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 [...]
For all those interested in Mediterranean history, I heartily encourage you to apply to the 2012 NEH summer seminar on “Networks and Knowledge: Synthesis and Innovation in the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Medieval Mediterranean,” 2–27 July (Barcelona). An earlier round of the seminar generated not only some exciting work, but also the foundation of the Spain-North Africa Project.
Next week will find me in Charlottesville, VA, for what is shaping up to be a fantastic symposium on the Spanish Inquisition organized by Alison Weber. (The program, in PDF, is here.) I’ll be speaking about the fate of Christian Hebraism in the Spanish Counterreformation. As many students of the subject know, the Inquisition abruptly [...]
In his engaging study of The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Harvard, 2010), Eric Nelson departs from the scholarly consensus which connects the development of modern ideas of republican liberty, economic redistribution, and religious toleration with the supposed “secularization” of political theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Instead, Nelson argues that it was [...]
I’m currently getting ready to leave this weekend for about five weeks in Europe. The first stop is London, where I’ll be participating in a conference on Historia Sacra in the Renaissance. (See brochure here, in PDF.) Then it’s off to Spain, for some research in Madrid and Simancas.
This weekend, I’ll return to the annual Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference hosted by the Augustinian Institute at Villanova University. I was last there in 2007, on a panel on Renaissance historia sacra with Kate Elliott van Liere and Howard Louthan. This time I’ll be joining Kate and Katrina Olds for a panel on “Visions [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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!