Next week will find me in Charlottesville, VA, for what is shaping up to be a fantastic symposium on the Spanish Inquisition organized by Alison Weber. (The program, in PDF, is here.) I’ll be speaking about the fate of Christian Hebraism in the Spanish Counterreformation. As many students of the subject know, the Inquisition abruptly turned on the community of hebraist biblical scholars in the 1570s, arresting and trying Luis de León, Gaspar de Grajal, and others. While this apparently anti-hebraist campaign has long been seen as a decisive moment in Spain’s long slide into intellectual irrelevance—yet another example of Inquisitorial repression retarding Spain’s path to Enlightenment and modernity—I want to argue that the story is more complex than that. For one thing, I think that we need to ask not just what the Inquisitors thought they were doing in the 1570s—a question which other scholars have answered by highlighting the hebraists’ Protestant and Jewish connections, whether personal or intellectual—but also why, if Protestantism and Judaism were part of the mix, the Inquisition had not acted sooner against earlier generations of hebraists.
In any case, I’m looking forward to the symposium, and hope to see many readers there…