Eve Duffy and Alida Metcalf have created an engaging and highly readable analysis of the famous sixteenth-century book True History, the author who wrote it, and the process by which the book came to be published. In many ways this study may be read as a sequel to Alida Metcalf’s wonderful book Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil: 1500 – 1600 (2006). Indeed Duffy and Metcalf argue that Hans Staden “can be best understood as a go-between” (p. 9) and that his role as an intermediary shifted and evolved during his captivity and afterward. He served as a physical go-between as he experienced what to him was a new and strange land. During his captivity among the Tupinambá, Staden acted as a transactional go-between as he mediated, translated, and managed affairs between the Tupinambá and the Europeans in Brazil. In the process he resorted to lies, deceptions, and dissimulation...

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