Reviews of Books

Great works of enduring scholarship are increasingly rare in our tenure-conscious, fashion-driven halls of ivy where, in the minds of deans, chairs, and the faculty itself, quantity often counts more than quality. The best works in the humanities, at least, come from mature scholars, whose experience, secure positions, and extended focus allow them the luxury of undertaking projects of some size and complexity. No candidate for tenure or even promotion to full professor today would undertake singlehandedly a multivolume project like David B. Quinn's Roanoke Voyages (2 volumes), Philip Barbour's Complete Works of Captain John Smith (3 volumes), or Lucien Campeau's re-editing of the Jesuit Relations, Monumenta Novae Franciae (8 volumes to date).	1
So it is understandable that Rolena Adorno, one of the two authors of this magnificent study of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's life and relación of his famous journey from Florida to Mexico between 1527 and 1536, is a senior professor at Yale and perhaps the preeminent student of colonial Latin American literature. But it may be more surprising that her co-author, Patrick Pautz, is a young ABD from Princeton now in investment banking (much to academe's loss). They began to team up in 1990 when Adorno, then at Princeton, supervised Pautz's senior thesis on Cabeza de Vaca. They continued their collaboration when he moved on to the graduate program in Spanish language and literature. Despite their differences in age and status, theirs was a true and full partnership: the research and writing of each of these three large volumes were evenly divided before they read each other's contributions. The final result is not only a testament to the rewards and efficacy of scholarly collaboration but also a masterwork of scholarship that has already garnered several prizes.	2
Despite some misleading advertising by the University of Nebraska Press, which did an excellent job of designing and printing the book, this is not a mere re-edition and translation of the relación. Most translations run less than 125 pages; this work is more than 1,400 pages, of which the critical transcription, translation, and annotations consume fewer than 300. The rest is devoted to a painstaking reconstruction of Cabeza de Vaca's genealogy from the early thirteenth century; a full biography; an extensive, contextualized analysis of his historic journey in the Southeast and Southwest, beginning and ending in Spain; and a history of the composition, publication, and reader reception of his account—all of it rooted in meticulous and imaginative new research in Spanish archives and libraries.	. . .