Two decades until the completion of Frei Sarmiento’s masterpiece

“The extraordinary extension of the works is a deterrent. And to work on a work that is advertised with 660 sheets, which is more than four thousand pages. It was written by hand, but it was not prepared for printing and, although it is not exactly a draft, it is not arranged, corrected text either, because it presents quite big problems during editing». Henrique Monteagudo explained how difficult it is to publish a complete edition of the work Natural history and all kinds of learning. Work of 660 sheetsthe superb work of Martín Sarmiento, whose five volumes are presented in the Museo de Pontevedra.

It was a process that lasted for the last two twenty years, since it was born in 2002 under the leadership of Henrique Monteagud, with the participation of an interdisciplinary research team. Six years after the publication of volumes II, III and IV, when I or V came out in 2022, the year of the 250th anniversary of the passing of Sarmiento.

It is certain that the original has been lost, although a copy made by Pedro Alonso de Salanova y Guilarte, who worked directly on the autograph with the still-living Sarmiento, survives. In fact, experts suspect that the final title was the work of a copyist.

This copy occupies five volumes, numbered XIII to XVII, and is part of the largest and finest compilation of two writings by Frei Martín Sarmiento, known as the Medina Sidonia Collection. It originally consisted of 17 volumes, to which some materials were posthumously cheated to form one or two more. The first four volumes (named XIII, XIV, XV and XVI) are kept in their original place, in the archives of the Casa Medina Sidonia Foundation, in Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz), while the last one is kept in the Museo de Pontevedra, or This explains the choice of this space to present the edition by which the Consello da Cultura Galega completes the publication of this great work.

“It is a sort of compendium of part of his intellectual work, which was very multifaceted. It was a work that was cited by me, but it was not published. Some part has been published, small fragments. Please give us access to this species Sarmentian encyclopedia It touches on some two topics that obsessed him the most, such as education, language, literature, but also other very interesting ones, such as his proposals for the improvement of the Galician economy and society”, said Henrique Monteagudo, who was accompanied by Rosario Álvarez, president of the Council for Culture Galicia, José Manuel Rey, director of the Museo de Pontevedra, and researcher María Álvarez Lires.