Born in a provincial city in the Peruvian Andes, the Franciscan linguist and theologian Luis Gerónimo de Oré (1554–1630) lived during a critical period in the formation of the modern world, as the global empire of Spain engaged in a nearly continuous struggle over resources and religion. In the first full-length biography of Oré, Noble David Cook and Alexandra Parma Cook reconstruct the friar's life and the communities in which he circulated, tracing the career of this first-generation Creole from his roots in Huamanga to his work in Andean missions, his activities at the royal courts of Spain and throughout Spanish America, until his final years as bishop of Concepción, Chile. While serving in Peru's Colca Valley, Oré composed multilingual texts, translating doctrinal concepts into the indigenous languages Quechua and Aymara, alongside Latin and Spanish, which missionaries and secular clergy frequently used in their conversion efforts. As commissioner to Cuba and La Florida, he inspected the frontier missions along the coast of what became the southeastern United States and wrote an influential history of these outposts and their environment. After Philip III dispatched him to Concepción, Oré spent his last years working in the southernmost end of the Americas, where he continued his advocacy for indigenous justice and engaged in heated arguments with the governor over defensive war, royal patronage, and Indian enslavement. Drawn from research conducted in Spain and Latin America over several decades, this consequential biography recovers from obscurity a colonial friar whose legacy continues in the Andean world today.

In the first half of the 1580s, Seville, Spain, confronted a series of potentially devastating crises. In three years, the city faced a brush with deadly contagion, including the plague; the billeting of troops in preparation for Philip II's invasion of Portugal; crop failure and famine following drought and locust infestation; an aborted uprising of the Moriscos (Christian converts from Islam); bankruptcy of the municipal government; the threat of pollution and contaminated water; and the disruption of commerce with the Indies. While each of these problems would be formidable on its own, when taken together, the crises threatened Seville's social and economic order. In The Plague Files, Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook reconstruct daily life during this period in sixteenth-century Seville, exposing the difficult lives of ordinary men, women, and children and shedding light on the challenges municipal officials faced as they attempted to find solutions to the public health emergencies that threatened the city's residents.

Filling several gaps in the historiography of early modern Spain, this volume offers a history of not only Seville's city government but also the medical profession in Andalusia, from practitioner nurses and barber surgeons (who were often the first to encounter symptoms of plague) to well-trained university physicians. All levels of society enter the picture -- from slaves to the local aristocracy. Drawing on detailed records of city council deliberations, private and public correspondence, reports from physicians and apothecaries, and other primary sources, Cook and Cook recount Seville's story in the words of the people who lived it -- the city's governor, the female innkeepers charged with reporting who recently died in their establishments, the physicians who describe the plague victims' symptoms.

As Cook and Cook's detailed history makes clear, in spite of numerous emergencies, Seville's bureaucracy functioned with relative normality, providing basic services necessary for the survival of its citizens. Their account of the travails of 1580s Seville provides an indispensable resource for those studying early modern Spain.

Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance uncovers from history the fascinating and strange story of Spanish explorer Francisco Noguerol de Ulloa. in 1556, accompanied by his second wife, Francisco returned to his home in Spain after a profitable twenty-year sojourn in the new world of Peru. However, unlike most other rich conquistadores who returned to the land of their birth, Francisco was not allowed to settle into a life of leisure. Instead, he was charged with bigamy and illegal shipment of silver, was arrested and imprisoned. Francisco's first wife (thought long dead) had filed suit in Spain against her renegade husband.
So begins the labyrinthine legal tale and engrossing drama of an explorer and his two wives, skillfully reconstructed through the expert and original archival research of Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook. Drawing on the remarkable records from the trial, the narrative of Francisco's adventures provides a window into daily life in sixteenth-century Spain, as well as the mentalite and experience of conquest and settlement of the New World. Told from the point of view of the conquerors, Francisco's story reveals not only the lives of the middle class and minor nobility but also much about those at the lower rungs of the social order and relations between the sexes.
In the tradition of Carlo Ginzberg's The Cheese and the Worms and Natalie Zemon Davis' The Return of Martin Guerre, Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance illuminates an historical period--the world of sixteenth-century Spain and Peru--through the wonderful and unusual story of one man and his two wives.

By means of an innovative methodology, the author attempts to estimate the size of the aboriginal population of the Americas at the time of the first contact with the Europeans. He traces the catastrophic loss of over 90 percent of that population and compares the experience of coastal region with Andean highlands.

Noble David Cook explains, in vivid detail and sweeping scope, how the conquest of the New World was achieved by a handful of Europeans--not by the sword, but by deadly disease. The Aztec and Inca empires with their teeming millions were destroyed by a few hundred Europeans whose most important weapons, though the conquerors did not realize it at the time, were diseases previously unknown in the Americas. The end result of the colonizing experience in the Americas, whether of the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, English, or French, was the collapse of native society.

While many scholars have been interested in the size of the Indian population of the Americas at the time of first contact with Europeans, this book, first published in 1982, was the first to make a thorough examination of the question. Focusing on Peru, Professor Cook estimates population size on the basis of archaeology, carrying capacity of the agricultural systems, disease mortality, depopulation ratios, and census projection. He also analyses the catastrophic population decline that resulted from contact with Europeans, and compares this experience with that of the coastal region and the Andean highlands.

Published on the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' discovery of America, "Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance" uncovers from history the strange story of another, lesser-known Spanish explorer, Francisco Noguerol de Ulloa. In 1556, accompanied by his second wife, Francisco returned to his home in Spain after a profitable, 20-year sojourn in Peru. However, unlike other rich conquistadores who returned to their land of birth, Francisco was not allowed to settle into a life of leisure. Instead, he was charged with bigamy and the illegal shipment of silver, and was consequently arrested and imprisoned. Francisco's first wife (thought long dead) had filed suit in Spain against her renegade husband. So begins the legal tale of an explorer and his two wives, reconstructed through the authors' original archival research. Drawing on the records from the trial, the narrative of Francisco's adventures provides a window into daily life in 16th-century Spain, as well as the experience of conquest and settlement of the New World. Told from the point of view of the conquerors, Francisco's story reveals not only the lives of the middle class and minor nobility, but also much about those at the lower rungs of the social order.