Religious Propaganda and Textual Hybridity in Tomás Carrascón's 1623 Spanish Translation of the Jacobean Book of Common Prayer

Tomas Carrascon de las Cortes y Medrano was among the many Spanish evangelicals who were forced to leave Spain for matters of conscience during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the same way as his best-known predecessors, Cipriano de Valera and Antonio del Corro, Carrascon found refuge in England and like del Corro, he became a clergyman of the Anglican Church. Like most of his Spanish coreligionists, however, his life story is virtually unknown, and many scholars remain misinformed about his identity and significance. The situation is complicated by the fact that during his stay in England, Carrascon adopted the name of Ferdinand (or Ferdinando) Texeda as his pseudonym. In this essay, I will study his work as translator of the Jacobean Book of Common Prayer.Fortunately, Carrascon left behind him a series of writings that can be used to reconstruct his life, ideas, and intellectual makeup.1 Between 1623 and 1625 he published in London, under the pseudonym of Ferdinando Texeda, three polemical pamphlets against Roman Catholicism. In 1623 he published the motives for his conversion in Latin and in English. The Latin version of the work was simply entitled Hispanus conversus.2 The English volume was entitled Texeda retextus: Or the Spanish monke his bill of divorce against the Church of Rome together with other remarkable occurrances.3 The next year he published another tract, Scrutamini scripturas: The exhortation of a Spanish converted monke, collected out of the Spanishe authors themselves, to reade and peruse the holy scriptures.4 Then in 1625 Carrascon published his last English work, and perhaps the most consequential of them all, Miracles unmasked: A treatise proving that miracles are not infallible signes of the true and orthodoxe faith.5Carrascon also produced two important works in Spanish. He was responsible for the first Spanish translation of the Book of Common Prayer, published in 1623, on the occasion of the infamous and frustrated Spanish Match between Prince Charles (r. 1625-1649) and the Infanta Maria (1606- 1646).6 Not only have scholars, as I will demonstrate later, been entangled in a series of historiographic errors regarding his translation of the Jacobean Book of Common Prayer, but the work in itself deserves careful attention as an example of the intimate nexus between translations and religious propaganda. Finally, he wrote a work bearing his own name as its title, i.e. Carrascon (1633).7 For long the identity of the printer, as well as the place of its printing, was unknown, but Harm den Boer has argued that it was printed by Menasseh ben Israel in Amsterdam.8 In this last work, Carrascon mentions two other manuscripts in Latin, but they remain lost.9Carrascon's 1633 work was rediscovered in the nineteenth century by Luis de Usoz y Rio, who published it in 1847 and then issued a second edition in 1848.10 It was the first volume to appear of the collection Reformistas antiguos espanoles.11 Furthermore, it also appeared in England in the first volume of Obras antiguas de los espanoles reformados.12 From the perspective of Usoz y Rio and Benjamin Barron Wiffen-both Quaker scholars who arduously collaborated in the collection and edition of the long-forgotten writings of Spanish Protestants-the publication of the Carrascon provided a new opportunity to promote the idea of religious toleration in Spain.The work also attracted the attention of scholars of European Jewry. In 1868, M. Caplan published a manuscript entitled Danielillo o respuesta a los cristianos.13 Isaac Mendes of Amsterdam was responsible for the manuscript which he copied from another source in 1738. Danielillo takes place in the early part of the seventeenth century in the Italian port city of Livorno (Leghorn). Don Antonio de Contreras, a resident of Madrid, arrives in the city after a frustrated visit to Rome where he intended to find answers for some questions regarding his Christian faith.14In the ensuing dialogue between Don Antonio de Contreras and Danielillo of Leghorn-a young Jewish lad of some fourteen to fifteen years of age- the latter made reference to a disputation that he held with a Spanish friar regarding the Christian dogma of the Trinity. …