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The Plague Files: Crisis Management in Sixteenth-Century Seville (review)

ter” (64). It is well known that d’Ailly’s Imago mundi (1410), long recognized as an important source for Columbus, incorporated sections of Roger Bacon’s Opus maius (1266). Wey Gómez does not claim that Columbus himself knew De natura loci, though he occasionally seems tempted (98, 235), or that the De natura loci was a source for Imago mundi. Instead, his innovation is to propose that De natura loci “crucially informed Las Casas’s explanation of Columbus’s geography and its sources,” and that it provided Las Casas with a model for his own permutations regarding the notion of latitude (64). In various notes, Wey Gómez provides citations from Las Casas’ Historia de las Indias (written between 1527 and 1561) that may indicate the inouence of De natura loci, and he offers an extended discussion of Albert’s conception of place and some of its historical antecedents in Chapter 4. But a close textual analysis demonstrating the direct inouence of De natura loci on the Historia de las Indias (or other of Las Casas’ writings) is missing. The possible inouence of Bacon on Las Casas’ conception of latitude also merits further consideration. It may be surprising to conclude about a book of such length that work still remains to be done before its thesis regarding the importance of the idea of latitude for the “enterprise of the Indies” and its historical aftermath can be securely established. More precise textual analyses are necessary; consideration of materials related to the development of navigation in afteenth-century Portugal and Iberia that Wey Gómez has chosen not to discuss may be crucial to his argument. Finally, the sources of Las Casas’ apologetical writings and his famous disputations with Juan de Sepúlveda have generated a considerable body of scholarly literature that this book does not take into account. Wey Gómez’s awareness that his thesis is provocative and provisional, however, is a notable feature of his book; he presents a credible challenge to rethink the origins and the conoicted legacy of an important historical moment. It will be fascinating to see how other scholars harvest this work and how Wey Gómez moves forward from it.