Sixteenth-Century St. Augustine: The People and Their Homes

Sixteenth-Century St. Augustine: The People and Their Homes. By ALBERT MANUCY. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. Maps. Tables. Figures. Appendix. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. Cloth, $24.95.

In writing about this book, it is difficult to avoid writing about another of Albert Manucy's works, The Houses of St. Augustine: Notes on the Architecture from If 65-1821, first published in 1962. For years the earlier book has served as the definitive architectural history of the Spanish colonial period in Florida. It was a work built largely upon eighteenth-century evidence. Manucy culled information from plat maps and documents to reconstruct the appearance and layout of houses in St. Augustine. He had many extant houses to use as models and Houses of St. Augustine soon passed into the annals as a local, regional classic.

This new book, although a companion piece, is a very different endeavor. It contains Manucy's ideas about what St. Augustine looked...