MALVENDA, TOMÁS. - Dominican exegete and philologist, b. at Játiva near Valencia in May 1566, d. at Valencia on 7 May 1628. He professed in the Dominican convent of Santa Croce in Lombay, where for four years he taught philosophy and for ten years theology. Of strong intellect, he learned Greek and Hebrew on his own, and at nineteen composed his first erudite work (now lost) on St. Anne and St. Joseph.
He sent learned observations (1600) on his Martyrology to C. Baronio, who had him come to Rome (1601), where he suggested to the cardinal many emendations to his Annales. At Rome M. worked with Isidoro Aliaga (1568–1648) and was the principal corrector of the Dominican Missal and Breviary (Rome 1603); he produced the Martyrologium Romanum recensitum by Baronio, with the addition of the saints and blesseds of the Order of Preachers (ibid. 1603), by which the Martyrology of Usuard, hitherto in use in his Order, was abandoned; he collaborated on the Librorum prohibitorum index expurgatorius published by Jo. M. Brassichelensis Mag. s. Pal. (Rome 1607). He expurgated the Bibliotheca SS. Patrum of Margarin de la Bigne (1586), and his Annotationes were included in the Paris edition of 1605. He compiled the Annales O. P. (up to 1246), which he was unable to complete and were published without his consent (Annalium s. Ord. Praed. Centuria prima sola edita, Naples 1627).
He returned to Spain in 1608 with Aliaga, who had been elected provincial of Aragon and shortly thereafter bishop of Albarracín. M. lived in the convent at Valencia (except for two years in Madrid [1610–12], at the side of the inquisitor Bernardo de Rojas), devoting himself to critical-exegetical works.
The work that revealed M.’s immense erudition was De antichristo II. XI (Rome 1604); the text was tripled by M. in the Valencia edition of 1621 and in that of Lyon 1647 (2 vols., edited by T. Turco, who dedicated them to Innocent X). Also highly esteemed was De paradiso voluptatis (Rome 1605). At M.’s death, who left a new version of the books of the Old Testament with a literal commentary (only I–II Maccabees and the prophets after Ezekiel 16:16 are missing), his writings were collected by his friend I. Aliaga, archbishop of Valencia, who entrusted them to his confrere Tomás Turco; the Dominican Gaspar Dinghens (d. 1678) published the Commentaria in S. Scripturam una cum nova de verbo ad verbum ex Hebraeo translatione (5 vols., fol., Lyon 1650), a most learned work but criticized by R. Simon and A. Calmet for the obscurity of its translation.