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Latin American Natural and Moral History of the Indies. By José de Acosta. Edited by Jane E. Mangan, with an Introduction and Commentary by Walter D. Mignolo. Translated by Frances López-Morillas. [Chronicles of the New World Order. Latin America in Translation/En Traducción/Em Tradução.] (Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2002. Pp. xxviii, 535. $74.95 cloth; $24.95 paperback.)
The first edition of José de Acosta's Natural and Moral History of the Indies, in the author's native Spanish, was published in Seville in 1590. It is a compact and elegant volume, conjoining discussion of the natural history of the New World, the "works of God" in Acosta's words, with a discussion of human history, "the works of free will." The book was an immediate success, and several more Spanish editions soon foEowed, along with translations into Italian, Latin, French, Dutch, and English. Excerpts appeared in the ninth volume of Theodore De Bry's celebrated America (Frankfurt, 1601). Among the several early modern historians and scholars who discussed the History the best-known would seem to be the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1609), and the book remained influential until the eighteenth century and beyond. The revised version...