La apología de la Biblia Regia escrita por Benito Arias Montano: un documento en paradero desconocido

Abstract

Scholars dealing with Humanism can access the most important Early Modern handwritten documents by using various tools and finding aids: library catalogues, catalogues of manuscripts and printed books, bio-bibliographical indexes and also the growing secondary literature (books and articles) on that subject. Yet one often comes across information about valuable manuscripts whose whereabouts is not known to us anymore. In this article I present the case of an important vindication of the Royal Bible written by the Spanish scholar Benito Arias Montano: the only copy of this document known to us was sacked by the English and taken to the library of Oxford, where it has not been found until today by a long chain of scholars who have tried to locate it by all means since the seventeenth century.