Results by title

Second place, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas, 2003

Perhaps no one has ever been such a survivor as álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Member of a 600-man expedition sent out from Spain to colonize "La Florida" in 1527, he survived a failed exploration of the west coast of Florida, an open-boat crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, shipwreck on the Texas coast, six years of captivity among native peoples, and an arduous, overland journey in which he and the three other remaining survivors of the original expedition walked some 1,500 miles from the central Texas coast to the Gulf of California, then another 1,300 miles to Mexico City.

The story of Cabeza de Vaca has been told many times, beginning with his own account, Relación de los naufragios, which was included and amplified in Gonzalo Fernando de Oviedo y Váldez's Historia general de las Indias. Yet the route taken by Cabeza de Vaca and his companions remains the subject of enduring controversy. In this book, Alex D. Krieger correlates the accounts in these two primary sources with his own extensive knowledge of the geography, archaeology, and anthropology of southern Texas and northern Mexico to plot out stage by stage the most probable route of the 2,800-mile journey of Cabeza de Vaca.

This book consists of several parts, foremost of which is the original English version of Alex Krieger's dissertation (edited by Margery Krieger), in which he traces the route of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions from the coast of Texas to Spanish settlements in western Mexico. This document is rich in information about the native groups, vegetation, geography, and material culture that the companions encountered. Thomas R. Hester's foreword and afterword set the 1955 dissertation in the context of more recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries, some of which have supported Krieger's plot of the journey. Margery Krieger's preface explains how she prepared her late husband's work for publication. Alex Krieger's original translations of the Cabeza de Vaca and Oviedo accounts round out the volume.

Peter the Venerable's extensive literary legacy includes poems, a large epistolary collection, and polemical treatises. The first of his four major polemics targeted a Christian heresy, the Petrobrussians (Against the Petrobrusians); the rest took aim at Jews and Saracens. Catholic University of America Press has published his Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews. This present volume will make available in their entirety Peter the Venerable's twin polemics against Islam - A Summary of the entire heresy of the Saracens and Against the sect of the Saracens - as well as related correspondence. These works resulted from a sustained engagement with Islam begun during Peter's journey to Spain in 1142-43. There the abbot commissioned a translation of sources from the Arabic, the so-called Toledan Collection, that include the Letter of a Saracen with a Christian Response (from the Apology of [Ps.] Al-Kindi ); Fables of the Saracens (a potpourri of Islamic hadith traditions); and Robert of Ketton's first Latin translation of the whole of the Qur'an. Thanks to Peter's efforts, from the second half of the twelfth century Christians could acquire a far better understanding of the teachings of Islam, and Peter may rightly be viewed as the initiator of Islamic studies in the West.

A few years before he died in 1662, Blaise Pascal wrote fifteen interconnected essays on grace, which have collectively come to be known as the Écrits sur la grâce. These were not published before his death, and were not polished and revised by him with an eye to publication, which means that they show his mind at work experimentally, trying out lines of argument and engagements with magisterial and patristic texts without resolving them into anything like a final system. The Écrits are replete with experimental formulations and bursts of literary and intellectual energy; taken together, they provide an intense and extreme presentation of Pascal's version of Augustinianism with respect to grace, election, and predestination, the meaning of the Council of Trent, and much else. These essays provide one of the keys to the entirety of Pascal's thought, and they provide a view of grace's workings -- perhaps better, a grammar of grace -- which still warrants serious attention by Catholic theologians. Less than one-fifth of the Écrits has yet been published in English. This book provides a complete translation, made from the French text provided in Michel Le Guern's edition (1998, 2000) of Pascal's Oeuvres complètes, and annotated to provide full information about Pascal's sources and how he used them. The translation is followed by a substantial interpretive essay in which Pascal's positions and approaches are restated and argued with.