Shock news: the new is not such a shock after all. This, according to Fernando Cervantes, is mainly because it can take several decades to sink in. Reviewing recent books on the discovery and conquest of New Spain, which one way or another recover something of “the explorers’ sense of wonder”, Cervantes points out how the Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars who arrived in Spanish America, far from simply imposing their Christian world view on its indigenous peoples “had no qualms about deferring to the native leaders’ superior knowledge, not only about the physical environment but also local spiritual forces”. Perhaps this is not so surprising: Columbus’s mental world may have had “deep roots in the medieval past” but, as we learn later in this issue, medieval devotion was itself “not some monolith of credence but a fractured set of orthodoxies and dissents”. In the latest work by Alastair Minnis, who “thirty years ago helped change medieval literary studies”, Seth Lerer finds a renewed focus on Chaucer’s handling of a popular figure in the Middle Ages – the unreliable narrator – and the question, can an immoral speaker tell a moral tale?

The question might easily have exercised some of those – witting and unwitting – whose cultural activities were sponsored by the CIA during the Cold War, in the effort to advance American interests and undermine those of the Soviet Union. Reviewing Hugh Wilford’s history of the period, the retired intelligence officer James M. Murphy pleads for fair play even when the play is on words, and reminds us of “how things looked in those prelapsarian days of civic trust and unhesitant patriotism, when men whose sense of service had been formed and deformed in the catastrophe of one war, genuinely felt it their duty to do what they could to prevent another”.

Alan Jenkins

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