Translated with Notes and Commentary by Leah Shopkow In 1220 Abbot William of Andres, a monastery halfway between Calais and Saint-Omer on the busy road from London to Paris, sat down to write an ambitious cartulary-chronicle for his monastery. Although his work was unfinished at his death, William’s account is an unpolished gem of medieval historical writing. The Chronicle of Andres details the history of his monastery from its foundation in the late eleventh century through the early part of 1234. Early in the thirteenth century, the monks decided to sue for their freedom and appointed William as their protector. His travels took him on a 4000 km, four-year journey, during which he was befriended by Innocent III, among others, and where he learned to negotiate the labyrinthine system of the ecclesiastical courts. Upon winning his case, he was elected abbot on his return to Andres and enjoyed a flourishing career thereafter. A decade after his victory, William decided to put the history of the monastery on a firm footing. This text not only offers insight into the practice of medieval canon law (from the perspective of a well-informed man with legal training), but also ecclesiastical policies, the dynamics of life within a monastery, ethnicity and linguistic diversity, and rural life. It is comparable in its frankness to Jocelin of Brakelord’s Chronicle of Bury. Because William drew on the historiographic tradition of the Southern Low Countries, his text also offers some insights into this subject, thus composing a broad picture of the medieval European monastic world.

In 1220 Abbot William of Andres, a monastery halfway between Calais and Saint-Omer on the busy road from London to Paris, sat down to write an ambitious cartulary-chronicle for his monastery. Although his work was unfinished at his death, William's account is an unpolished gem of medieval historical writing. The Chronicle of Andres details the history of his monastery from its foundation in the late eleventh century through the early part of 1234. Early in the thirteenth century, the monks decided to sue for their freedom and appointed William as their protector. His travels took him on a 4000 km, four-year journey, during which he was befriended by Innocent III, among others, and where he learned to negotiate the labyrinthine system of the ecclesiastical courts. Upon winning his case, he was elected abbot on his return to Andres and enjoyed a flourishing career thereafter. A decade after his victory, William decided to put the history of the monastery on a firm footing. This text not only offers insight into the practice of medieval canon law (from the perspective of a well-informed man with legal training), but also ecclesiastical policies, the dynamics of life within a monastery, ethnicity and linguistic diversity, and rural life. It is comparable in its frankness to Jocelin of Brakelord's Chronicle of Bury. Because William drew on the historiographic tradition of the Southern Low Countries, his text also offers some insights into this subject, thus composing a broad picture of the medieval European monastic world.

Written over a seven-year period to Charles V of Spain, Hernan Cortes's letters provide a narrative account of the conquest of Mexico from the founding of the coastal town of Veracruz until Cortes's journey to Honduras in 1525. The two introductions set the letters in context.

This book is part of an encyclopedia set concerning the environment, archaeology, ethnology, social anthropology, ethnohistory, linguistics and physical anthropology of the native peoples of Mexico and Central America. The Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources is comprised of volumes 12-15 of this set. Volume 13 presents a look at pre-Columbian Mesoamerican from a combined historical and anthropological viewpoint, using official ecclesiastical and government records from the time.

The History of the Counts of Guines and Lords of Ardres, a work made famous by Georges Duby, now appears in an expert translation by Leah Shopkow. Consisting of 154 surviving chapters, Lambert's chronicle is just one of many local genealogies produced in Flanders during the high Middle Ages. It is extraordinarily rich and idiosyncratic, however, in its treatment of two competing families, longtime rivals until they were joined by marriage in the mid-twelfth century. In the first 96 chapters, Lambert, priest of the church of Ardres, traces the lineage of the counts of Guines from the seventh century to his present. Suddenly, narrative control seems to be wrested away by the garrulous Walter LeClud, illegitimate son of Baldwin of Ardres, who tells the history of the other family for the next 50 chapters. At that point, Lambert's voice is finally restored, with an account of the now combined holdings of Guines and Ardres. With two storytellers recounting some of the same events from different perspectives, The History of the Counts of Guines and Lords of Ardres is a particularly useful source for probing the medieval aristocratic family and aristocratic attitudes. Shopkow brings Lambert's chronicle to life in an accurate, lively translation and provides relevant historical and historiographical information in her extensive introduction and explanatory notes to the text.

This book argues that abbatial authority was fundamental to monastic historical writing in the period c.500-1500. Writing history was a collaborative enterprise integral to the life and identity of medieval monastic communities, but it was not an activity for which time and resources were set aside routinely. Each act of historiographical production constituted an extraordinary event, one for which singular provision had to be made, workers and materials assigned, time carved out from the monastic routine, and licence granted. This allocation of human and material resources was the responsibility and prerogative of the monastic superior. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of primary evidence gathered from across the medieval Latin West, this book is the first to investigate systematically how and why abbots and abbesses exercised their official authority and resources to lay the foundations on which their communities' historiographical traditions were built by themselves and others. It showcases them as prolific authors, patrons, commissioners, project managers, and facilitators of historical narratives who not only regularly put pen to parchment personally, but also, and perhaps more importantly, enabled others inside and outside their communities by granting them the resources and licence to write. Revealing the intrinsic relationship between abbatial authority and the writing of history in the Middle Ages with unprecedented clarity, Benjamin Pohl urges us to revisit and revise our understanding of monastic historiography, its processes, and its protagonists in ways that require some radical rethinking of the medieval historian's craft in communal and institutional contexts.

Stepmotherland is a tour-de-force debut collection about coming of age, coming out, and coming to America. Winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Stepmotherland, Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s first full-length collection, is filled with poems that chronicle and question identity, family, and allegiance. This Central American love song is in constant motion as it takes us on a lyrical and sometimes narrative journey from Panamá to the USA and beyond. The driving force behind Holnes’s work is a pursuit for a new home, and as he searches, he takes the reader on a wild ride through the most pressing political issues of our time and the most intimate and transformative personal experiences of his life. Exploring a complex range of emotions, this collection is a celebration of the discovery of America, the discovery of self, and the ways they may be one and the same. Holnes’s poems experiment with macaronic language, literary forms, and prosody. In their inventiveness, they create a new tradition that blurs the borders between poetry, visual art, and dramatic text. The new legacy he creates is one with significant reverence for the past, which informs a central desire of immigrants and native-born citizens alike: the desire for a better life. Stepmotherland documents an artist’s evolution into manhood and heralds the arrival of a stunning new poetic voice.