The recent Columbian Quincentenary saw the publication of vast amounts of material, including a variety of works claiming a non-Genoese origin for Columbus and not based in any way on the documentary evidence generally accepted by scholars. Luckily, such works are outnumbered by a wealth of sound scholarship and carefully prepared editions. The proof of Columbus’ Genoese origins rests in documents in Genoa’s notarial and state archives, dating from the early fifteenth century into the sixteenth, in which Columbus and members of his family appear. They include notarial documents related to Columbus’ grandfather, father, siblings, and cousins; and his own testimony and letters, especially some famous ones to the Bank of St. George and the bank officials’ responses (which he never received). Many of these documents were known in the 1890s, when Cesare de Lollis published the original Raccolta. Others came to light later, many of them edited by Giovanni Monleone and Giovanni Pessagno and published as facsimiles in the rare editions of 1931. Most recently Aldo Agosto has assembled them in I documenti genovesi e liguri, the fourth volume of the Nuova raccolta colombiana (1992).
U.S. scholars will find it hard to locate any of those editions outside the best-equipped libraries. Undergraduates will find the volumes difficult to use unless they read Latin, Italian, and Spanish. Hence the purpose of Farina and Tolf’s Columbus Documents: to provide English-language summaries of the Genoese Columbian documents as a guide for scholars and students.
For each document, the editors provide a number, the date the item was written or notarized, its place of composition, its archival location, the notary who drafted it, the person who found it in the archive, and a summary of its contents. In the volume’s first appendix, Helen Nader provides a user’s guide to Columbus’ Book of Royal Privileges, summarized in this volume (and published in full by Nader in the University of California’s Repertorium Columbianum). The second appendix is a guide to the Monleone and Pessagno editions. The third appendix provides a full list of persons named in some of the more extensive documents. Finally, there is a detailed index.
The editors deserve praise for producing a useful tool for researchers, some of whom will find the summaries sufficient for their needs and others who will use the book as an introduction to deeper research into the complete documents in their original languages. Columbus Documents should ideally become part of the collections of most college libraries, but I fear its price may limit its circulation.
