There is a ligall (a set of papers that correspond to a file) preserved (saved) and conserved (not lost) in the municipal archive of Albaida of the presbyter of Valencia Camilo Abad i Satorre. Among them, a deed of sale of a house in Muro d'Alcoi made in Albaida; a notebook of recipes (pains, anti-rheumatic, wounds), herbal teas (of life, for those who draw blood from the mouth) and curative methods (syphilitis, humours, cholera); a scroll of his Bachelor of Civil Law degree (1798); a sheet of the joys of Sant Engraci from the parish of Aielo (1840); the indulgences of 1775 from the church of the Assumption of Maria d'Albaida and a handwritten leaf written in two columns corresponding to the last two plains of the Valencian Bible by Bonifaci Ferrer published in 1478.
Looking at the backlight, the watermark is "SABATE" (see explanation of "watermark" in the attached photo). One of the structural problems of paper manufacturing (mills) in the 18th and 19th centuries was the supply of old cloth, the fundamental raw material, which could be flax, hemp and, later, cotton, and which, according to certain criteria, determined the quality of the resulting paper.
Did you know that the fourth language in which the Bible was printed was Valencian? The first was the Latin Vulgate (Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press, in 1455 in Mainz); the second, in German (1466); the third, the Tuscan version (Italian, 1471); and the fourth, the Valencian one attributed to Bonifaci Ferrer, printed in Valencia, by Alfonso Fernández de Córdoba and Lambert Palmart, in 1478. Bonifaci was the brother of Vicent Ferrer (Sant) and started in the Carthusian monastery of Portaceli (Serra, Camp de Turia ) the translation of the Bible around the year 1400. The colophon says: "The very true and Catholic Bible ends, taken from a Bible of the noble priest Berenguer Vives de Boïl, knight, which is based on his own Bible that is romanized in the monastery of Portaceli, in Latin in our Valencian language, by the most reverend micer Bonifaci Ferrer, doctor in all law and faculty of sacred theology».
This Bible was subsequently revised, before being printed, by the Dominican inquisitor Jaume Borrell. Six hundred copies were printed which were soon to stumble upon the reluctance of the new Inquisition, the Castilian one, extended to the Crown of Aragon by the work and grace of Ferdinand II, not yet "the Catholic", in 1482. This if there was a Bible in Valencian, Tomás de Torquemada didn't like it one bit. In 1498, at the behest of Torquemada, the process against the Bible in Valencian began. The inquisitor in Valencia, Juan de Monasterio, ordered the confiscation of all copies of the Bible. The volumes of the Romanized Bible (to put in Romance or Romanesque vulgar language what has been written in a classical language) of Friar Bonifacio had to be handed over to the Inquisition, under penalty of incurring the crime of heresy, and burned.
Finally, however, the Bibles were burned; all? One survived and arrived at the Royal Library of Stockholm (Sweden), but was lost in the fire that destroyed this library in 1697. From this Valencian Bible, around 1480, the book of Psalms was printed in Barcelona, which it has survived in a single copy, today in the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris. And chance wanted a sheet, the last, of the Valencian Bible to be saved.
Well, the leadership of the Inquisition was such that the Bible disappeared and there are even those who doubted that it had existed. Anyway, the crime wasn't quite perfect. It left traces, many, and of the six hundred copies condemned to the stake, the sheet of one remained that ended up in the Carthusian monastery of Portaceli, the birthplace of the work. To the Carthusian Joan Baptista Civera (1575-1655), from Alcoy, while he was writing the history of his monastic establishment, in 1646, a priest from Valencia gave him four leaves of the Valencian Bible. The Annales of the Cartuja de Porta Coeli de Civera consisted of two parts: a first, De totis, and a second or Vida de varones illustres de Porta Coeli in the manuscript of which he inserted the last page of the Valencian Bible.
