The Manila Synod of 1582

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Can design assist in deepening our understanding of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines?

The Manila Synod of 1582: The Draft of Its Handbook for Confessors

Publisher: Ateneo de Manila University Press
Author: Paul Arvisu Dumol
Book dimensions: 8.5 × 11 in
Year: 2014

Winner, Best Translation & Best Design, Philippine National Book Awards 2015

About the book

A seminal English translation of the two surviving drafts of the Manila Synod of 1582, with annotations. The influential document is an unwitting record of the atrocities suffered by Filipinos under Spanish colonizers, and the more benevolent view of the first bishop of the Philippines concerning native Filipinos' rights.

Publisher's description

In 1582 Domingo de Salazar, the first bishop of the Philippines, alarmed by reports from Filipinos themselves on the abuses they were suffering at the hands of Spanish officials and soldiers, convoked what has come to be known as the first Synod of Manila. The assembly identified all the different ways Filipinos were being oppressed and determined the cases in which restitution had to be made and how much. All this was set down in a handbook for confessors. The publication of the handbook was delayed, and Salazar’s death in 1594 meant the indefinite suspension of all publication plans. Some ten years later these plans were revived, and annotations were made to the original manuscript. Publication, however, was once again thwarted by a calamity that destroyed almost half the manuscript. Sometime in the middle of the seventeenth century, a clean copy was made of the surviving chapters of the handbook, with the scribes incorporating the early seventeenth-century annotations haphazardly into the main text of the handbook. The present work is an English translation of the clean copy and attempts to disentangle the annotations and to reconstruct the original text itself in some places dubiously copied. The handbook for confessors of the Synod of Manila of 1582 is not only the unintended witness to early Spanish abuses that it describes in appalling detail; it is also a vivid portrait of the Lascacian generation of missionaries who defended native rights and human dignity. It is the only surviving document produced by the assembly that influenced Spanish colonial policy in the Philippines crucially for at least the next two centuries.

Footnotes within footnotes

There is no surviving copy of the original Spanish document. All that remains are two drafts, both copied by hand from the original document: the first draft, and the second draft, which is basically an annotated version of the first draft, with comments as footnotes. Dumol meticulously untangles the issues and problems that arose in the process of transcription and annotation, including errors in copying and translation. This is seen in the documents' three sets of footnotes: the author comments on both the text and the 17th-century footnotes in the second draft.

Paper stock as storytelling

The cover stock is a rough cardboard whose informality adds to the draft nature of the document; it will also quickly accrue a patina through handling over time. This informality is balanced by the centered type and antiquarian calligraphic flourishes, as well as a subtle blind-embossed frame.

Time, space, and typography

In the design, I try to present this complex document in a way which will give the reader the most ease. The large page size is conducive to close scrutiny of the text; the spacious margin gives the eye a rest, and makes room for the author's two sets of comments in two separate columns for easy reference. The type is subtly calligraphic, referring to the handwritten nature of the Synod documents, without being distracting to the content. The author's contemporary notes are in a neat sans serif to differentiate it from the original text and annotations. Overall, the design rests on a strong grid and restrained type.

“Font faces have each their own peculiar aura: the face of the main text and footnotes recalls Venice and the Renaissance; that of the editorial notes to the main text, modern times. The juxtaposition of the two faces reminds us of the function of the notes: modern comments on an old text.”

—Paul Dumol

“Given a wider readership, The Manila Synod of 1582 is bound to change the way we view our colonized past and ourselves.”

—DLS Pineda, The Philippine Star

Installation views from Secret Lives of Books: Karl Castro, Book Designer, solo exhibition at the Ayala Museum, 2016.

In a display showing the process of making this book, we showed the actual printer's negatives used in printing the pages of the book.

Left: Printouts of years' worth of emails showing the tedious process of proofreading the manuscript and inputting corrections. Right: The author's own copy of the Synod manuscript with his marginal notes. The printout bears water damage from when a typhoon flooded the author's apartment. Similarly, the original Synod drafts have fallen victim to the ravages of time and weather, surviving only in fragments.