The Torrelaguna manuscript, written at the Convento de la Madre de Dios, a Franciscan monastery in Torrelaguna, Spain, over many years beginning in about 1520.

The Torrelaguna manuscript, written at the Convento de la Madre de Dios, a Franciscan monastery in Torrelaguna, Spain, over many years beginning in about 1520.

Gift of the Helen F. Spencer fund; acquired in 1974 from Colin and Charlotte Franklin. Cardinal Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros (1436-1517), who edited the Complutensian Polyglot, was born in the small town of Torrelaguna, some thirty miles north of Madrid, and founded the Franciscan monastery of La Madre de Dios there, beginning its construction in 1517. This manuscript, mainly concerned with the annals and business affairs of the monastery (including such matters as a dispute between the town and the monastery about the maintenance of an aqueduct built by Ximenes), contains as its first item an otherwise unknown biography of the cardinal.

MS C238