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Photo by Reed Hutchinson
UCLA Photographic Services
Geoffrey Symcox gathered the latest data on Columbus. |
Historian explores Columbus' life, times
by Meg sullivan
ucla today
In the late 1980s, UCLA historian Geoffrey Symcox chose the Italian
city of Turin as a focus for his research. Known today chiefly as
the headquarters of Fiat, the city, Symcox believed, deserved recognition
as a masterpiece of civic planning.
Then he did a good turn, or — depending on whom you talk
to — took a wrong one. He back-burnered his history of Turin
to take the helm of a massive UCLA-based project centered on the
life and times of Christopher Columbus.
“I’m sure he’s lost a book or so on Turin over
this,” said Symcox’s wife, Linda. “He’s
the kind of person who never complains, but it was a tremendous
sacrifice.”
Scholars of the period such as UCLA history chair Teofilo Ruiz
see Symcox’s decision as the best thing to happen to the Spanish
Renaissance since Ferdinand and Isabella bankrolled an Italian navigator
with wild ideas about reaching China by sailing west from Europe.
“Anybody who wants to do work on the encounter between the
Old and New World has to come to this (collection),” said
Ruiz. “It’s exquisitely done, and only Geoffrey could
have done it.”
Just in time for Columbus Day (and Symcox’s retirement), the
13th and final volume of the Repertorium Columbianum — a biography
of Columbus purportedly written by his son — has rolled off
the presses. The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, a
project sponsor from the beginning, will mark the occasion Oct.
15 with a daylong conference on the latest in Columbus scholarship.
At 5,343 pages, the Repertorium puts in one place what Symcox
describes as “the most significant contemporary sources bearing
on Columbus,” including Columbus family legal records, the
explorer’s initial contracts with the Spanish Crown and accounts
of all four of his voyages by Columbus contemporaries, especially
Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar critical of Columbus’
treatment of indigenous people.
As conceived by late Italian Renaissance scholar Fredi Chiappelli,
who died as his project got under way, the Repertorium was to be
a successor to the Raccolta Colombiana, the last major compendium
of Columbus primary material, published in Italian in 1892.
But the cosmopolitan Symcox — an Englishman who has taught
both French and Italian history and was one of the first professors
to teach world history at UCLA — cast a wider net, including
not just Italian, Spanish and Latin primary materials but also documents
in French, English and even Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec peoples
conquered by Spanish forces. The documents appear both in their
original languages and in English translations, with analyses by
leading scholars in the field.
“Originally, it was bent toward an Italian project,”
Ruiz said. “Geoffrey made it Mediterranean and worldwide.”
Now Symcox, who earned his Ph.D. in history at UCLA in 1967 and
has taught here for 37 years, plans on returning to his beloved
Turin when he retires.
“It’s a very beautiful city, nobody knows about it,
and it’s got beautiful baroque architecture,” he said.
“But don’t tell anybody.”
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