The handwritten transmission of Quevedo's reply Al padre Juan de Pineda

Abstract

In 1626 Quevedo published the first edition of Política de Dios, a political work that sparked an important controversy. The Jesuit priest Juan de Pineda wrote a diatribe against it, now lost, which provoked Quevedo's reply, entitled Al padre Juan de Pineda. Until now only two manuscript copies of the 17th century containing this response were known, one of them affected by significant mutilations of the text compatible with censorship. A third copy, dating from the 19th century, is lost. The National Library of Spain has acquired a manuscript dated in the 17th century that includes Quevedo's work and is added to those already known. This article studies the textual transmission of the writing, based on the comparison of the three testimonies, to elucidate the position of the new manuscript in it and its textual value in a future critical edition of the work. The abundance of errors and omissions in the text, which even increase in the recently found copy, reveals the distance of the three copies with respect to the original, as well as the presumable existence of an important manuscript diffusion despite the scarcity of preserved sources.