La pieza de Marzo

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The piece of the month of March, dedicated to International Women’s Day, could not overlook the opportunity to recall that, throughout the history of Spanish printing, women have been present for centuries, although they were frequently rendered invisible. Many took over typographical workshops after the death of their husbands, ensuring not only the continuity of editorial production but also— in numerous cases—the economic future of their children and families. Despite this, their names and achievements were often eclipsed behind formulas such as “widow of” or “heirs of,” which urges us to recover and highlight their contribution to the history of the book and printing in Spain.

Within this context of inequality, María de Quiñones (d. 1669) emerges as an extraordinary figure. Her career embodies women’s capacity to assert and empower themselves in a world that denied them visibility, reminding us that the history of the book is also—and has always been—a history of women who resisted, created, and transformed.

Little is known about María de Quiñones’s origins, although it is recorded that she entered the world of printing after marrying Pedro Madrigal the Younger. Her father-in-law, the Salamancan Pedro de Madrigal, had settled in Madrid in 1588, where he opened his workshop in response to the growing demand generated by the presence of the court of Philip II. Over time, he became distinguished as one of Madrid’s leading printers of the sixteenth century. After the death of Madrigal the Younger in 1602, María remarried in 1604, to Juan de la Cuesta, famous for having printed the first edition of Cervantes’s Don Quixote in 1605. Cuesta left the workshop in 1607 to move to Seville; nevertheless, his name continued to appear in the imprints, as he had received powers of attorney from María Rodríguez Rivalde in 1602.

Between 1608 and 1627, María de Quiñones actively participated in the family printing workshop, and from 1633 onward, following the death of her mother-in-law, María Rodríguez Rivalde, she assumed full management of the business. From that moment on, all works produced by the press visibly bore the name “María de Quiñones,” an emblem of her professional independence and evidence that she was the first woman in Madrid to sign as a printer.

For thirty-three years she sustained a production of remarkable technical quality, recognizable by the scarcity of errata and by her collaboration with leading publishers of the period. Her press printed both recreational literature and political texts, royal decrees, sermons, as well as liturgical and theological works. In 1666 she transferred the business to Melchor Alegre and Catalina Gómez, and she died three years later, in 1669.

We consider it relevant to underscore how the Society of Jesus, over several decades, placed its trust in the Madrigal–De la Cuesta–Quiñones press, maintaining its collaboration with María in a context dominated by profound gender prejudices. This Jesuit support not only acknowledged the technical excellence and reliability of her workshop, but also constituted an exceptional act of legitimization: an order of considerable influence that treated a woman printer as an equal among her male colleagues. Thanks to this trust, the Society in fact helped to weaken resistance and to affirm María’s full professional authority in a field that rarely granted women the right to leadership and authorship.

This support is evident in the piece selected for this month, Vida del Santo Padre y gran siervo de Dios el B. Francisco de Borja… (Madrid, María de Quiñones, 1644), by Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, SJ (1595–1658). The work recounts the life of the third Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Saint Francis Borgia, SJ (1510–1572). This hagiographic biography belongs to the Jesuit literature devoted to the exaltation of its saints and blesseds, intended to offer models of virtue and spirituality. At the time of printing, in 1644, Borgia had not yet been canonized—his canonization would come in 1671—hence his designation as “Blessed” in the title.

Quiñones’s edition displays the hallmarks of major Baroque publications: folio format—a symbol of prestige for institutions and learned readers—text in two columns with marginal notes for ease of consultation, woodcut engravings on the title page, ornamented initials, and decorative headpieces.

Particularly noteworthy is the engraved copperplate frontispiece dedicated to Francis Borgia: a three-quarter-length figure, clad in the Jesuit habit, with a serene and introspective expression, accompanied by inscriptions, heraldic emblems, and an identifying legend that evoke both his ducal lineage and his governance of the Society. The treatment of the face achieves a balance between historical verisimilitude and spiritual idealization, acting as a visual threshold to the hagiography by anticipating in image the virtues that Nieremberg develops in the text. The technical quality of the engraving helps reinforce Borgia’s public projection and indirectly supports his process of beatification and subsequent canonization.

The half-leather working binding, probably from the mid-nineteenth century, is designed for intensive use while retaining a certain dignity. The leather spine features raised false bands marked with fillets and simple gilt tooling; the title “VIDA DE S[AN] FRANCISCO DE BORJA” appears in gilt capitals. The endpapers are marbled paper of the “stone” type, with droplets in a very restrained two-color palette: a reddish-tile background with bluish-gray speckles surrounded by white halos. The copy, with shelfmark AM/157, preserves handwritten ex-libris from the Ropería of the College of the Society of Jesus in Madrid, an ex-libris of the Countess of Bornos, a stamp from the Colegio de Nuestra Señora del Recuerdo in Madrid, and the aforementioned half-leather binding. It comes from the Complutense Library of the Society of Jesus of the Province of Toledo, in Alcalá de Henares, from where it was transferred to the Pontifical University of Comillas.