Centenary Paper: A Text in Exile? The Voyage across Europe of <i>Las cient novelas de Juan Bocacio</i>

Las cient novelas de Juan Bocacio , the medieval Castilian translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron, survives in six witnesses: one manuscript and five printed editions. Of the sixteen copies of the printed editions, only one, and the manuscript, are currently held in a Spanish library. This article, through an exploration of the material condition and history of the respective libraries, purports to examine the reasons why this text is absent from Spanish soil and why it was more fortunate in foreign collections. Furthermore, it aims to reconstruct the ownership history of several of these exemplars to argue that, despite its prohibition in the 1559 index, the book still had a presence in Inquisitorial Spain. Finally, the article explores several more exemplars that were damaged, probably due to censorship practices. All this will serve as a starting point to begin to explore the influence this particular translation had in sixteenth-century Spain.