Born in 1564 in the Castilian village of Olmeda de las Cebolas, the Spanish Jesuit missionary priest Pedro Páez Xaramillo fulfilled a request made by the Jesuit Order in Rome to write his History of Ethiopia beginning in 1613, after having worked prior in the Portuguese padroado missions in Goa, the capital of the Portuguese State of India. It was during Páez’s subsequent trip to Ethiopia — arriving disguised as an Armenian merchant sailing on Turkish vessels to the port of Massawa (now present-day Eritrea) — where his arrival to the long imagined kingdom of the legendary Prester John inaugurated the second phase of the Jesuit mission in this region of sub-Saharan Africa.

Produced by the Society of Jesuits over the course of the seventeenth century, Pedro Páez’s two-volume History of Ethiopia surveys a collection of vast ethnographic, historical, and literary material. A repository of empirical knowledge and unexpected rhetorical ingenuity, Páez’s History of Ethiopia provides fascinating accounts on the political geography, religion, and customs, as well as the flora and fauna, of Ethiopia. Similar to the travel writing accounts of late medieval and early modern European chroniclers, the History of Ethiopia “relates the activities of the Jesuit missionaries on the ground in their Ethiopian mission and reworks a wide variety of documents, including the first translations into a European language of a large number of Ethiopian literary texts, from royal chroniclers to hagiography” (1).

The Hakluyt Society has organized an outstanding international group of critics — Isabel Boavida, Hervé Pennec, and Manuel João Ramos with Christopher J. Tribe’s English translation from Portuguese — to conduct the monumental task of successfully presenting Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia with numerous vivid maps and figures, detailed footnotes, and weights and measures, as well as a chronology of Ethiopian monarchs dating from 1270 to 1632. What is especially laudable about each critic’s scholarly contribution to the History’s critical introduction are eight cogent and concise fragments: “The Need for a Critical Edition of Páez”; “Biography of Pedro Páez”; “The Reasons for Writing the History of Ethiopia: Commissioning a Refutation”; “The Manuscript: From its Drafting to its Travels”; “Theologian, Translator, Author, Architect and Explorer”; “The Sources of the History of Ethiopia”;. “Editing Criteria”; and “Notes on the English Translation, by Christopher Tribe.” Each of these eight minisections provides ample biographical and historical background on the History of Ethiopia, which will ultimately clarify potential uncertainties for the audience. Overall, this critical edition by Boavida, Pennec, Ramos, and Tribe is impeccable and exhaustively thorough. It also respects the finery between nuanced readings and in-depth close readings. “In editing the present edition,” each editor is “very aware that Pedro Páez’s book is much less than, but at the same time more than, a ‘true’ and ‘sincere’ presentation of Ethiopian history and ethnography” (4).

Ultimately, scholars in various fields will welcome this serious critical edition on Páez’s History of Ethiopia. The text at hand will be of great use not only to graduate students and scholars from the humanities and social sciences, but also to archivists and librarians. Because Páez’s History of Ethiopia complements other early accounts of Ethiopia by Ludovico de Varthmea, Francisco Alvares, Castanhoso, Bermudez, Arnold von Harff, Manoel de Almeida, Bahrey, Alessandro Zorzi, Jerónimo Lobo, and Václav Prutky, a multifarious grouping of scholars originating in African studies, literary and religious studies, as well as history and art history will take joy in seeing the rhetorical value and polemical nature of Páez’s History. Thanks to this beautifully designed edition of Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia, the so-called mystique and allure surrounding early modern Christian Ethiopia will come to life, opening up a new field of uncharted territory on critical studies about early European contact in sub-Saharan Africa.