This lively volume is a welcome addition to the growing Latin American Originals series from Penn State University Press. The series offers brief collections of primary documents, edited and translated, accompanied by explanatory/contextual introductions. This volume about William Lamport is no. 17 in the series.

Andrea Martínez Baracs and the translator Hank Heifetz offer readers a broad range of material penned by Lamport, previously unavailable in English. Martínez Baracs provides a helpful introduction to the life and context of Lamport, though it should be stressed that the majority of the work on this volume comes from the translator Heifetz, even though he is strangely not given authorship.

The Introduction offers a helpful overview of Lamport's life. Soldier, scholar, spy (?), Irish and Catholic patriot, self-described son of a Spanish king, theologian, and victim of the Mexican Inquisition, Lamport is well-known to scholars of colonial Mexico. But he is not known beyond this field. This Introduction provides a nice sketch of this complicated man. Born in Ireland in 1611 or 1615 to a family associated with Irish resisters to English assaults on Irish nobility, Lamport had a strong identity as Catholic and defender of oppressed colonial subjects. He found his way to Spain in 1631 and studied variously in Santiago de Compostela and Salamanca. He fought for the Spanish crown in several European wars as the head of an Irish unit between 1633 and 1635. He eventually went to New Spain in 1640, possibly as a spy for the Count-Duke of Olivares. He plotted an insurrection against the Spanish crown in Mexico to establish an independent Catholic kingdom to be ruled by none other than himself, claiming that he was the son (though illegitimate) of Philip III and the brother of Philip IV. The Mexican Inquisition arrested him in 1642 and he remained in the Inquisition's jails, excepting a brief escape in Christmas 1650, until his death by execution on the bonfire in 1659.

Lamport's story is complex, not least because his various claims are unverified. Was he, in fact, an hijo natural of Philip III? Was he a secret agent of the crown? Did he really, as the Inquisitors claimed, ingest peyote? We will probably never know. But he was a singularly fascinating man. This volume provides the reader with fascinating material by and about Lamport. Document 1 is a ‘Proposal to King Philip IV for the Liberation of Ireland’, in which Lamport militated for the creation of an Irish volunteer army to fight the English usurpers. Document 2 is Lamport's declaration of a general insurrection of New Spain. This document offers a fascinating glimpse of Lamport's political theories in which he claims that the Spanish had no original right to possess New Spain, calling for a complete rejection of Spanish rule in order to return Mexico to the rightful owners, the indigenous peoples. Martínez Baracs reads this document as a predecessor to the Mexican Independence movement, though it also has clear connections to standard refutations of papal claims to dominion in the Americas aired by Francisco Vitoria and Alfonso de Castro a century earlier. Claims that Lamport was somehow original in his critique of Spanish dominion are overstated and incorrect. Documents 4 and 5 are excerpts from Lamport's poetry. Yes, Lamport was also a poet – Document 4 highlights a poem, Great Alcides, which preceded a satire, Christian Ammends, a critique of his treatment by his Inquisitors. Document 5 is a double-translation of parts of his Latin Psalmody – translated from the Latin to Spanish by Olivia Isidor Vázquez and from Spanish to English by Heifetz.

Ultimately, Lamport was ordered to be executed by the Inquisition and perished on the bonfire in the last grand auto-da-fé of Mexico City on 19 November 1659. A later investigation of the agents of the Mexican Inquisition of the 1640s and 1650s revealed that, as Lamport claimed, they were particularly venal and corrupt, though this came after Lamport had been executed – alas, too late. Much of what we know about Lamport from his original documentation comes from material seized by the Inquisition. This volume does an excellent job of explaining the provenance of these materials. For example, Lamport composed his 918 psalms and hymns in Latin, incredibly, on bedsheets: ‘He had neither ink nor pen in his cell, no books, no paper. He wrote on bedsheets, using chicken feathers culled from trashcans as his pens, and made his own ink from ashes, was, chocolate, and other salvaged substances’ (p. 103). The introductory discussions, combined with the general introduction to the volume, offer vivid accounts of this unique man's life, circumstances, and philosophy.

This volume is overall a captivating biography in miniature of a figure who has been featured in historical novels/studies by Vicente Riva Palacio and Luis González Obregón, but whose original words have been unavailable in translated and/or transcribed form. It will interest students of colonialism, Mexico, Catholic thought, and the Inquisition.