Study reclassifies 1797 'Manual Digest' as Puig’s revised, more religious Politar

Historian Francesc Rodríguez presented his study at the Consell General showing that a 1797 manuscript long titled El Manual Digest is not a copy of Antoni Fiter’s Manual Digest but a substantially revised, more religious third version of Antoni Puig’s Politar andorrà.

The manuscript was donated to the Consell in March by Jordi Alcobé, consul major of Canillo, who had found it in 2008 after a tip from the Cal Regí family in Prats and kept it at his home for 16 years. Alcobé donated the volume in his personal capacity on the condition that it be restored, digitized and studied; the Consell financed restoration, and the restored manuscript has been deposited at the Arxiu Nacional d’Andorra and made available online. The presentation, moderated by journalist Andrés Luengo, accompanied the publication of Rodríguez’s monograph on the volume.

Rodríguez’s textual comparison shows the 1797 manuscript derives from Puig’s own earlier draft rather than from Fiter’s Manual Digest. He identifies it as a third stage after an initial draft and the canonical 1763 Politar, and finds that Puig drew specifically on a draft that surfaced in Paris in 1976. The texts diverge in content and vocabulary: for example, Fiter’s Manual Digest refers to the Valls Neutres, a term absent from Puig’s Politar.

The 1797 volume preserves the structure of the Politar but introduces notable additions and a stronger clerical emphasis. Puig opens with a dedication to the Virgin of Meritxell, expands accounts of the most recent co-princes and bishops—including an extended history of the Diocese of Pallars—and simplifies or rephrases passages to make them more didactic. Rodríguez also documents new visual material: three devotional illustrations (including Santa Maria d’Urgell, the Virgin of Meritxell and the three bishop saints Just, Ot and Ermengol) and a map that Rodríguez links to a 1788 sketch sent to Francisco de Zamora now held in Madrid.

Rodríguez interprets these changes as reflecting Puig’s intensified religious convictions late in life and a desire to “update” the Politar. He also points to contemporaneous political pressures—tensions with revolutionary France, Puig’s critical language toward the revolutionaries, and a two‑year sede vacante following the 1795 death of Bishop Josep de Boltas—as well as Puig’s family connections to local political figures. Those family ties, including relations that connected Puig to the Cal Regí household, may help explain the manuscript’s preservation in private hands.

Why Puig labeled the volume Manual Digest remains uncertain. Rodríguez and other commentators offer hypotheses—an homage to Antoni Fiter, an assertion of authorship, or an effort to harmonize the Politar with the Manual Digest tradition—but no definitive explanation.

Rodríguez calls for a systematic comparative edition that assembles the three Puig texts (the 1763 Politar, the Paris draft and the 1797 manuscript) alongside the various Manual Digest versions now in the national archive. Such a critical study, he argues, is needed to fully understand Puig’s revisions and the political and intellectual currents shaping late‑18th‑century Andorra.