Doctrina Christiana | Page 9

or by a combination of the two methods.
More positive and more succinct than Medina was T.E. Retana whose earlier researches [48] into the history of the Philippines Medina acknowledgedly made use of, and who in 1897 published his _La Imprenta en Filipinas, Adiciones y Observaciones a La Imprenta en Manila_. He took the material of Medina, added the evidence of Chirino and Plasencia, and resummarized the problem. The letter of Dasmari?as showed conclusively that a Doctrina was printed in 1593. Chirino said that the first two whose works were printed were Juan de Villanueva and Blancas de San Jos��. Fern��ndez stated positively that the first book printed in the Philippines was the book of Our Lady of the Rosary by Blancas de San Jos�� printed at Bataan in 1602. Aduarte supported this without mentioning a title, place or date of printing. If we are to accept all these statements as incontrovertible, how can the apparent contradictions be reconciled? The answer had already been hinted at, but Retana solved the problem with amazing acumen, and arrived at four conclusions, which are here printed in his own words:
"A--That the Doctrinas of 1593, though printed at Manila, were not executed in type, but by the so-called xylographic method;
B--That the initiative for the establishment of typography is owed to P. Fr. Francisco Blancas de San Jos��;
C--That the first typographer was the Chinese Christian Juan de Vera at the instigation of the said Father San Jos��;
D--That the first typographical printing of this Dominican author is of the year 1602." [49]
It is not difficult to say with the book itself in front of us, that it is an example of xylographic printing, but it was a great feat on the part of Retana, who had never seen a copy, to resolve apparently irreconcilable differences of opinion on the part of several unquestioned authorities by deducing that it was all a matter of semantics--what did printing mean? As for the sprite of 1581 introduced by Beristain, Retana dismissed it on the grounds of insufficient evidence. In a word, he concluded that the first book issued in the Philippines was a Doctrina printed from wood-blocks in 1593.
All subsequent writers on the subject have derived their information from the sources we have already mentioned, and to a great degree have been influenced by the findings of Medina and Retana. The Rev. Thomas Cooke Middleton [50] in 1900 confessed that he did not know what the first book printed was. Pardo de Tavera maintained his old intransigence, when in the introduction to his bibliography for the Library of Congress in 1903 he wrote that Medina's affirmation that printing took place in 1593 "loses all validity in the face of the categorical statement of F. Alonso Fern��ndez." [51] Medina did not comment further in his Adiciones y Ampliaciones [52] of 1904, yet when the same year P��rez and G��emes [53] published their additions to and continuation of Medina, bringing his bibliography down to 1850, they resurrected the 1581 Arte, but added no new evidence to prove their case. Blair and Robertson, in their tremendous, collective history of the Philippines, did not include a list of Philippine imprints in their bibliography, [54] but referred readers to Medina and Retana with whom they agreed. To celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of typographical printing in the Philippines Artigas y Cuerva [55] wrote a study which emphasized the part played by Blancas de San Jos��, but did not deny the existence of the 1593 Doctrina. Retana [56] in 1911 brought his work on the subject up to date, but retained all his major conclusions. In Palau's standard bibliography of Spanish books we find the Doctrinas called "the two earliest books known to have been printed in Manila." [57] Finally, the most thorough recent work on the subject is to be found in Schilling's [58] survey of the early history of the Philippine press published in 1937. There is little that can be added to the evidence uncovered by these modern writers, but the appearance of the book itself enables us to say with certainty some things which they were able only to surmise. However, as regards the authorship and the circumstances and place of printing we are able, from the information given on the title, to carry the investigation somewhat further.

THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE TEXT
The title tells us that the book was "corrected" by the priests of more than one order, and since it was printed by the Dominicans, we can assume that the ultimate responsibility for the preparation of the text in consultation with friars of other orders also lay in their hands. Our problem then is to discover what texts were available to them in 1593 and who were the priests who formed the editorial board. We have included in this study also