THE HAKLUYT SOCIETY ANNUAL LECTURE 2011 PEDRO PÁEZ’S HISTORY OF ETHIOPIA: ON EXPLORATION, REFUTATION AND CENSORSHIP Manuel Ramos Delivered at the Annual General Meeting of the Hakluyt Society 29 June 2011 Mr President of the Hakluyt Society, Ladies and Gentlemen, I sincerely wish to thank the generous and honouring invitation that the Hakluyt Society has addressed me to present its 2011 annual lecture. Given that the long awaited publication in the Hakluyt Society’s hird Series of the work of the Spanish Jesuit missionary Pedro Páez, History of Ethiopia, is now imminent, 1 I have chosen to share with you some brief thoughts on his life, on his achievements, and also on the convoluted fate of his opus. In truth, this edition of Páez’s History will add to an already important body of knowledge published by the Society relating to the geographical and sociological exploration of the Horn of Africa and particularly of Ethiopia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, namely the writings of Alessandro Zorzi, Francisco Álvares, Manuel de Almeida, Jerónimo Lobo and Remedius Prutky. 2 For the editors, Hervé Pennec, Isabel Boavida and myself, as well as for the translator, Christopher Tribe, the joy of seeing through the publication of the English version of this book is immense, not least because Pedro Páez’s work will inally be available to many scholars and interested public unfamiliar with early seventeenth century Portuguese, the language adopted by the author, a Spaniard by birth. I mention this because we set out working in 2000 on the project of studying and comparing the original manuscripts, annotating and revising the text, with a major consideration in mind: that the History of Ethiopia written by Pedro Páez is an essential cornerstone to the understanding of a rich low of sources 1 1 The present lecture took place on 29 June 2011, at the Royal Geographical Society in London; in the following November, the Hakluyt Society published the two volumes of Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia, 1622, eds I. Boavida, H. Pennec, M. J. Ramos; transl. C. Tribe; the translated and revised edition of the História da Etiópia de Pedro Paez, that the same editors have published for the collection Obras Primas da Literatura Portuguesa of the Direcção-Geral do Livro e das Bibliotecas, Lisbon, 2008, itself a critical edition, in modern Portuguese, of the original work by Pedro Paez. 2 C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford, eds, Some Records of Ethiopia, 1593–1646; O. G. S. Crawford, ed., Ethiopian Itineraries circa 1400–1524; C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford, eds, A True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John; M. G. Da Costa, ed., and C. E. Beckingham, introduction and notes, The Itinerario of Jerónimo Lobo; H. Arrowsmith-Brown, ed., Prutky’s Travels to Ethiopia and Other Countries. Lecture 2011_Annual Lecture 2011 26/02/2012 20:10 Page 1