the mystical theology of valentin weigel - DataSpace at Princeton ...

Brucioli must have come in contact with Lutheran ideas, returning to Florence in 1527,
only to be exiled again for his beliefs, this time to Venice, where he published a
translation of the Bible as well as works on Protestant theology. He was tried by the
Inquisition twice, in 1548 and 1555, first for publishing banned works then for heresy. 551
Unfortunately, it is not possible to guess from the Brucioli edition of Dionysius
itself what Brucioli himself thought of the work, why he decided to publish the work, or
whether his decision to publish an edition of Dionysius had anything to do with his
Protestant beliefs: it is a reprint of Lefèvre d’Étaples’ edition, prefaced with Étaples’s
own introduction—but with no comment at all by Brucioli. Perhaps historians of
Venice’s printers will locate documents from the press Ad signum Spei that might answer
this question. In the mean time, I mention Brucioli’s Dionysius edition chiefly as an
example of another Protestant Dionysius reader, alongside André Wechel, Oswaldus
Crollius and Weigel himself.
Spain
By contrast, the Alcalá edition from Spain emerged from a Catholic and humanist
milieu, published in 1541 on the presses of Juan Brocar, and dedicated to the Archbishop
of Toledo, Juan Pardo de Tavera. The Alcalá edition of Dionysius is interesting for
having been produced by a press both in the service of Catholic reform and dedicated to
perhaps the most powerful man in Spain after the King himself. The printer, Juan
Brocar’s was the son of Arnao Guillén de Brocar, founder of one of the first printing
Hillerbrand, Oxford University Press, 1996,
http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t172.e0852 (accessed June
20, 2012).
551 Chris Coppens and Angela Nuovo, "The Illustrations of the Unpublished Giolito Bible," in Lay Bibles in
Europe 1450-1800, 119-142 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006), n. 29, 134. See also John Jeffries
Martin, Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993).
198