Adam G Beaver » Pietro Martire

Pietro Martire, postponed

Adam — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:42:09 +0000

A quick notice for those readers in the Boston area: unfortunately, I’ve had to postpone my Pietro Martire talk until Monday, 15 December (same time and place) due to illness. I hope still to see many of you there!

No Trickster here

Adam — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 04:51:30 +0000

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) life story of Leo Africanus, engages with many of the same themes that my ongoing study of Martire’s Legatio Babylonica has placed in front of me‚Äîwhether they be the intricacies of premodern diplomacy between Muslims and Christians, or the many possibilities for boundary-crossing and self-fashioning that the Renaissance Mediterranean afforded charismatic individuals linving on both sides of the putative Christian-Muslim ‘divide.’ In some sense, I see Martire’s story as a counterpoint to Leo Africanus’s. As one reads Martire’s account of his experiences in Egypt, one can see a committed Christian struggling to understand North Africa on its own terms, in order to relate it to fellow Europeans in their terms. He’s no less of a ‘translator,’ I would say, than Leo Africanus, though his personal story is much less interesting‚Äîat least insofar as it would be impossible even for Davis to turn him into the charmingly enigmatic “trickster” that she makes Leo out to have been.

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?

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.

Pietro Martire in the Levant

Adam — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:05:39 +0000

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 one of the most significant of the ‘B-list’ humanists of the Renaissance‚Äîthat is, those humanists who figure prominently in the national historiographies of the Renaissance in their respective homelands, but who rarely share the limelight with internationally-recognized figures like Petrarch or Erasmus. Martire, who was born near Milan but emigrated to Spain as a young scholar in search of the Catholic Monarchs’ patronage, has received rather more attention than many of his fellow Spanish humanists. That is largely due to his eight decades De orbe novo, one of the first histories of the Spanish conquest of the New World.

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!