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1 Prologue The year is 1610. One of the soldiers who explored and helped colonize the first Spanish settlement in the far northern reaches of empire is scratching out the final stanzas of an epic poem about his exploits that will be published in April under the title Historia de la Nueva Mexico. Gaspar Pérez deVillagrá, a criollo born in Puebla de los Ángeles, Mexico, aspires to join the ranks of other soldiers who have turned to the pen to win fame and wealth. The period around 1610 is an extraordinary moment for art and discovery.AsVillagrá is musing over his verse, Galileo Galilei is observing the satellite moons of Jupiter using the revolutionary technology of the telescope, while Johannes Fabricius discovers sunspots. El Greco is painting the Laocoon and The View and Plan of Toledo, and Peter Paul Rubens is finishing Philomenes Recognized by the Old Woman and The Elevation of the Cross. Having completed his final paintings, The Denial of St. Peter and David with the Head of Goliath, Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio dies of malaria in Tuscany. In Padua, the Academy of Poetry is founded.William Shakespeare composed his three great romances during this period: Cymbeline,TheWinter’sTale, and TheTempest.At theaters closer to the soldier ’s Spanish home,Lope deVega’s OldTestament drama La hermosa Ester and his pastoral Peribáñez play to audiences ecstatic for another of the prodigious playwright’s dramas. Across the seas in the New World, Henry Hudson, commissioned to find a northwestern passage to India, sails into an icy, fog-pressed bay that would be renamed in his honor—only long after mutineers set him adrift in a small boat and he was never seen again. At Jamestown, some five hundred English colonists perish during the starving time; the sixty who remain, it is rumored, have survived by cannibalizing their brethren. 2 prologue In August, the English attack the Indian village of Paspahegh, destroy the cornfields,and then execute the queen and her children.The first Spanish settlers in la nueva México, the place Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá traces in his poem, move from their colony in the river valley settlement of San Gabriel to a spot twenty miles south at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. Here, under the name La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís,it becomes the capital of what is now New Mexico. We know this small city today as Santa Fe. As Villagrá finishes his epic back in Spain, the Acoma people who survived the slaughter of their pueblo—an attack the writer-soldier himself took part in—complete the tenth year of their servitude to the Spanish, punishment for defending themselves on their mesa home in 1599. ~1~ Four hundred years later, I wait for the reference librarian in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley to retrieve one of perhaps twelve surviving copies of the Historia de la Nueva Mexico. Because one must have permission to handle the book that tells a story in verse of the 1598 Spanish colonial settlement of what is now New Mexico, the librarian suggests I use the microfilm copy and then says,“Of course,there is a digital copy of the original 1610 one can read on the internet from anywhere in the world.” I understand. This advice is a crucial strategy for protecting the original edition held in the Bancroft vault. Still, I would like to hold the actual book in my hand, feel its weight and turn its pages, so that I might see what a seventeenth-century reader would have seen.I have read and studied the digital facsimile of Villagrá’s poem on the large, bright screen of the computer in the seclusion of my office, drinking coffee as I scroll across the virtual images of this poem published half a world away four centuries ago.The digital facsimile is clear, easy to read, with no pages one must turn carefully—simply touch the“next image”icon and,magic, another page of verse. Nor do I need fret about the protective archival protocols prohibiting bags, purses, and cell phones and permitting only pencils, a single writing pad, or a laptop with which to take notes. Yet, when the librarian conveys the small box containing the original text—Historia de la Nueva Mexico,Del Capitán Gaspar deVillagrá—the oldfashioned aura of the archive comes over me,and the digital text evaporates. The original is...

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