I am Jeroni Conques, beneficiary of the Cathedral of Valencia.

I was born in Valenca in the year of our Lord, 1518. I am fifty-five years old. My father was a well connected merchant, which allowed me to study arts, medicine and theology in the Estudi General and received minor orders and a bursary from the Cathedral of Valencia. The thirst for knowledge and deep spiritual and religious concerns, as well as an interest in the ideas of Erasmus and other thinkers of theReformation, led me to translate some of the sacred texts into Valencian. I made friends with Gaspar de Centelles, a Valencian gentleman, and Sardinian Segimon Arquer theologian, now in glory, and some other notables, with whom I met in Pedralba to seek a better relationship with God and study nature without prejudice. But as the Holy Inquisition made me see, we were wrong. I had to renounce my mistakes and seclude myself away in the convent of Our Lady of the Relief to do penance, pray fifteen hundred Hail Marys and Our Fathers every day, and limit my reading to the breviary and the Bible in Latin. My companions, I still do not understand why they refused to acknowledge their mistake: Gaspar died at the stake in an act of faith. I wore the hood of the condemned nine years ago. I had just arrived in Segimon when I heard the news about his execution in Toledo after a long inquisitorial process.