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ABSTRACT This essay explores the technologies of reading and visualization in La passion del eterno principe (Burgos, 1493?). Early printed texts generated a material relationship between the text and image that allowed the readers to process words and images without interference and to construct meaning from their interplay. The distinctiveness of this incunable resides in its deployment of dynamic visual and verbal codes that offered laypeople a framework for empathetic meditation focused on Christ's suffering and its salvific consequences within the Christian life.
La passion del eterno principe (henceforth LPEP) has received relatively little attention from scholars of late medieval Iberia. The volume, a miscellany of devotional texts centered on the Passion of Christ, entered the collection of the Boston Public Library on October 30, 1940 (More Books 416-20).1 While it lacks a colophon and is unsigned, the Boston LPEP bears the typeface used by Fadrique de Basilea's workshop in Burgos around 1493.2 The incunable consists of fourteen leaves set in a two-column configuration with seventeen xylographic illustrations depicting scenes from the Passion of Christ.3 The volume includes Padre Guaberte's translation into Spanish of chapters 139-149 of Jean Gerson's Monotessaron (349-73), an influential Gospel harmony written in Latin in 1429.4 The translated selection of the Monotessaron collates the four canonical Gospels into a single account of Christ's Passion and fashions an accessible narrative useful for devotions or instruction (Hobbins 82-92). In addition, the collection contains other pieces that complement the Passion narrative: a prayer to Christ at the Cross, a hymn on the Passion attributed to Bonaventure, and apocryphal letters ascribed to Pilate and Lentulus.5 The experience of reading the LPEP with its mixture of texts and images participates in the discourse of religiosity that shaped the devotional culture of Isabelline Castile. Through the materiality of the LPEP, readers can fashion a subjectivity based on imaginative consideration of Christ's life and thus achieve the salvation to which all Christians aspire.
The seventeen woodcuts centered on Christ's Passion provide a visually dynamic space that invites readers to become witnesses to the Passion of Christ through their reading and seeing. In the late Middle Ages, this technique constituted an important component of affective meditation, as Sarah McNamer has noted: "reading is virtually synonymous with seeing, as...