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The earliest pioneer families at San Simeon Creek began to arrive in 1858. They lived in cabins down in the fields and by necessity were phenomenally hardworking and closely united. But they were also free, free to use every scrap of courage, education, skill and grit they could squeeze out of their native gifts. They were endlessly busy - killing pigs, grafting trees, churning butter, digging cows out of landslides, sowing wheat, trimming apple trees and grape vines, hoeing raspberries and currants, raising cattle...the list was endless. For fun they might go to Pujol's rodeo, to the pine woods strawberrying or perhaps an afternoon of trout fishing. All this we now know, along with similarly revealing details for hundreds of other days, thanks to recently recovered diaries and letters of one of the earliest family groups to homestead in the area. Dr. E.A. Clark and his sister Sarah Mariah Clark were the first teachers in northern San Luis Obispo County. E.A. also farmed and practiced medicine, dentistry, and law. His sister Lovina Clark Dart wrote eloquent and touching letters from her frontier cabin, while his son-in-law, Chester Webster Pinkham, kept a homesteading diary. The clan's ability with language, their drive to commit their feelings to paper, and their ties to the many people they knew, bring to life in their own words the formative years of the County.

Cervantes’ now mythical character of Don Quixote began as a far different figure than the altruistic righter of wrongs we know today. The transformation from mad highway robber to secular saint took place in the Romantic Era, but how and where it began has just begun to be understood. Germany and England played major roles, but, contrary to earlier literary historians, Pascal, Racine, Rousseau and the Jansenists scooped Henry and Sarah Fielding. Jansenism, a persecuted puritanical and intellectual movement linked to Pascal, identified itself with Don Quixote’s virtues, excused his vices, and wrote a game-changing sequel mediated by the transformative powers of a sorcerer from Commedia dell’Arte. As an early Romantic, Rousseau was attracted to the hero’s fertile imagination and tender love for Dulcinea, foregrounding the would-be knight’s quest in a play and his best-selling novel, Julie. Sarah Fielding reacted similarly, basing her utopian novel David Simple on the Jansenist concept of quixotic trust in others. Colahan here reproduces and explains for the first time the extremely rare original illustrations of the French sequel to Cervantes’ novel, and documents the fortunes in French culture of the magician at the heart of the Romantic Quixote. Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Sor Mar’a de Agreda (1602-65) was a Spanish nun and visionary who is best known as the author of the widely read biography of the Virgin Mary, The Mystical City of God, and as the missionary who "bilocated" to the American Southwest, reportedly appearing to Indians there without ever leaving Spain. Her role as advisor to King Philip IV contributed further to her legend. Clark Colahan now offers the first major study of Sor Mar’a's writings, including translations of two previously unpublished works: Face of the Earth and Map of the Spheres and the first half of her Report to Father Manero, in which she reflects on her bilocation.

"The 16th-century humanist Juan Maldonado in his Latin essays foreshadows the Spanish picaresque. Like Erasmus, with whom he corresponded, Maldonado advocated the use of Latin in a wide-range of activities. Maldonado's Pastor Bonus, a lengthy open letter to a bishop, reviews in a vivid and satirical style the abuses of the churchmen in his diocese. His ludus chartarum is framed as a colloquium similar to Vives' on the subject, entertaining while teaching a Latin terminology for card playing. His Bacchanalia, written for student actors, is a spirited play pitting the forces of Lent against those of Bacchus, as in the Libro de buen amor. These works have been edited and translated into English by Warren Smith and Clark Colahan for the first time, with illustrations of scenes from each work, and of 16th-century cards, by Richard Simmons and Caleb Smith."--Publisher's website.

Juan Maldonado's earliest work, Hispaniola, The Spanish Woman, is a five-act comedy. This edition of the play has Latin and English on facing pages, and with an introduction, 491 footnotes to both Latin and English texts, and 74 endnotes. A Plautine comedy of adolescent sexual desire, deceptive identity, and tricky servants, it merits a place among Reformation texts on Christian issues, defending the younger generation's right freely to choose a marriage partner in defiance of arranged matches.