Franciscana

FRANCISCANA Books Information supplied by Father Irenaeus Herscher, O. F. M., Librarian of St. Bonaventure’s College, again enables us to list a considerable number of new books on Spanish America which treat of Franciscan history in whole or in part. The Seven Golden Cities (Bruce, Milwaukee, 1943) by Mabel Farnum is an interesting and popular presentation of the story of Fray Marcos de Niza’s journey and of the Coronado expedition to the pueblos at and near modern Zuni, N. Mex. A new publication of the Quivira Society is entitled Three New Mexico Chronicles. It was published at Albuquerque in 1942, and the translators are H. Bailey Carroll and J. V. Haggard. The Cortés Society has begun a new series of publications, Documents and Narratives concerning the Discovery and Conquest of Latin America, with the publication of a small volume of ninety pages entitled The Discovery of Yucatan by Francisco Hernández de Córdoba (Berkeley, 1942). It contains nine narratives of the expedition made by Hernández de Córdoba to the mainland in 1517, the first to reach the coast of what is now Mexico. Henry R. Wagner is the translator of these documents. Hispanic American Essays, edited by A. Curtis Wilgus and published by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N. C., 1942, is a memo­ rial to James Alexander Robertson. As volume 102 of its Miscellaneous Collections, the Smithsonian Institute has published Antonio Vasquez de Espinosa’s Compendium and Description of the West Indies, translated by Charles Upson Clark (Washington, 1942). This work is an eyewitness report on all the Spanish possessions in the New World during the early seventeenth century; the author made a journey through Spanish America all the way from Mexico City to Chiloe in south­ ern Chile. Volume III of Studies in Hispanic American History is an account of Spanish Beginnings in the Philippines, 1564-1572 (Catholic University, Washington, 1942), by Edward J. McCarthy, O. S. A. Though lying on the other side of the Pacific, the Philippines were regarded in colonial times as a part of Spanish America. Biografías populares is a series of biographical sketches of personages famous in the history of Mexico, including a number of Franciscans, such as Fray Toribio Motolinia, Fray Pedro de Gante, and Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. The fact that the book is published by the Secretaría de Educación Pública in Mexico City indicates that the government has made great strides in the return to sanity. A Spanish translation of Charles F. Lummis’ famous work has been published in its thirteenth edition by Editorial Araluce, Barcelona, 1942; it is entitled Los Exploradores Españoles del Siglo XVI. Editorial Araluce, Barcelona, in the same year (1942) also published Cultura y Costumbres del Pueblo Español en los Siglos XVI y XVII, by Ludwig Pfandl. 314 FRANCISCANA 315 Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old, 1652-1942, by Philip Good­ win, has been published by the Museum of Modern Art, N. Y., 1943. Volume V of Kenneth S. Latourette’s monumental six-volume work on the history of the expansion of Christianity, giving an idea of the impact of white peoples upon the peoples of primitive cultures, discusses The Great Century in the Americas, Australasia, and Africa, 1800-1914 (Harper, N. Y„ 1943). Parker Hanson is the editor of a two-volume work, New World Guides to Latin American Republics (Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, N. Y., 1943), which purposes to offer more authoritative background and guidebook material than has ever before been collected in convenient and usable form. (Something better than Terry’s bigoted Guide to Mexico is a great desideratum.) Important publications on Latin America are annually listed and evalu­ ated in the Handbook of Latin American Studies. Number seven in the series, for the year 1941, made its appearance this year; the editor is Myron Burgin, and the publisher Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Resources of Southern Libraries, edited by Robert B. Downs and pub­ lished by the American Library Association, Chicago, 1938, locates con­ siderable documentary and source material which is of special interest to Franciscan historians. * * * Among anthropological books pertaining to Spanish America which have...