Flosculus Sacramentorum

The Flosculus sacramentorum is an incunable manual of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church: baptism, Eucharist, penance, confirmation, holy orders, marriage, and extreme unction. Its author, Pedro Fernández de Villegas (1453-1536), had the Latin work printed in his hometown of Burgos, Spain, sometime between 1498 and 1500 by Fadrique de Basilea (a.k.a. Friedrich Biel), the city’s most prominent printer. In twenty-six folios Fernández de Villegas expounds the basic teachings of his day on the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church, with an emphasis on priestly ministry. For the sake of his target audience, priests, he writes far more extended treatments of the sacraments of baptism, Eucharist, and penance than the others. The work would be reprinted dozens of times in the sixteenth century and banned by the council of the Spanish Inquisition in 1570 and, in 1583, by Spain’s Inquisitor General Gaspar de Quiroga y Vela. The Holy See issued its own prohibition in 1590 and repeated it for several centuries. The present edition draws on the late-fifteenth-century editio prínceps, a recently discovered edition from ca. 1510, and a 1521 edition lightly revised by Fernández de Villegas, to establish the critical text and apparatus. A new English translation runs in parallel to the Latin.