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Abstract
St. Gregory the Great's Morals on the Book of Job exists in two fourteenth century Spanish translations: one of these is anonymous and the other is known to be the work of Pero Lopez de Ayala. A unique manuscript presenting a compendium of Ayala's translations of the Moralia in Iob was identified by Luciano Serrano in 1911 at which time he essayed a brief analysis of the character of the condensation available in that text. He recognized correctly that the nature of the abbreviated edition followed the pattern of an anthology of the full text but he erred in ascribing the principle of reduction to the motivation to remove the allegorical interpretation of the significance of Job's life. It was not a religious issue per se that caused the author to condense the lessons from Gregory but rather his wish to build on the kernel of the lessons given in the Moralia on the art of government. By his careful selection and highlighting of the twenty-five percent of the Moralia that treated the subject of rule he was able to craft a speculum principis to which he added another twenty-five percent from the original text that dealt with the content of a Christian education in Church doctrine. Thus he offered in his abbreviation of Gregory's Moralia a Christian De regimine principum.
The uniquely Christian character of this handbook for princes is brought out by a comparison with other examples of manuals on rule that would have been known to Ayala. They show how decidedly innovative a step the author had taken when he turned to a Church Father as the source for his textbook on royal government.
But as great as the significance of this innovation was it must take second place to the truly remarkable discovery that Ayala's translations of the Moralia when carefully examined with the Latin is seen, contrary to the normal expectations for fourteenth century Spanish translations, not to be a paraphrase of the Latin but an exact literal translation equivalent to the quality and character of the humanist translations of the succeeding centuries.
