Pedro Mexía

• 1. Introduction

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  Pedro Mexía was born in Seville sometime between the 17th of January and the 6th of September 1497, and when he died on the 17th of January 1551, it was in that same city. He never really left, and Seville never really left him. His writings carry a special affection for the place woven through them, a loyalty that shaped everything he made.

  What Mexía made, it turned out, the rest of Europe wanted. His major work, Silva de varia lección, published in 1540, became one of the earliest bestsellers the continent had seen. Within the sixteenth century alone it was reprinted 17 times. Within a hundred years of its first appearance, it had reached 31 editions in Spanish and 75 in foreign languages. Authors from Montaigne to Cervantes to Shakespeare drew from it.

  How does a humanist scholar from Seville produce a book that spreads across the continent so rapidly? And what exactly was in it that so many readers, in so many languages, found indispensable?

• 2. A Humanist at the Spanish Court

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  Mexía studied humanities and law at two of Spain's foremost institutions: the universities of Seville and Salamanca. Those years gave him command of the classical sources he would spend his career weaving together.

  He also reached beyond Spain. Mexía kept up correspondence with some of the leading intellectual figures of his age, among them Erasmus of Rotterdam, the philosopher Luis Vives, and Juan Gines de Sepulveda. That network placed him squarely within the pan-European humanist world of the sixteenth century.

  The peak of his official recognition came in 1548, when Emperor Charles V appointed him official chronicler of the imperial court. That position gave Mexía both the authority and the materials to pursue his historical writing, including a biography of the emperor that he left unfinished and unpublished at his death.

• 3. Silva and Its Sources

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  Silva de varia lección is best understood as a deliberate act of collection. Mexía assembled material from a wide range of classical and humanist authors, treating the accumulated wisdom of antiquity as raw material to be sorted and shared with a broader audience.

  Among the ancient writers he drew upon were Aulus Gellius, whose Attic Nights gathered miscellaneous learning from across antiquity; Athenaeus and his Banquet of the Sophists; the Saturnalia of Macrobius; and the Memorable Deeds and Sayings of Valerius Maximus. Mexía also turned to Polydore Vergil's De inventoribus rerum, to Plutarch's Moralia and Parallel Lives, and above all to the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, the vast Roman compendium of the natural world.

  Work by Erasmus of Rotterdam also appears within the Silva. That inclusion is notable: Erasmus was not an ancient authority but a living contemporary and correspondent of Mexía's, placing his influence directly inside a book that would carry his ideas across Europe in Spanish, Italian, French, and English translation.

• 4. Europe Reads the Silva

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  Italian readers were the first outside Spain to encounter the Silva in translation, in 1542, just two years after its original publication. French readers followed a decade later in 1552, and an English version appeared in 1571.

  The numbers that accumulated over the following century are striking. 31 editions in Spanish and 75 in foreign languages together represent a reach that few books of the period could claim. The Silva was not circulating in a single learned language; it was being read across the vernaculars of western Europe.

  Traces of the book can be found in works by Mateo Alemán and Miguel de Cervantes, by Montaigne writing in French, and by Shakespeare in English. That the same miscellany should leave its mark on authors so different in nationality, genre, and temperament points to something in the Silva's design: its encyclopedic range of subjects, drawn from humanistic knowledge, gave writers of almost any stripe something they could use.

• 5. History and Other Works

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  Beyond the Silva, Mexía wrote in history and in dialogue. His Historia imperial y cesárea, published in 1545, brought together accounts of the Holy Roman emperors. Coloquios y Diálogos followed in 1547.

  The Historia del Emperador Carlos V, his account of the ruler who had appointed him court chronicler, was neither finished nor published in his lifetime. Whatever Mexía gathered and wrote about Charles V remained incomplete when he died in Seville on the 17th of January 1551. His correspondence with Erasmus, Vives, and Sepulveda, and his appointment as imperial chronicler in 1548, together suggest a writer whose networks and ambitions extended well past what he managed to commit to finished pages.