these characters were prototypes of individual behavior; moral examples that had a projection on the political level very much to the taste of his time. He is also the author of a history of Cuenca that gave him many problems (Francisco Morovelli de la Puebla and the cities of Córdoba and Seville filed a lawsuit against him for including in this work those cities among those that rose up against King Carlos I in War of the Communities) and a History of the Wars of Flanders, in which -as José Antonio Maravall affirms in his old but essential study on the author- he joins so many writers who exercised the "defense of Spain against foreign calumnies", like his friend Francisco de Quevedo or Diego de Saavedra Fajardo. His poetry has not yet been collected or published. An article highlights the discovery of another work by Mártir not known to the previous ones and offers a paleographic edition of it: Anna Maria Mignone, «Un inedito del Seicento della Civica Biblioteca Aprosiana di Ventimiglia: the Consolatory to Mr. Juan María Cavana in the death of his father by Juan Pablo Martir Rizo», Quaderno dell'Aprosiana. Miscellanea di Studi, Vecchia Serie, I (1984), 41-62.

Work

• Poetics of Aristotle translated from Latin. Illustrated and commented by Juan Pablo Mártir Rizo. Ed. Margarete Newels, Cologne and Opladen, 1965.
• History of the very noble and loyal city of Cuenca.... Madrid: Heirs of the widow of Pedro Madrigal, 1629. There are ed. facsimile of Barcelona: El Albir (1974). Partly available in facsimile edition (only online) in [1]
• Tragic history of the life and death of the Duke of Biron.... Barcelona: Sebastián de Comellas, 1629. Reprinted in 1635
• Northern princes, Madrid: Diego Flamenco, 1626. There are modern ed. of Madrid, Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1945; and with a study by José Antonio Maravall, Madrid, Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1989.
• Trad. by Pierre Matthieu, Life of the blissless (Elio Seyano), Madrid, P. Tazo, 1625.
• History of the Life of Mecenas, Madrid: Diego Flamenco, 1626.
• History of the life of Lucio Anneo Séneca..., Madrid: Juan Delgado, 1625. There is modern edition: Madrid: Atlas, 1944.
• Trad. by Pierre Matthieu History of the unhappy prosperity of Felipa de Catanea, written in French, by Pedro Mateo... and in Spanish, by Juan Pablo Martyr Rizo... (Madrid: D. Flamenco, 1625)
• Trad. by Pierre Matthieu, History of the wars of Flanders, against that of Geronimo de Franqui Conestaggio, written in French, by Pedro Matheo and in Spanish, by Juan Pablo Martyr Rizo... (1627)
• Defense of the truth that is written D. Francisco de Quevedo Villegas, Cavallero professso of the Order of Santiago, in favor of the Patronado of the same Unico Apostol Patron of Spain, against the errors that printed Don Francisco Morovelli of Puebla, native of Seville, contradicting this unico Patronato [who wrote it in Madrid his homeland, on July 10, 1628], Málaga, Iuan René, 1628 (reprod. in F. de Quevedo, Complete Worksed. de Luis Astrana Marín, Madrid, Aguilar, 1932, pp. 948-966)
• The Rhomulus, Madrid, Francisco Martínez, 1633 (reed. y est. prelim. de José Antonio Maravall, Madrid, Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1989).