| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Gesa Mackenthun. Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492–1637. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1997. Pp. xii, 370. $32.95.

Gesa Mackenthun has written a sophisticated and engaging book, as impressive in the richness of its materials as in the range and vigor of its argumentation. Although many of the sources examined will be only too familiar to scholars of the early modern period, it is seldom that themes as disparate as the legend of Prince Madoc, the myth of Quetzalcoatl's return, the coronation of Powhatan, the Roanoke massacre, the conversion and marriage of Pocahontas, and the various accounts of the Pequot War have been presented and discussed with such thoroughness and rigor, and made to fit so neatly within a generally coherent hypothesis. 1

A premise that helps to give the book its unifying thread is the often-overlooked continuity between Spanish and English accounts of their encounters with America. "[T]he crucial role of Spain," argues Mackenthun, "as both precursor and rival of English action, has been neglected by the history of ideas." Such "historiographical blindness . . . has become intolerable in a period marked by both decolonization and a heightened awareness of neo-colonial dependencies." Hence the author's aim to "attempt to present part of the 'hidden heritage' of early American history that is both transcultural and translational" (p. 9). . . .

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