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INPRIMATU
The critical edition of Esteve Materra’s book of 1617 has been published
  • The members of the Aziti Bihia Linguistics and Philologists Association of the UPV/EHU have created a critical edition of the book “Doctrina Christiana” by Esteve Materra, published by the UPV/EHU and the Basque Country, “Witnesses of the Basque Language” and “Monument to linguae Vasconum: Under the collections of “Studia et Instrumenta”.
Maddi Txintxurreta @mtxintxurreta 2018ko martxoaren 28a
Ekaitz Santazilia, Eneko Zuloaga eta Dorota Krajewska ikerlariak (Arg: Euskaltzaindia)

The first edition of Esteve Materra’s “Christiana Doctrine” saw the light in 1617 in Bordeaux. In addition to being one of the first books to be printed in Basque, he created a literary dialect that was frequently used in later publications, the classic lapari.

The UPV/EHU and the Basque Country have researched the book, showing that the Blessed Mother was “more important than what was believed”, both in the field of Basque literature and outside it. All the copies of the Blessed Mother were lost, and the first edition of the book was unknown until a copy was found in the Royal Library of Denmark.

Dorota Krajewskak, a student and researcher in the Department of Didactics of Language and Literature of the UPV/EHU, has discovered the lost book. “In fact, the critical edition and analysis of this and the only issue (1623) of the second publication stored in Oxford has just been prepared by Krajewska himself and other members of the Aziti Bihia Association of Linguists and Philologists,” reports the Basque Ministry. The new edition has now been published by the Basque Government and the UPV/EHU.

Krajewska explains that the Blessed Mother brings useful information about the type of reader of the Basque texts of the time: “The first edition is made for direct use by children, and the second one is aimed at sailors. There was a community that knew how to read Lapurdi.”

On the other hand, research has shown that the writer Materra was more important than I expected. His works published in Erdara had a weight in the dissemination of the counter-reform. “It is precisely for this reason that they were supposed to be sent at that time and in the heat of the embers of the Inquisition from Gascony to Lapurdi, in order to expand and strengthen the foundations of the Catholic faith. I learned it in 10 months,” he said.

The researchers believe, however, that the Blessed Mother was used as the author of the book because she was already a well-known writer and to give prestige to the work. Then who wrote it? Scholars have hypothesized that Axular might have been the same, but comparing it with the writing styles of the Blessed Mother, they have not yet found enough clues to say that this writer is Axular.