The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This volume contains an English translation of a description of Ethiopia written by Francisco Alvarez (c.1465–c.1540) during the six years he spent as a missionary with the Portuguese embassy to the Emperor of Ethiopia. Alverez describes Orthodox Christian monasteries and churches, compares the Orthodox and Catholic rites, and provides the first known descriptions of the ancient city of Axum in this, the earliest surviving Western description of Ethiopia, first published in English in 1881.
Bringing to life a time of depravity, violent power struggles, intrigue and corruption, this excellent work of history and politics tells the stories of the women of the Italian Renaissance who were a
From Leonie Frieda, critically acclaimed biographer of Catherine de Medici, comes The Deadly Sisterhood: an epic tale of eight women whose lives—marked by fortune and poverty, power and powerlessness—
The letters in this volume cover Erasmus' correspondence from March to December 1527. These 129 letters centre primarily on Erasmus' continuing struggle with his Catholic critics, especially those in
A stirring account of Spain’s incursion into the New World. ? Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo is the 16th-century author of Historia general y natural de las Indias, a general and natural history of the
