Category Archives: history

Digging the Bible, II

… 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. [...]

Adam wins Meyer Prize

I’ve recently returned from the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, where I received the 2007 Carl S. Meyer Prize for the paper I delivered last year (entitled “A Holy Land for the Catholic Monarchy: Spanish Reconstructions of Palestine, 1469‚Äì1598;” see here for the abstract). The Meyer Prize, as the SCSC website explains, “is awarded annually for [...]

Two October conferences

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, antiquarius

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 [...]

Spanish bibliographies

As the lone Hispanist in my history department, I’m often asked for references to Spanish history texts. I frequently answer these queries by turning to one of the most valuable resources for early modern Spanish history on the web: Jim Amelang’s copious and au courant bibliographies, hosted on his website at the Universidad Aut??noma de [...]

You give me fever

My friend and Fulbright colleague Matt Crawford (see his website here) has just published his first article, on the basis of research he’s done in Madrid and Seville for his dissertation on the production of quinine in the Spanish empire in the eighteenth century:
Matthew James Crawford, “‘Para desterrar las dudas y adulteraciones’: Scientific Expertise and [...]

A curious visit to the Casa de Pilatos, 1848

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, [...]