A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia. By Thomas Hariot. The 1590 Theodor de Bry Latin Edition. Facsimile edition accompanied by the modernized English text. (Charlottesville and London: Published by the University of Virginia Press for the Library at the Mariners’ Museum, 2007. Pp. Xviii, 189. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-2605-6; cloth, $200, ISBN 978-0-8139-2604-9.)

The new facsimile edition of the Latin version of Thomas Hariot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, accompanied by Theodor de Bry’s hand-tinted copper engravings of White’s watercolors, is a perfect complement to the new catalogue. The facsimile, made from a copy held at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, gives readers insight into how Europeans were introduced to coastal Carolina’s Algonkian people. Though the facsimile is of a Latin edition, it is accompanied by a skillfully modernized English text prepared by Jay E. Moore and Janet C. Robertson. The real stars of the volume, though, are the magnificently rendered copper engravings, reproduced in all their hand-painted splendor, testifying to the richness of European visions of the New World.

Acompanying the facsimile and its English version are two essays, one by Karen O. Kupperman providing a brief history and context of the Roanoke venture, and another by Peter Stallybrass on A brief and true report, which he dubs “a European bestseller.” Stallybrass describes how Thomas Hariot’s work—previously known in England only by a cheap folio edition of 1588—came to be printed in four languages in an expensive edition by a Huguenot exile living in Germany. But more importantly, Stallybrass argues that the significance of de Bry’s edition was its botanical context—a novel approach to a set of engravings whose main import historians have seen as being visual representations of southern coastal Algonkians. Stallybrass expertly situates the engravings in the story of sixteenth-century European botanical literature: “[i]n Frankfurt in 1590, a handbook on colonization was transformed into a catalog not only of the people of America but also of the American plants that were materially reshaping Europe and the rest of the world.” (30)

While this volume will probably not replace the inexpensive Dover edition of A briefe and true report in survey classes, scholars of sixteenth-century Europe and North America will appreciate access to the facsimile of the hand-colored de Bry engravings and to the Latin edition (which was undoubtedly more widely read than the English, French, and German editions also published that same year).

-Rebecca A. Goetz, reviewed in the Journal of Southern History, vol. 74, no. 3 (August 2008), 707-709.

Thomas Hariot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia is one of the earliest and most important accounts of Indian life along the coast of what is now North Carolina and Virginia, as well as an interesting compilation of 'commodities' and natural resources of the region.

The University of Virginia Press has just issued a beautiful facsimile of the 1590 Theodor de Bry Latin edition, which includes a modernized English text. The copy used for the facsimile, that of the Mariners' Museum, is one of two known in which the engravings (from John White's famous drawings) were hand-colored at the time of publication. The high-quality facsimile, photographed and printed by the Stinehour Press, is remarkably clean and bright; not only the colors but also the shades of the paper come through sharply (even the small amount of off-setting is replicated).

Alone, the Hariot/de Bry facsimile would be a great book; combined as it is with excellent complementary essays, this is a work which is certain to hold a wide appeal. Karen Ordahl Kupperman's contextual introduction summarizes the expeditions during which Hariot and White did their work, while Peter Stallybrass examines the history of Hariot's manuscript, White's drawings, and de Bry's combination thereof into the 1590 folio editions (English, French and German editions were also printed). He comments on the rationale behind the printing of such an expensive volume (to appeal to the natural history-obsessed European elite), and also analyzes the interesting differences between the White drawings and the de Bry engravings (as well as the Hariot captions).

Of the huge crop of books appearing this spring related to the Jamestown anniversary, this is certainly the best designed and most lavishly illustrated. Kupperman's and Stallybrass' essays complement the facsimile nicely, and Hariot's text manages to remain interesting across the centuries. Highly recommended.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2007/04/book-review-briefe-and-true-report.html ( )