Adam G Beaver

This weekend, I’ll return to the annual Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference hosted by the Augustinian Institute at Villanova University. I was last there in 2007, on a panel on Renaissance historia sacra with Kate Elliott van Liere and Howard Louthan. This time I’ll be joining Kate and Katrina Olds for a panel on “Visions of the Christian Past in Golden Age Spain.” (See the program here.) While Kate and Katrina take on scholarly historia sacra as performed by Ambrosio de Morales and Jerónimo Román de la Higuera, I’ll be looking at the conflation of history and epic in Lope de Vega’s Jerusalén conquistada. (Incidentally, 2009 marks the fourth centennial of its first publication.) In a nutshell, I’ll be arguing that Lope’s attempt to rewrite the history of Spain’s participation in the Crusades—which, predictably, he justified by invoking poetic license and quite a lot of specious historical reasoning—is not simply a literary phenomenon to be left to literature scholars, but rather a significant challenge to all subsequent historiography on the subject. Though it’s hardly a new observation, I want to remind medievalists that much of what we think we know about the Middle Ages has been pre-sifted by early modern scholars and poets; even when we think that we are seeing past their obviously erroneous readings, we are nevertheless influenced in more subtle ways by their method.