The Authorship of the Text
The title tells us that the book was “corrected” by the priests of more than one order, and since it was printed by the Dominicans, we can assume that the ultimate responsibility for the preparation of the text in consultation with friars of other orders also lay in their hands. Our problem then is to discover what texts were available to them in 1593 and who were the priests who formed the editorial board. We have included in this study also the origins of the Chinese text, for the two Doctrinas appeared at the same time, and as we shall see the same Dominicans were probably responsible for the production and preparation of both the Tagalog and the Chinese texts. During the period under discussion there were priests of four orders active in the islands, and so we shall speak in turn of the Augustinian, Franciscan, Jesuit and Dominican fathers who might have written or worked on the Doctrinas printed in 1593.