This work by Rolena Adorno and Patrick Pautz is not just a new edition of the 1542 first-published account of the Narváez expedition by Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca; it is a historiographical tour de force, a model for the kind of detailed textual criticism that is made possible by the investigation of the intertextual connections and reception of the text itself. This reader’s first reaction was to think that it is too bad that the impetus of the Columbus quincentenary did not give rise to many more such careful new studies of fundamental texts of Spanish exploration and conquest.
If the edition consisted of nothing else than the careful transcription of the text in Spanish with an English translation on facing pages, including marginal notation of variations from the 1555 text and explanatory notes to the translation, it would be of great value to anyone who has little hope...