The manuscript came to be seen by Jaume Villanueva (Dominican priest, theologian and scholar from Xativ) in the early 19th century, but was later lost with the exclaustration of 1835. At the end of the 19th century, Civera's manuscript appeared in a Bellver de Cerdanya farmhouse (Lleida). The association Lo Rat Penat presented it in Valencia in 1908. The German scholar K. Kaebler, expert in incunabula, studied the sheet and concluded that it was part of the missing Bible ("The Valencian Bible", in Revue Hispanique, no. 21, 1909). There were many offers to the farmer from Cerdà and finally he sold it to an antique dealer in Barcelona and soon after it was acquired by the Hispanic Society of New York, which is where it currently is.
Continuing with the Abbots' ligall in the Albaida archive, there is a quartile of 12 plains and a loose sheet (two plains) where herbal teas, recipes and home remedies are discussed (year 1834).
1) Herbal tea to cure those who draw blood from the mouth. Ingredients: Inland lichen (1 ounce), marshmallow (3 ounces), licorice (2 ounces), gum arabic (3 ounces), violets (1 ounce), mallow flower (1 ounce).
ounce : unit of weight, it was the twelfth of a pound. The Valencian pound was equivalent to 355 gr.;
2) Tea of life. Discovered by the physician of King Henry of France. The doctor's father lived 108 years drinking the tea of life, and he, Caterina, the doctor, lived 120 years. Two glasses (12 ounces) are taken on an empty stomach, 3 times (spring, summer, fall) a year for 15 days. Ingredients: half a cup of oatmeal, a handful of wild chicory roots, half an ounce of mineral crystal, two tablespoons of honey. In the annotations they point out: it is a pleasant drink to drink.
Almud: Old measure of grains, of variable value, equivalent in Valencian lands to approximately four liters; it was also the wooden container in the form of a truncated quadrangular pyramid that served to measure grains;
3) Composition of the water of Bañares (village in La Rioja). Ingredients chopped in a stone mortar: tartrate, fig salt;
4)medicine for tertians (appears, a class of malaria-malarial fever, every three days) and quartans (every 4 days). Ingredients: paste of rent and "doncel" chopped green;
5)recipe for pain: everything chopped in a stone mortar: brionia root (zucchini), oroval, green tobacco leaves, rosemary. Everything is mixed in a bowl plus common oil, wine, brandy;
He also writes the curative method of syphilis (sic), herpes and other ailments that have their origin in the mass of the blood and in the irregularity and acrimony of the humors
moods: in ancient medicine, they were bodily fluids such as bile, atrabilis, pituitary, and blood on the degree of balance of which a person's health and temperament were considered to depend.
Other recipes are: a) for "saratanes" (breast cancer), sprains and waxing; b) anti-rheumatic; c) for all kinds of wounds, bruises, fresh and old sores; d) to cure cholera (excerpt from what was published in the "Diario de Valencia" of August 1, 1834;
Here's the link to the newspaper in case you're curious:
"There is a remedy for everything, except for death” and “He who is in pain, seeks a remedy".
The elders say and tell (folk wisdom) that the most important medicines are Dr. Joy, Dr. Sun, Dr. Sleep and Dr. Aliment and that when this medication fails, you have to turn to Dr. Medication.
Remedies are what is applied to cure or relieve a disease. The home remedies so well known by our ancestors and that have so little benefit today. Natural medicine respectful of conventional medicine.
Preventive treatments, home remedies, ancestral recipes, ointments, infusions, etc. it's about understanding, learning and taking advantage of nature's resources and virtues.
An old philosophy of life and health. A look at the past or a note against oblivion.
Herbal tea is the most common way of extracting the healing substances from plants and plant products and has been drunk for centuries, both as medicine and for simple pleasure. It includes three processes: infusion (boiling water with chopped plants), cooking (cooking the roots or stems to extract more substances) and maceration (resting to soften and extract soluble parts).
Medicinal plants are mankind's oldest remedies. All cultures have used plant resources to treat illnesses and conditions naturally. And it's not just supporters of alternative medicine who are researching its properties, but also large pharmaceutical laboratories because more than half of the drugs on the current market are made with medicinal plants.
The first apothecaries we know of are from the 10th century. The apothecary was a kind of doctor and pharmacist surrounded by mortars, flasks, funnels, pipettes, brushes, flasks, filters, spatulas and containers.
Joseph Moll
Health and ball
