MALVENDA, TOMÁS. – Dominican exegete and philologist, born at Játiva near Valenza in May 1566, died at Valenza on 7 May 1628. He made his profession in the Dominican convent of S. Croce at Lombay, where for 4 years he taught philosophy and for 10 theology. A man of powerful intellect, he taught himself Greek and Hebrew, and at the age of 19 composed his first learned work (now lost) on S. Anna and S. Giuseppe.
He sent learned observations (1600) on his Martyrologium to C. Baronio, who had him come to Rome (1601), where he suggested many emendations to the cardinal’s Annales. In Rome M. worked with Isidoro Aliaga (1568-1648) and was the principal corrector of the Dominican Missale and Breviarium (Rome 1603); he prepared the Martyrologium Romanum a Baronio recensitum, additis sanctis ac beatis Ord. Praed. (there 1603), with which the Martyrologium of Usuard, until then in use in his Order, was abandoned; he collaborated on the Index expurgatorius of the Librorum prohibitorum 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 which 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 afterward became bishop of Albarracín. M. lived in the convent at Valenza (apart from two years in Madrid [1610-12], with the inquisitor Bernardo de Rojas), devoting himself to critical and exegetical works.
The work that revealed M.’s immense erudition was De antichristo II. XI (Rome 1604); M. tripled the text in the editions of Valenza 1621 and Lyon 1647 (2 vols., edited by T. Turco, who dedicated them to Innocent X). De paradiso voluptatis (Rome 1605) was also highly esteemed. At M.’s death, he left a new version of the books of the Old Testament with a literal commentary (only I-II Mach. and the prophets after Ez. 16, 16 are lacking); his writings were collected by his friend I. Aliaga, archbishop of Valenza, who entrusted them to his confrere Tommaso Turco. The Dominican Caspar Dinghens (died in 1678) published the Commentaria in S. Scripturam una cum nova de verbo ad verbum ex Hebraeo translatione (5 vols., folio, Lyon 1650), a highly learned work but criticized by R. Simon and A. Calmet for the obscurity of the translation.