A Note on the English Summaries, Transcription Method and Marking

Summaries: I wrote my own English summaries rather than transcribing them from Spanish, which enabled me to give more detailed information, and give it more succinctly, than would have been available from a transcription of the Spanish summaries.

Accommodating 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 accessible as possible. I have retained the inconsistent spellings from the manuscripts, including 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 elisions such as dellos, into which I have inserted the missing e in square brackets and separated into two words, i.e. d[e] ellos. When I 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, any additions or comments I have also placed in square brackets.

Parentheses: The manuscripts contain abbreviations common to the era which are not as familiar to modern readers. I have expanded these abbreviated words to make reading the documents easier for those unaccustomed to them, and placed those expansions within parentheses so that they are easily recognizable as my restoration of the abbreviated text.

Footnotes: I used footnotes only to give information regarding words I found to be illegible in the manuscript itself, but where additional information would suggest a plausible reading. In addition, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at BYU has taken on the letters as a source of thesis and project material.

Much of the department’s work was concurrent with my transcription, but Patricia Honey’s thesis using the 1595 letters and Diana Sanzana’s using the 1596 letters were available when I had exhausted my imagination, and I was grateful for a second opinion. Consultation of their work is footnoted in the individual letters.

Acknowledgments:I must thank Dr. De Lamar Jensen in the History Department of Brigham Young University for his always kind and precise instruction, and Richard Hacken at the Harold B. Lee Library for his patience in answering all my questions and his generosity in editing for the web. All the errors are my own.

— Kristin Richardson