1573 publication of the expurgated edition

The 1573 publication of the expurgated edition reshaped Lazarillo de Tormes under censorship: issued after a 1559 prohibition and in response to foreign editions circulating in Spain, it excised selected passages and removed the fourth and fifth tratados altogether. The cuts made the book’s contested religious criticism visible not only in what remained, but in what the authorities chose to suppress.

Background and Publication

Lazarillo de Tormes had been placed on the Index in 1559. Its prohibition did not end its circulation: numerous editions published abroad continued to reach readers in Spain. Under pressure from that persistent circulation, an expurgated edition appeared in 1573, censoring some passages and eliminating two chapters in full.

The work’s early textual history was already complicated. Three surviving editions date from 1554: those printed at Burgos, Antwerp, and Alcalá de Henares. Their differences and the interpolations in the Alcalá text suggest that earlier versions must have existed; the Burgos edition is considered closest to the lost first edition. The 1573 expurgation thus belongs to a history in which both transmission and editorial intervention shaped the text available to readers.

The Scope of the Cuts

The expurgators removed some passages and the entirety of the fourth and fifth tratados. The cuts did not extend to every short chapter: the fourth tratado alone was considered sufficiently complete to communicate an ambiguous yet intelligible denunciation of the friar of the Order of Mercy. The evidence leaves open the question of the sixth tratado, but makes clear that brevity did not prevent a chapter from carrying pointed criticism.

That distinction matters because the seven tratados vary considerably in length and organization. The first three are longer and more elaborated; the next three are arranged differently, and the final tratado reconnects the narrative to its prologue. The expurgation therefore intervened in a deliberately uneven structure, removing two complete units rather than merely shortening the book uniformly.

Religious Criticism and Censorship

The fourth and fifth tratados’ removal is evidence of the censorial attention paid to the work’s treatment of religious figures. The introduction identifies the friar of the Order of Mercy as the target of a denunciation that was ambiguous in form but clear enough to survive as a chapter’s central force. Elsewhere, the novel’s anticlericalism appears in its portrayal of a miserly priest and in its parody of clerical language; the 1573 cuts belong to the broader reception of that criticism, though the evidence does not specify every passage censored.

The author’s identity and precise intellectual commitments remain uncertain. The introduction places the work’s possible background in learned Castilian humanism and raises, without establishing, a connection to converts from Judaism. It also notes the book’s fierce anticlericalism. The expurgated edition records an institutional response to the text, but does not by itself settle the author’s identity, beliefs, or the exact grounds for each individual cut.

Textual Record and Significance

The translator’s edition uses the critical text edited by F. Rico in 1988 and reports departures from it in notes. Its appendix reproduces additions found only in the Alcalá segunda impresión, identified as interpolations. This editorial distinction between the transmitted text and later additions provides useful context for understanding the 1573 edition as another consequential layer in the work’s publication history.

The expurgated edition shows that the ban did not make the book disappear: foreign publication and circulation prompted a censored version within Spain. By deleting two whole tratados while leaving at least one short denunciatory chapter intact, the 1573 edition also reveals the uneven judgments involved in managing the work’s religious critique. Its history is therefore not simply one of suppression, but of circulation, selection, and altered access to the text.