The Mythical Indies and Columbus's Apocalyptic Letter: Imagining the Americas in the Late Middle Ages by Elizabeth Moore Willingham (review)

In this greatly informative book, Willingham examines the printing and the dissemination of Christopher Columbus's letter dedicated to the Spanish royal minister Luis de Santángel, which publicly announced the findings of the former's first voyage to the Americas. Due to available partial documentary evidence, prior scholarly grasp of the letter's preparation for printing, the relationship between the manuscript and the print versions of the letter, and the identities of the printers, the dissemination of the printed letter had been incomplete. Willingham combines her use of methodologies from bibliography and book studies as well as new documentary and interpretive evidence, with a thorough revisiting of the works by founding scholars of Columbus's voyages such as Fernández de Navarrete, Henry Vignaud, Samuel Eliot Morison, Consuelo Varela, and Margarita Zamora, to do an in-depth study of the printed Letter contextualized in the early modern print history.

The book could be summarized as consisting of three main parts. The first part (Chapters 1–6) outlines what is known about the three surviving unique versions of the Letter in Spanish—that is, the two "orphan" printings (the Spanish Folio and the Spanish or Ambrosian Quarto) and the manuscript version of the letter (known as the Simancas Manuscript) as well as the contemporary translations of the letter into Latin and other languages. Given that the possible identities of the printers of the Folio and the Quarto had been "assigned speculatively over a hundred years ago" (25), Willingham meticulously revisits the typographical and orthographic features of the two incunabula including letter types used, distinctive woodcut initials, borders, and illustrations that may shed light on the printing process and circumstances. Although, having considered all available evidence, Willingham concludes that the Folio's printer cannot be determined with certainty, she states rather that it is "virtually certain" that "where the Quarto was printed, the Folio was present and in exclusive use by the compositor" (185), thus offering her view that the printing of the Folio preceded that of the Quarto.

Chapters 7–10 present the Variorum: the comprehensive edition Willingham has compiled using the collated texts from the manuscript and print editions. To compile the Variorum (Chapter 8), Willingham layers onto the Spanish Folio copious notes about the textual variations and the material features (ink marks, damaged areas, blank spaces, and hand-written additions to the printed text) found in the other two incunabula. Color facsimiles of all three unique versions are nestled inside Chapter 7, and photographic images of individual letters, graphemes, words, and phrases are included throughout the chapters, bringing the reader closer to the physical copies. This collated version that comprises the textual, orthographic, and material features as well as some of the previous critical approaches provides an overarching view of the Letter's text as unsettled and multilayered. Given Willing-ham's focus on the print history of the Letter, parallels with the diarios "since their dating and nearness to Columbus's hand, as well as the copyist's identity, are unknown factors" (122)] as well as other historical writings, documents, or correspondence largely fall beyond the scope of her informative study. The English Translation (Chapter 10) of the Variorum is also generously annotated, to indicate areas of complex meanings and problematic translation, as well as possible solutions. The section-by-section reading of the Variorum (Chapter 11) is detailed and accurate, and the concluding points that the rather scant "printing graces" of the Folio as well as the organization of the text governed by chronology "suggest no courtly, clerical intervention" (232), offer to the scholarly community an alternative look at the question of authorship.

The last section of Willingham's study consists of the concluding chapter and three final sections: a glossary of terms related to the history of printing; a chronological list of all known printings...