I was gobsmacked to learn yesterday that Spain’s Ministerio de Agricultura, Alimentación y Medio Ambiente has published a book entitled La vegetación de la Biblia in order to ”increase knowledge of the Bible and of the vegetation mentioned in its books.” Written by the retired engineer José Javier Nicolás (d. 2011) and prefaced by Juan Ruiz de la Torre, professor [...]
This will be a busy spring for me, as on top of the usual teaching and research schedule I’ll be giving several papers. A quick note about the two on which I’ve been working most recently: In early March, I’ll be in Oslo, Norway for a conference, organized by Halvor Moxnes, on “Holy Land as [...]
In 1860, the Parisian polymath Ernest Renan (1823–1892) stepped off a ship in Syria and surveyed the landscape that unfolded before him. Renan had come to the Levant on behalf of the French government, assigned by his doting patron Napoleon III to oversee an archaeological inquiry into ancient Phoenician antiquities. Though still young—he was not [...]
For some time now, I’ve been compiling bibliography on European replicas of Near Eastern Holy Places. Below the jump I’ve pasted a stab at all that I’ve collected thus far; please feel free to email me or to comment on this post to add things I might have missed!
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]