Note 204 — Chapter XXXVIII

Pedro de Ribadeneyra, who died, aged 84, in 1611, and for whom a beautiful epitaph was composed by Mariana, wrote several works in honor of his company, and several ascetic works, besides his “Cisma de Inglaterra,” (Valencia, 1588,) and his “Flos Sanctorum,” Madrid, 1599-1601, 2 tom. folio.

José de Siguenza, who was born in 1545, and died in 1606, as Prior of the Escurial,—whose construction he witnessed and described,—published his “Vida de San Gerónimo,” in Madrid, 1595, 4to, and his “Historia de la Orden de San Gerónimo,” in Madrid, 1600, 4to. He was persecuted by the Inquisition. Llorente, Hist. de l’Inquisition, Tom. II., 1817, p. 474.

It would be easy to add to these two writers on ecclesiastical history the names of many more. Hardly a convent or a saint of any note in Spain, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, failed of especial commemoration; and each of the religious orders and great cathedrals had at least one historian, and most of them several. The number of books on Spanish ecclesiastical history to be found in the list at the end of the second volume of Antonio’s Bibliotheca Nova is, therefore, one that may well be called enormous. Some of them, too, like the history of the order of St. Benedict, by Yepes, and several of the histories of those orders that were both knightly and religious, are of no little importance for the facts and documents with which they are crowded. But nearly all of them are heavy, monkish annals, and not one, I believe, has literary merit enough to attract our attention.