John Elliott writes:

Staden’s True History, which last appeared in English in 1929, has now been retranslated. Staden, too, had an agenda: as a good Lutheran, he was eager to emphasise the redemptive power of his God and Saviour. At the same time, those who read his narrative – which, even ‘revised’ by a German academic, retains an engaging naivety – are likely to come away with the impression that they are being given the first-hand view of an observer-cum-potential victim, who may not have understood all he saw, but who tried to describe it as he saw and experienced it. The result, as Neil Whitehead points out in his sometimes opaque introduction, is a unique document among European accounts of life among the indigenous peoples of the New World in the early stage of contact.

(LRB 3 July 2008)

Duke | hardback 206 pp. |ISBN: 9780822342311