Luis De Granada's Mission to Protestant England

chapter 9 Luis De Granada’s Mission to Protestant England: Translating the Devotional Literature of the Spanish Counter-Reformation

Alexandra Walsham

The famous Spanish Dominican friar Luis de Granada never actually set foot on the shores of England. Born to poor parents in 1504 and brought up by his widowed mother who scratched together a living as a laundress, he entered the priory of the Holy Cross in Granada in 1524 and took his vows of profession a year later. A man of austere life drawn to the rigours of ascetic discipline, he devoted himself to study and was sent to St Gregory’s College in Valladolid for further education. Inspired by evangelical zeal he sought and was given per- mission to join the ranks of Dominican missionaries in Mexico. But before his departure for the New World, the Provincial of Andalusia decided to redeploy him to restore the religious vitality of the Order’s house of Santa Domingo de Escalaceli in the mountains near Cordoba instead. In this remote setting, Luis spent long hours in solitude and meditation, perfecting the strand of interior piety for which his many devotional writings subsequently made him famous. Eager to intensify the faith of the laity, he also disseminated it in the vicin- ity of the monastery by preaching and news of his talent and eloquence soon spread. Elected prior of Badajoz in 1549, at the request of the Cardinal-Infante, Dom Henrique (1512–1580, reigned 1578–1580), son of King Manuel (1495–1521), he moved to Portugal and became Provincial of the Dominicans in 1557. He was appointed confessor and counsellor to the Queen regent Catalina and became a key figure in the Portuguese court, though he refused successive offers of episcopal sees and declined a cardinalate from Pope Sixtus v (1585–1590). A towering figure in the Iberian Catholic world, he died in Lisbon on the last day of December 1588. The final months of his life must have been overshad- owed by the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the thwarting of Philip ii’s “messianic vision” to invade and reconvert the heretical kingdom of England and absorb it into the sprawling Habsburg empire.1

1 Some useful studies include R.L. Oechslin, Louis of Granada (London: Aquin Press, 1954); John A. Moore, Fray Luis de Granada (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977), Alvaro Huerga, Fray Luis de Granada: Una vida al servicio de la Iglesia (Madrid: Católica, 1988). Geoffrey Parker,

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But if Luis de Granada never physically ventured beyond Spain and Por- tugal, he nevertheless became an internationally renowned writer, whose spiritual works were translated into multiple European languages, including Italian, Latin, French, German, Greek, and Polish. In England, his books were nothing less than bestsellers: numerous clandestine Catholic editions were imported across the Channel from the Low Countries, while other versions produced by London-based publishers and booksellers circulated unhindered within the Protestant mainstream. The volume of copies of the latter may even have exceeded the former.2 Catholic and Protestant translators alike lauded Luis de Granada as a “learned and reverend,” “famouse and renowned,” “rare and matchless divine”; as “a spirituall captain” supremely skilled in conduct- ing his readers to “the Celestial Canaan” and in piercing the hearts of sinners; and as “the very flower” of devotional writers of his age and generation.3 They spoke in superlative tones of “the honnyed sweetnes of his celestiall ayre” and declared that he discoursed so sublimely “that some heavenly Cherubim or Seraphin, seemeth rather to speake by his mouth, then a mortall man.”4 The aim of their own endeavours was to make this Spanish angel intelligible to English readers in their own tongue. This essay explores the transmission, adaptation and domestication of Luis de Granada in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It approaches translation as a vital arm of the parallel programmes of evangelical conversion and moral renewal that comprised the Reformations and as a species of religious ventriloquism by and through which ministers and laypeople acquired a voice and gave expression to their own priorities, passions and preoccupations.

‘The place of Tudor England in the messianic vision of Philip ii of Spain,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002), pp. 167–221. 2 For English translations of Luis de Granada’s various works, see stc 16899.3-16922a.7.; Wing L3471C-E. A.F. Allison and D.M. Rogers, The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640, vol. ii Works in English (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), 270, 345–348.5, 426, 439–445. For an older study of Granada’s works in English, see Maria Hagedorn, Reformation und Spanische andachtsliteratur: Luis de Granada in England (Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 1934). 3 Luis de Granada, Granados spiritual and heavenlie exercises, trans. Frances Meres (London: 1598), title page; Granados devotion. Exactly teaching how a man may truly dedicate and de- vote himselfe unto God: and so become his acceptable votary…now perused, and englished, trans. Francis Meres (London: 1598), sigs A4r, 5v. 4 Luis de Granada, The sinners guyde. A worke contayning the whole regiment of a Christian life devided into two bookes, trans. Francis Meres (London, 1598), sig. A2v; A treatise of the love of God, wherein consisteth the perfection of the Christian life, in Six spiritual books ful of marvel- lous pietie and devotion, comp. and trans. John Heigham ([Douai]: 2nd edn, 1611), p. 204.