A Note on the English Summaries, Transcription Method and Marking

Summaries: Rather than transcribe the Spanish summaries of the letters, I wrote my own English summaries of the letters. This enabled me to give more detailed information, and give it more succinctly, than would have been available from a transcription of the Spanish summaries.

Layout, spelling, and grammar: In transcribing the Cuatro Villas letters I have assumed an audience comprised of students of all kinds and have tried to make the transcriptions as obvious as possible. I transcribed the documents line by line for easier comparison with the facsimiles, beginning each line flush with the margin and allowing it to wrap if necessary. Each new line of the body of the letter is double-spaced and again flush with the margin. Contemporary secretarial notes, dates, and addressing are single spaced (again with line beginnings flush with the margin) and arranged visually to reproduce their placement on the actual documents.

I have retained the odd and inconsistent spellings, including the capital letters which appear mid-sentence, with two exceptions: Modern phonetic v's I have transcribed as v even though the script letter may appear to be a u, and I have separated words which the manuscript runs together. The latter includes examples such as dellos, into which I have inserted the missing e in square brackets and separated into two words, i.e. d[e] ellos.

Square Brackets: In addition to the above nod to modern grammar, there are instances where I have found a word to be illegible or undefined by available dictionaries, or the document to be torn, or an edge cut to have damaged a word. These editorial comments and additions I have placed in square brackets.

Parentheses: The manuscripts contain many abbreviations of commonly used and familiar words from the era which are not as common and familiar to us. I have expanded these abbreviated words to make reading the documents easier for those unaccustomed to 16th century usage and vocabulary. I have placed those expansions within parentheses so that they are easily recognizable as my restoration of the abbreviated text.

Footnotes: I have tried to keep my voice out of the transcriptions, so footnotes are minimal. I have used them only to give information regarding words I found to be illegible in the manuscript itself, but where additional information would suggest a plausible reading.

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese at BYU has also taken on the letters as a source of thesis and project material. Much of their work was concurrent with my transcription, but Patricia Honey's thesis using the 1595 letters and Diana Sanzana's project using the 1596 letters were available to me when I had exhausted my imagination, and I was grateful for a second opinion. Consultations of their work are fully footnoted in the individual letters.

Acknowledgments: I must thank Dr. De Lamar Jensen and Dr. Craig Harline in the History Department of Brigham Young University for their ongoing encouragement of my professional activities, and especially Richard Hacken at the Harold B. Lee Library for his enthusiasm over this little project, his patience in answering all my questions and his generosity in editing for the web. I am also grateful to Dr. John Worth of the Coosawattee Foundation in Calhoun, Georgia whose willingness to broaden my experience with transcription of similar texts from the era of Spanish exploration in the Southeastern United States enabled me to take on some of the more problematic handwriting found in these documents. Finally, thanks to my husband Ed, and to my children Marie, Thomas and Mercedes, who entertained themselves while their mother revisited the micromanagement of Philip II, King of Spain.

Kristin Richardson