Adam G Beaver » research

NEH summer seminar

Adam — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 17:05:13 +0000

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.

Hebraists: expect the Spanish Inquisition

Adam — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 18:09:51 +0000

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 turned on the community of hebraist biblical scholars in the 1570s, arresting and trying Luis de León, Gaspar de Grajal, and others. While this apparently anti-hebraist campaign has long been seen as a decisive moment in Spain’s long slide into intellectual irrelevance—yet another example of Inquisitorial repression retarding Spain’s path to Enlightenment and modernity—I want to argue that the story is more complex than that. For one thing, I think that we need to ask not just what the Inquisitors thought they were doing in the 1570s—a question which other scholars have answered by highlighting the hebraists’ Protestant and Jewish connections, whether personal or intellectual—but also why, if Protestantism and Judaism were part of the mix, the Inquisition had not acted sooner against earlier generations of hebraists.

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

The Hebrew Republic

Adam — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:32:22 +0000

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 precisely the deepening engagement with religious sources—and especially with Hebrew commentaries on the biblical text—which inspired and allowed political philosophers to develop persuasive arguments in favor of these features of “modern” liberalism.

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.

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.
ff. 86v–87v.

European Tour

Adam — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:03:47 +0000

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.

Lope de Vega, historian?

Adam — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:14:17 +0000

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 of the Christian Past in Golden Age Spain.” (See the program here.) While Kate and Katrina take on scholarly historia sacra as performed by Ambrosio de Morales and Jerónimo Román de la Higuera, I’ll be looking at the conflation of history and epic in Lope de Vega’s Jerusalén conquistada. (Incidentally, 2009 marks the fourth centennial of its first publication.) In a nutshell, I’ll be arguing that Lope’s attempt to rewrite the history of Spain’s participation in the Crusades—which, predictably, he justified by invoking poetic license and quite a lot of specious historical reasoning—is not simply a literary phenomenon to be left to literature scholars, but rather a significant challenge to all subsequent historiography on the subject. Though it’s hardly a new observation, I want to remind medievalists that much of what we think we know about the Middle Ages has been pre-sifted by early modern scholars and poets; even when we think that we are seeing past their obviously erroneous readings, we are nevertheless influenced in more subtle ways by their method.

Spring 2009: From Northern Europe to Southern California

Adam — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:50:19 +0000

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 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.

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!

Replicated Jerusalems

Adam — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:12:01 +0000

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!

Holy Sepulchers

Sarah Blick & Rita Tekippe, Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, 2 vols., Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, 104 (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
Genevi?®ve Bresc-Bautier, ‚ÄúLes imitations du Saint-Sepulcre de Jerusalem (IXe‚ÄìXVe si?®cles): Arch?©ologie d‚Äôune d?©votion,‚Äù Revue d‚ÄôHistoire de la Spiritualit?© 50 (1974): 319‚Äì342.
N.C. Brooks, The Sepulchre of Christ in Art and Liturgy, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 7.2 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1921).
Ludwig H. Heydenreich, ‚ÄúDie Cappella Rucellai von San Pancrazio in Florenz,‚Äù in Millard Meiss, ed., De artibus opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, 2 vols. (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1961), 1:219‚Äì229.
F.W. Kent, ‚ÄúThe Letters Genuine and Spurious of Giovanni Rucellai,‚Äù Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974): 342‚Äì349.
Richard Krautheimer, ‚ÄúIntroduction to an ‚ÄòIconography of Mediaeval Architecture,‚Äô‚Äù Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 1‚Äì33.
Justin E. A. Kroesen, The Sepulchrum Domini through the Ages: Its Form and Function (Leuven: Peeters, 2000).
Colin Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West: From the Beginning to 1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
———-, ‚ÄúBringing the Holy Sepulchre to the West: S. Stefano, Bologna, from the Fifth to the Twentieth Century,‚Äù in R.N. Swanson, ed., The Church Retrospective, Studies in Church History, 33 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press for The Ecclesiastical History Society, 1997), 31‚Äì60.
Damiano Neri, Il S. Sepulcro riprodotto in Occidente (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1971).
Robert Ousterhout, ‚ÄúLoca Sancta and the Architectural Responses to Pilgrimage,‚Äù in idem, ed., The Blessings of Pilgrimage (Urbana/Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 108‚Äì124.
———-, ‚ÄúThe Church of Santo Stefano: A ‚ÄòJerusalem‚Äô in Bologna,‚Äù Gesta 20 (1981): 311‚Äì321.

[It is interesting to note that the same pattern of replication occurred in medieval Ethiopia, as well; see Marilyn E. Heldman, ‚ÄúArchitectural Symbolism, Sacred Geography and the Ethiopian Church,‚Äù Journal of Religion in Africa 22 (1992): 222‚Äì241.]

Via Crucis & Sacri Monti

Amilcare Barbero, ed., Atlante dei sacri monti, calvari e complessi devozionali europei (Novara: Istituto geografico De Agostini, 2001).
David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 192‚Äì245.
Sergio Gensini, ed., La ‚ÄúGerusalemme‚Äù di San Vivaldo e i Sacri Monti in Europa (Firenze‚ÄìSan Vivaldo, 11‚Äì13 settembre 1986), Centro internazionale di studi ‚ÄúLa ‚ÄòGerusalemme‚Äô di San Vivaldo,‚Äô Montaione, 1 (Montaione: Comune di Montaione, 1989).
Ces?°reo Gil Atrio, ‚ÄúEspa?±a, ¬øcu?±a del Viacrucis?‚Äù Archivo Ibero-Americano 11[n.s.] (1951): 63‚Äì92.
Pedro Jos?© Pradillo y Esteban, V??a Crucis, Calvarios y Sacromontes: arte y religiosidad popular en la contrareforma. Guadalajara, un caso excepcional (Guadalajara: Diputaci??n Provincial de Guadalajara, 1996).
Kathryn Rudy, ‚ÄúNorthern European Visual Responses to Holy Land Pilgrimage, 1453‚Äì1550,‚Äù PhD dissertation, Art History, