As this review in El Público makes clear, Nicolás’ study has yielded some interesting conclusions, among which are his determination that Zaccheus must have climbed a sycamore, and not a common fig tree, in order to catch a glimpse of Jesus; evidently fig trees are too spindly and too flexible to support the weight of the typical ancient Israelite! Unfortunately, however, Nicolás was unable to resolve what he calls “one of the most serious problems in biblical research,” namely, the proper identification of the fruit which Eve is said to have plucked from the tree of knowledge in Eden. As Nicolás notes, the convention of describing the fruit as an apple is surely mistaken, for apples are not native to Palestine. Note a few fascinating assumptions: [1] that the Garden of Eden was in Palestine, and not further East as it is often depicted (on this subject, see Alessandro Scafi‘s wonderful Mapping Paradise [Chicago, 2006]); [2] that it should be possible to reconcile the flora of Eden with modern counterparts; and [3] that knowing precisely what kind of fruit Adam and Eve are supposed to have eaten will shed meaningful light on the their story.

So why am I gobsmacked? Well, for two reasons. First, for the same reason as many of my Spanish friends and colleagues: at a time when the Spanish government is withdrawing resources from (and reducing the salaries of) the many brilliant young professors and researchers active in Spanish universities today, it can nevertheless find subsidies to publish amateur projects like this one. Secondly, because it’s not everyday that one sees a subject that was all the rage in the seventeenth century resuscitated, with complete seriousness, in the twenty-first. Though I expect that Nicolás is not familiar with his early modern ancestors, the kind of study of biblical flora and fauna which he has produced was a mainstay of seventeenth-century biblical criticism. In works like Wolfgang Franz‘s Historia animialium sacra (1613), Samuel Bochart‘s Hierozoicon, sive, bipertitum opus de animalibus sacrae scripturae (1663), and Johann Ursin‘s Continuatio historiae plantarum biblicae (1665), early modern scholars worked feverishly to find precisely the same kinds of correlations between biblical and modern plants and animals that evidently animates Nicolás and his benefactors at the Ministerio. Readers interested in these projects may want to look at Jonathan Sheehan’s article ”From Philology to Fossils: The Biblical Encyclopedia in Early Modern Europe,”¹ as well as my chapter on “Scholarly Pilgrims: The Holy Land Among the Antiquarians” in the forthcoming volume on Renaissance historia sacra edited by Kate van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan.

I suspect that there is some kind of Masson-de-Morvilliers-esque joke in all of this about the supposedly stalled nature of Spanish intellectual culture—viz. that even when the Spanish create a sophisticated apparatus of state patronage for scientific research, they wind up stuck in the seventeenth century—but that would be profoundly unfair to the legions of splendid Spanish historians who seem to be in danger of missing out on the enthusiastic sponsorship that they deserve.

1. Jonathan Sheehan, “From Philology to Fossils: The Biblical Encyclopedia in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (January 2003): 41–60.

In any case, I’m looking forward to the symposium, and hope to see many readers there…

In the case of republicanism, Nelson points to early modern interpretations of I Samuel 8, the famous passage in which the Israelites ask Samuel to transform their unusual political community into a more conventional monarchy:

When Samuel grew old, he appointed his sons as Israel’s leaders. … But his sons did not follow his ways. They turned aside after dishonest gain and accepted bribes and perverted justice. So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.” But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the LORD. And the LORD told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”

Samuel complies, granting the Israelites a monarchy but warning them bitterly that they will regret their decision. The King, Samuel warns,

“will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the LORD will not answer you in that day.”

As Nelson notes, Christian exegetes traditionally sought to explain the exploitative nature of the Israelites’ new monarchy, which turned out as badly as Samuel prophecied, as the consequence of the individual monarchs’ personal failings and/or as just punishment for the Israelites’ bad behavior. In the seventeenth century, however, Nelson notes that Christian hebraists adopted a new explanation for Samuel’s anger, which they had found in the Midrash: perhaps the very institution of monarchy itself was illicit, and Samuel’s prophecy was meant to warn his fellow Israelites away from the “idolatry” inherent in the promotion of a human king before God. On that basis, it became possible for scholars like John Milton to argue that republics were the only licit form of terrestrial government.

I see no reason to disagree with Nelson here, but I must second one of the criticisms which David Sorkin raises in his recent review in the Journal of Modern History:

despite his broad learning, Nelson acquiesces to the emphasis on Anglo-Dutch politics that constricts the English language scholarship on early modern political thought. For Nelson the rest of Europe is a mere backdrop to an Anglo-Dutch drama. While he disputes the secularization narrative, he nevertheless maintains that narrative’s parameters. In overturning the secularization narrative is it not imperative to broaden the canon of political thinkers to incorporate other religions as well as other areas of Europe?

