As I’ve been working‚Äînot very well, I’m afraid, as I have spent all of the Thanksgiving holiday laid up with a cold‚Äîon my Pietro Martire paper for this week’s Early Modern Workshop at Harvard, I’ve been thinking a great deal about Natalie Zemon Davis’ Trickster Travels. Trickster, Davis’ re-imagining of the fascinating (and ultimately unknowable) [...]
On 2 December at 5:00pm I’ll be presenting a work-in-progress entitled “Pietro Martire in the Levant: Diplomacy and Orientalism in the Spanish Renaissance” as part of Harvard’s Early Modern History Workshop series. The talk will be held in the Lower Library [=1st floor] of Robinson Hall (map here). A bit of background: Martire (1457‚Äì1526) is [...]
Readers familiar with my dissertation will know that the Spanish antiquarian Benito Arias Montano (1527‚Äì1598) and his theory that Spain was settled by Nebuchadnezzar’s Jewish captives play an important role. Now you, too, can read Arias Montano from the comfort of home, as the Spanish Culture Ministry’s Biblioteca Virtual del Patrimonio Bibliogr?°fico (BVPB) has put [...]
Though it has been up for several months, only today did I notice David Plotz’s “Digging the Bible” series over at Slate.com. The series is essentially Plotz’s travel journal from an extended visit he made to Israel, in the course of which he toured a number of archaeological sites associated with the Bible. As he [...]
… Continued from “Digging the Bible, I” …
This history of destruction and disregard was only reversed in the fourth century, well after all memory of the actual localizations o the Holy Places had been forgotten. What accounts for the resuscitation of interest in the Holy Land was the Christianization of the empire under Constantine (ca. [...]
October will be a busy month for me, as I’ll be presenting papers at two conferences. The weekend of 19-21 October I’ll be in Philadelphia for the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies Conference at Villanova; then, the weekend of 24-28 October, I’ll be in Minneapolis for the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. In both cases, I’ll [...]
Antonio Agust??n (1517-1586), bishop of Tarragona, was one of sixteeenth-century Spain’s most famous antiquarian scholars. Like his contemporaries Ambrosio de Morales (1513-1591), Benito Arias Montano (1527-1598), and Juan Fern?°ndez Franco (ca. 1520-1601), Agust??n was skilled in epigraphy and numismatics, and profoundly interested in applying the information that could be had from material remains to writing [...]
In 1848, while on a grand tour of the Iberian Peninsula, the French traveler Antoine de Latour passed through Seville. Among the many sites that caught his attention was the so-called “Casa de Pilatos,” or “Pilate’s House,” a rambling, whitewashed palace near the center of town long associated with the noble Enr??quez de Ribera family, [...]