Authorship and rewriting in eighteenth-century literatura de cordel

The printers Manuel Martí and Francisco Benedito in four pliegos from the University of Geneva

Abstract

In its progress towards an increasingly literate society with a growing taste for reading, the 18th century gave the cordel one of its greatest moments of splendour. As a result of constant reprinting, these printed ephemera will make of the publishing market a space for the survival of popular stories. Publishers of oral tradition such as Manuel Martí and Francisco Benedito, whose printing presses in Madrid and Murcia produced, among others, four pliegos which are preserved in the collection of the Library of the University of Geneva and which include four narrations of what are known as sacred stories and which formed part of the Colección de varias historias (1767-1768) by Hilario Santos Alonso, although their authorship is not entirely clear. The study of their edition and printing will also serve as a way of understanding the idiosincracies of distribution in this period, characterised by a systematic censorship but still incapable of restraining the thrust of the genre.