The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes

Print shops in four different Spanish and Flemish towns issued La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes in the same year, 1554, and not one of them named an author. That silence was not an accident of the press. The book is a sustained joke at the Church's expense, five of its narrator's eight masters are clergymen, and every one of them is starved, greedy, or corrupt, at a moment when saying so in print could bring the Inquisition to the printer's door as easily as to the author's. The story is framed as a letter: a town crier named Lázaro, ordered by an unnamed official, Vuestra Merced, to explain a scandal in his own household, instead narrates his whole life, from his mother's poverty in Salamanca through his apprenticeship to a cruel blind beggar, a starving priest, a penniless squire performing a gentility he cannot afford, and on to the archpriest whose maid Lázaro is paid, in effect, to marry and not to notice. Internal references anchor the narrator's own chronology to a Toledo Cortes of 1525, and the text never once mentions the later Cortes held in that same city in 1538, which is the closest thing scholars have to a date of composition; publication then waited another decade and a half beyond even that. What resulted was something Spanish prose had not produced before: a first-person antihero, low-born and unheroic, describing hunger and humiliation in plain sentences, with no chivalric romance and no forgiving moral at the end of it. Four editions appeared within days of one another in Burgos, Alcalá de Henares, Medina del Campo and Antwerp, which points to a text that had likely already been passing hand to hand in manuscript before any press touched it. It gave Spanish literature a word, pícaro, and a genre, picaresque, before either had a name to go by.

The question of who

Candidates have multiplied for four centuries without ever settling anything. In 1605 the monk José de Sigüenza named a Hieronymite friar, Juan de Ortega; two years later the Flemish scholar Valère André named the diplomat Diego Hurtado de Mendoza instead, a claim archival notes revived in 2010 and rival scholars disputed within months. Rosa Navarro Durán has argued at length for Alfonso de Valdés, secretary to Charles V, dating the book two decades earlier than anyone else accepts. Nobody has ever produced a signature.

How it nearly did not

The Inquisition's 1559 Index banned Lazarillo outright for its contempt of priests, and it could not be sold in Spain at all for fourteen years. A royal censor let it back in 1573 only with two whole chapters and assorted lines removed, and that castigado version remained the only Lazarillo Spain could legally read for the next three hundred years.

Five hundred years

• c. 1525 Composed, on the evidence within it, in Charles V's Spain, the narrator's own chronology runs no later than a Toledo Cortes held that year
• 1554 Four editions appear within days of each other, Burgos, Alcalá de Henares, Medina del Campo and Antwerp; no one of them is proven first
• 1555 An anonymous sequel turns Lázaro into a tuna, printed only in Antwerp, bound to the original from then on
• 1559 Placed on the Inquisition's Index, banned outright for its contempt of priests
• 1573 Returns, cut, as the Lazarillo castigado, two whole chapters removed; the only legal text in Spain for three centuries
• 1586 First English translation, David Rowland's version; twenty editions followed
• 1992 A walled-up copy surfaces in Barcarrota, found during a house renovation, hidden since the Inquisition's day
• Now Still being read