Letters From The Pyrenees
By (author) Don Luis Méndez de Haro y Guzmán Edited by Lynn Williams
Publication date:
01 December 2000Length of book:
147 pagesPublisher
University of Exeter PressDimensions:
210x148mm6x8"
ISBN-13: 9780859896924
In 1659, Luis de Haro met with Cardinal Jules Mazarin in the Pyrenees to conclude a peace treaty and marriage agreement that would end over twenty years of war between Spain and France. The hitherto unpublished letters which Haro sent to Philip IV from the peace conference are fascinating to read and offer an account of the negotiations that often diverges radically from what Mazarin reports in his letters to the French court. This edition offers a mix of the original letters and summaries of the letters, as well as numerous explanatory notes and an introduction that sets the peace conference firmly within its historical context. This volume in the Exeter Hispanic Texts series provides the letters in the original Spanish; the Introduction, notes and summaries are in English. It will be of interest to a scholarly readership, especially those concerned with late seventeenth-century Spanish and French history.
"This book is not only important but riveting . . . All the letters are summarised here in English, and 25 are printed in full. None are translated. Williams has performed miracles in deciphering the handwriting. The printed text is readable and largely intelligible: it has been slightly cleaned up, such that philologists can trust the vocabulary, syntax, morphology and spelling (including abbreviations), but not the punctuation. There are no misprints in the English, so we can trust the Spanish text to be right. This is scholarship at its best." (Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, Vol. 7, No.2, 2001) "The edition itself is exemplary . . . In making this important documentation not only available, but also so readily accessible through his editorial labours, Dr Williams has made a significant contribution to the more informed appreciation of a critical moment in the fortunes of seventeenth-century Spain and Europe." (BSS, Vol. 79, 2002) “This book will therefore be invaluable to specialists, but it will also provide an inexpensive source base for university courses on Spanish history…. it is a particular pleasure to welcome Williams’s scholarly and accessible edition of the letters of one of the most important and neglected figures in the history of early modern Europe.” (MLR, 99.3, 2004)