That is to say, it would be nice to see more credit given to non-Anglo-Dutch hebraists and political philosophers who may have arrived at radical readings of passages like I Samuel 8 prior to Milton. One example from my own work is the sixteenth-centry Spaniard Felipe de la Torre, author of an Institución del rey christiano published at Antwerp in 1556, just as Philip II ascended the Spanish throne in the wake of his father Charles V’s abdication.¹ De la Torre discusses I Samuel 8 over the course of three pages tucked away in the middle of his text,² and while his interpretation is, according to Nelson’s rubric, entirely conventional—that is to say, he blames the Israelites and their kings for the tyrannical nature of their monarchy—it also comes in the context of a rather radical work  aiming to persuade the young Philip to abandon his father’s religious policies in favor of a much more tolerant attitude towards conversos [i.e. New Christians of Jewish ancestry] and perhaps even Protestants. Towards that end, de la Torre stuffed his work with biblical examples of kings—most notably Solomon—who ruled wisely, refused to listen to sycophantic counselors, were sensitive to public opinion, and  accepted the diversity of their populations.

In other words, de la Torre did not see in I Samuel 8 an argument for republicanism, but he clearly did see in it—at a crucial moment in mid-sixteenth-century Spain—an argument for wise and deferential rule and tolerance towards the Jews and their descendants. In many ways, that reading of I Samuel was every bit as radical when taken in context as was the republican reading highlighted by Nelson.

1. On Felipe de la Torre and the Institución, see José Antonio Maravall, “La oposición político-religiosa del siglo XVI: El erasmismo tardío de Felipe de la Torre,” in Homenaje a Xavier Zubiri, ed. Agustín Albarracín Teulón, 2 vols. (Madrid: Moneda y Crédito, 1970), 2:295–320; R.W. Truman, “Felipe de la Torre and his Institución de un rey christiano (Antwerp, 1556): The Protestant Connexions of a Spanish Royal Chaplain,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 46 (1984): 83–93; idem, Spanish Treatises on Government, Society and Religion in the Time of Philip II: The “De Regimine Principum” and Associated Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 69–88.
2. ff.  86v–87v.

• In early March, I’ll be in Oslo, Norway for a conference, organized by Halvor Moxnes, on “Holy Land as Homeland.” While most of the speakers focus on the supposed origins of modern biblical criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I’m planning to use my paper—entitled “Nihil sub sole novum? Early Modern Approaches to the Holy Land”—to encourage the group to look further back, to the Renaissance, for important precedents for later scholars’ historical and archaeological approach to biblical antiquity.

• In mid-March, I’ll be at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Los Angeles. Together with Daniel Stein Kokin and Marion Leathers Kuntz, I’ll be part of a panel on Early Modern Promised Lands. My paper, entitled “Nebuchadnezzar’s Jewish Legions,” traces the legend that Spain was settled by Jews from the Babylonian Captivity through its various incarnations in Renaissance historiography.

The genetic signatures of people in Spain and Portugal provide new and explicit evidence of the mass conversions of Sephardic Jews and Muslims to Catholicism in the 15th and 16th centuries after Christian armies wrested Spain back from Muslim control, a team of geneticists reports.

Read the full article here.

While my admiration for Davis’ work remains unchanged‚Äîif anything, hearing her former students’ tributes and watching her in action at her 80th birthday symposium only increased it‚ÄîI do, nevertheless, have one big question for Davis about her portrait of Leo Africanus. I will probably begin my remarks on Martire tomorrow evening by justifying my decision to study his embassy, and I plan to make a claim that Spain’s engagement with the Muslim empires of the Levant left a measurable imprint on development of modern Spanish state, society, and culture. In other words, figures like Martire mattered beyond the intrinsic interest of their individual stories. If we take away Ramusio, whose later editions of Leo Africanus’s works were crucial in preserving their author’s historical memory, can the same be said of Leo Africanus? Did his description of Africa demonstrably change Europeans’ impressions of the continent and its peoples? Or does he matter more simply for the possibilities that his individual story reveals? In other words, I suppose I’m asking‚Äîto borrow a distinction beautifully drawn by Jill Lepore in her “Historians Who Love Too Much”¹‚Äîis he a biographical figure, or merely the vehicle for a microhistory of North Africa and Renaissance Rome?

1. Jill Lepore, ‚ÄúHistorians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,‚Äù Journal of American History 88 (2001), 129-144. I should note that I was only reminded of this article, fortuitously, by reading Rebecca Goetz’ terrific syllabus.

In my talk I will focus not on the De orbe novo, however, but rather on another, smaller work which Maritre appended to several of its first printings. Entitled simply Legatio Babylonica, it consists of three humanist epistles which Martire first drafted in 1501‚Äì1502 in the course of his embassy to Egypt on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs. As I’ll attempt to show, the Legatio ought to receive as much attention as the more famous De orbe, for two reasons: first of all, because it reminds us of the relatively greater importance of the Near East vis-?†-vis the Americas in shaping Spanish policy in the early sixteenth century; and secondly, because its record of Martire’s reactions to, and negotiations with, the Mamluk empire offer an opportunity to question much of what we think we know‚Äîwhether from Edward Sa?Ød, or more recent books by Nancy Bisaha and Margaret Meserve, for example‚Äîabout the history of “orientalism” in the Renaissance.

I hope to see you there, and to hear your feedback on my talk!