The Jesuits’ colonial legacy in Latin America is well-known. They pioneered an interest in indigenous languages and cultures, compiling dictionaries and writing some of the earliest ethnographies of the region. They also explored the region’s natural history and made significant contributions to the development of science and medicine. On their estates and in the missions they introduced new plants, livestock, and agricultural techniques, such as irrigation. In addition, they left a lasting legacy on the region’s architecture, art, and music. The volume demonstrates the diversity of Jesuit contributions to Latin American culture. This volume is unique in considering not only the range of Jesuit activities but also the diversity of perspectives from which they may be approached. It includes papers from scholars of history, linguistics, religion, art, architecture, cartography, music, medicine and science.

This work is the first English translation of the entire text of part one of sixteenth-century Spanish historian Francisco López de Gómara’s General History of the Indies. Including substantial critical annotations and providing access to various readings and passages added to or removed from the successive editions of the 1550s, this translation expands the archive of texts available to English speakers reconsidering the various aspects of the European invasion of America.
 
General History of the Indies was the first universal history of the recent discoveries and conquests of the New World made available to the Old World audience. At publication it consisted of two parts: the first a general history of the European discovery, conquest, and settlement of the Americas, and the second a detailed description of Cortés’s conquest of Mexico. Part one—in the multiple Spanish editions and translations into Italian and French published at the time—was the most comprehensive, popular, and accessible account of the natural history and geography of the Americas, the ethnology of the peoples of the New World, and the history of the Spanish conquest, including the most recent developments in Peru. Despite its original and continued importance, however, it had never been translated into English.
 
Gómara’s history communicates Europeans’ general understanding of the New World throughout the middle and later sixteenth century. A lively, comparatively brief description of Europe’s expansion into the Americas with significant importance to today’s understanding of the early modern worldview, Francisco López de Gómara’s General History of the Indies will be of great interest to students of and specialists in Latin American history, Latin American literature, anthropology, and cultural studies, as well as specialists in Spanish American intellectual history and colonial Latin America.
 

Through portraits of readers and their responses to texts, Reading Practice reconstructs the contours of the knowledge economy that shaped medicine and science in early modern England.
 
Reading Practice tells the story of how ordinary people grew comfortable learning from commonplace manuscripts and printed books, such as almanacs, medical recipe collections, and herbals. From the turn of the fifteenth century to the close of the sixteenth century, these were the books English people read when they wanted to attend to their health or understand their place in the universe. Before then, these works had largely been the purview of those who could read Latin. Around 1400, however, medical and scientific texts became available in Middle English while manuscripts became less expensive. These vernacular manuscripts invited their readers into a very old and learned conversation: Hippocrates and Galen weren’t distant authorities whose word was law, they were trusted guides, whose advice could be excerpted, rearranged, recombined, and even altered to suit a manuscript compiler’s needs. This conversation continued even after the printing press arrived in England in 1476. Printers mined manuscripts for medical and scientific texts that they would publish throughout the sixteenth century, though the pressures of a commercial printing market encouraged printers to package these old texts in new ways. Without the weight of authority conditioning their reactions and responses to very old knowledge, and with so many editions of practical books to choose from, English readers grew into confident critics and purveyors of natural knowledge in their own right.
 
Melissa Reynolds reconstructs shifting attitudes toward medicine and science over two centuries of seismic change within English culture, attending especially to the effects of the Reformation on attitudes toward nature and the human body. Her study shows how readers learned to be discerning and selective consumers of knowledge gradually, through everyday interactions with utilitarian books.