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The Papers of Sir William Berkeley, 1605-1677 * Edited by Warren M. Billings with the assistance of Maria Kimberly * Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2007 * 1, 1,682 pp. * $59.95
It is difficult to imagine a historian better suited to compile and edit the papers of Sir William Berkeley than Warren Billings. One of the finest historians studying seventeenth-century Virginia, Billings published a well-received biography of Berkeley in 2004. The present volume, "among the largest caches of documents relating to a seventeenth-century English royal governor-general ever to appear in print," is based on documents collected from archives in England, Scotland, and in several of the United States (p. xxxiii). It is a worthy achievement, providing historians of Virginia and the early English Atlantic World with an extraordinary view of the governor of one of England's most important imperial outposts.
Roughly two dozen of the documents cover Berkeley's career before Charles I appointed him Virginia's governor-general in 1642. Another two dozen documents cover Berkeley's career in...