Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, De Orbe Novo Decades, voll.1-2

This is the critical edition with parallel translation of the Decades De Orbe Novo, books I-VIII by Peter Martyr of Angleria, an Italian humanist who, during his life at the court of the Ferdinand and Isabella, catholic monarchs in Spain, was a witness of events bound to change the world and the course of history. In this work a thirty-four years' history of geographical discoveries and conquests is described in epistolary style, from Christopher Columbus's landing in the ''Indies'', up to the exploration of the Caribbean islands and Venezuela, the conquest of Mexico and the first American settlements. Christopher Columbus, the Pinzons, supporters and participants in the Colombian project, the Vespuccis, together with Cabot, Cortés and Oviedo are the most famous characters of Peter Martyr; their reports to the Council of the Indies, the charts and the pilots' books are the sources allowing Peter Martyr and - later- his readers to become "desk travelers". The typical ciceronian Latin is made a current language thanks to the use of popular expressions, proverbs of the time and exoticisms taken and adapted from other languages, sometimes even at the expense of the formal elegance, The text, distributed in books, chapters and paragraphs has been reconstructed by collating the oldest editions, since neither an autograph nor a manuscript of the Decades de Orbe Novo has been found so far. Spelling criteria have been thoroughly kept: they respect the spelling of the oldest editions (1516 and 1530) printed in Spain, that is to say in the cultural environment where the Author himself lived. However, graphic fluctuations, even if common in umanistic texts, have been standardized as they would have caused spelling disorder, while some neologisms, typical of the language heritage acquired by the Author in Spain, have been preserved in the graphic form closer to Spanish The critical apparatus indicates the differences between the editions collated, which are the following: H = ed. Hispali 1511 (Decas I) C1 = ed. Compluti 1516 (Decades I-III) Ba = ed. Basileae 1521 (Decas IV) C2 = ed. Compluti 1530 (Decades I-VIII) = G = ed. anastatica Graz-Akademische Druck-u.Verlagsanstalt 1966 Pa = ed. Parisiis 1532 (Decas IV) B = ed. Basileae 1533 (Decades I-III; Decas IV) P = ed. Parisiis 1587 (Decades I- VIII) E = consensus editionum Ba Pa B (Decas IV). The parallel translation has been carried out so as to reflect the immediateness and expressiveness in the Author's style. Whenever any difficulties have arisen in the attempt to render terms of some classical and medieval texts in Italian, in general, when possible, the Latin pattern has been avoided, giving preference, instead, to technical terms considered to be more faithful to the social, political, legal and military situations of the time, according also to the Latin-Spanish dictionary of the humanist, Elio Antonio de Nebrija. As to the New World's geographical names, they are been translated into Spanish, since, on the one hand, Spanish (or Portuguese) is the language used by the discoverers and, on the other, such places are now known with Spanish names. The edition is completed by accompanying notes and three indexes, the former, of different kinds, are marked by an asterisk over the number indicating the paragraph in the translation and appear in two appendixes to the Decades I- IV and V- VIIII respectively. They help provide both an explanation and a first hint for further investigation. The latter refer to native terms, proper nouns and placenames. The work is composed as follows: - Introduction, edition criteria, collating the edition of Seville (1511) for the first Decade, the Basel edition of 1512, in Paris in 1532 and Basel in 1533 for the fourth Decade with edition, translation and notes of the preliminary texts by Rosanna Mazzacane; - Edition, translation and notes of the Decades I-IV by Elisa Magioncalda; - Edition, translation and notes of the Decade V-VIII by Rosanna Mazzacane; - Bibliography and Index of indigenous terms, proper names and names of places by Rosanna Mazzacane and Elisa Magioncalda.