I too would be interested to know of a text-searchable database of Spanish Renaissance texts. I have used the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/bib/seccion/literatura/psegundoniveld6b2.html?conten=catalogo), but it mainly contains PDF files and lexical searches are not supported.

Estimados colegas:

Hace unos años vi una presentación en el Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, sobre la Biblioteca Digital del Pensamiento Novohispano. Tiene unas herramientas de búsqueda interesantes. Aquí está el hipervínculo:

http://www.bdpn.unam.mx/

Este texto, de la sección "Índices", da una idea de los que se puede hacer:

"En esta sección se encuentran varios índices. Estos se forman recuperando automáticamente las palabras o frases marcadas con etiquetas TEI dentro de los textos. Por la forma en que se realiza el marcado, cada índice agrupa una categoría y dentro de ella se encuentran las palabras o frases identificadas con distintos atributos dentro de esa categoría.

"Por ejemplo, bajo la categoría nombres encontramos los nombres de personas, planetas, dioses y seres mitológicos, lugares, instituciones, constelaciones, signos del zodiaco y divinidades católicas. En fechas, en cambio, sólo encontramos además de un agrupamiento general de las fechas indicadas en los textos, aquellas que se refieren a cometas. Las referencias identificadas se agrupan en tres categorías: citas textuales, citas no textuales y fuentes. Finalmente, bajo la categoría términos, se encuentran los atributos médicas, astrológico-astronómicas, filosóficas, etc.

"Las palabras marcadas que aparecen en estos índices pueden ser accesibles, también, en la parte derecha de cada folio al dar clic en el menú. En ese menú sólo aparecen las categorías que fueron marcadas en ese folio".

Thank you very much. I did not find still the useful tool, but thank you.

Dear Eduardo:

Perhaps Google advanced search would be the most powerful tool available for your general purposes, as it accesses many databases and other repositories simultaneously. I have used it for comparing 16th century Nahuatl texts with useful results, and texts in Castilian are probably better represented on the web than texts in Nahuatl.

One way to obtain more exhaustive results would be to search for short phrases with all possible orthographic variants, since Castilian orthography did not begin to be standardized until the 18th century, and much of what is available on the web is presented in the form of nonmodernized paleographic transcriptions.

Following is an example. In a manuscript dated 1717, I came across the Latin phrase Qui bene legit, multa mala tegit. I had not encountered this before. A simple Google search led me to several translations, and to the use of this adage and its Castilian equivalent in context, in a book published in 1805, available as a digital facsimile on the Google Books site. This information was sufficient, allowing me to write this footnote for a critical edition of the manuscript from 1717:

3. Esta locución latina corresponde al adagio castellano: “Que en quien lee bien, muchas faltas no se ven”. Véase: Antonio Arbiol, La familia regulada, con doctrina de la sagrada escritura y santos padres de la Iglesia católica, para todos los que regularmente componen una casa seglar, a fin de que cada uno en su estado y en su grado sirva a Dios nuestro señor con toda perfección, y salve su alma, Viuda de Barco López, Madrid, 1805, p. 394, https://books.google.com/books?id=f9RwotsgZ64C, consultado el 23 de enero de 2016.

Thank you again. I centainly tried advanced searches in Google whithout success. I realize more and more that I am studying unknown texts.

Well, you're certainly on the right track, Eduardo. It is important to try to locate the origin of each part of a text, since it was common in the sixteenth century for authors to copy large sections verbatim from one text to another, often without citing their sources. (It is still common today, of course, with the difference that it is no longer considered acceptable and those authors who are exposed are called plagiarists and are ostracized by the academic community.)

I suppose in your case the most effective strategy would be to follow the historical and textual leads and reconstruct the intellectual network surrounding your author, assembling a corpus of potentially related texts. For this sort of thing "artificial intelligence" is not as effective as a human being. As you are aware, this happens naturally as part of the research process when one delves into a problem of this sort.

The most thorough job I have seen of tracking down original sources of a text, done in an age when databases were not yet avaialable, is the critical edition of friar Juan de Torquemada's Monarquía indiana, prepared by a seminar in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, coordinated by Miguel León-Portilla, and published in seven volumes from 1975 to 1983. In volume VII there is a discussion of how Torquemada pieced his mounumental work together from earlier texts, adding parts of his own. There are exhaustive tables showing where each part of Torquemada's chronicle came from. This publication is available on line:

http://www.historicas.unam.mx/publicaciones/publicadigital/monarquia/index.html