The Fourteenth Leaf
A brief perusal of volume one of the Advertencias para los Confessores de los Naturales reveals an error in foliation: the number 14 appears twice, on two subsequent pages in the text.
The first leaf 14 follows, as it should, leaf 13. It begins:
¶Si el penitente qui|iere nombrar en la cõfe|sion al cõplice del delicto, en ninguna manera lo permita el confe||oor, por que peccaria grauamente |i lo permitie||e, como en|eñan Doctores graues.If the penitent would like to name in confession his accomplice in sin, the confessor must not permit it, because he would commit a serious sin if it was permitted, as serious Doctors teach.
The second leaf 14 follows immediately on the first. It begins:
¶El confe||or a cuyos pies vìnieren Indios de obraje, procure ante todas co|as acabar cõ los amos y dueños, que les perdonen lo que les han cogido, y apañado de |u casa: pues hablando moralmente pocos ay que no hurten algo, en los dichos lugares: y e|tan ca|i impo|ibilitados de poder |atisfazer, y con e|to podran ab|oluer a |us penitentes.The confessor at whose feet come Indians of labor, must procure before all things to go to the masters and owners, and have them pardon them for everything they have taken, and manage their house, because speaking morally there are few who have not stolen anything, in the said places: and they are almost unable to be satisfied, and with this it will be possible to absolve the penitents.
What's going on here? It's clear that this is not a case of duplicated leaves, which would require both pages to be identical. Nor is it simply a case of inaccurate counting (calling two leaves "14" when there should only be one). We know this because of a comparison in the quality of the paper between the two leaves. Across all copies - including the copy displayed here - leaf 14 (2) shows discoloration from age that is not seen on leaf 14 (1). This suggests that these pages come from a different sheet of paper than leaf 14 (1). In fact, the mottling extends through leaf 17 before the paper returns to its ordinary condition.
The signature marks at the bottom of the page provide a clue to this story. The Advertencias was printed in octavo, which means that the book is printed on a sheet that is then folded into eight leaves and bundled together for binding. In this book, the first four leaves of each bundle receive a signature mark on the base of the recto page. When we examine the bundle that contains the double Folio 14s, however, we find that it contains nine leaves.
A further clue is found in some exemplars of the Advertencias. Made invisible by the processes of digitization are the stubs of two leaves bound into the book just prior to the second folio 14, and cut out after binding.
The simplest explanation, which we come to by way of Occam's Razor, suggests that an entire page was omitted during the process of printing and foliation. To resolve the problem, our printers removed three leaves from the book (folios 15, 16, and 17) and replaced them with a four-leaf bundle which included the second leaf 14.
[NOTE: WOULD BE NICE TO ILLUSTRATE THE "BUNDLE" HERE.]
[Thanks to professor Michael Winship for help with this analysis.]
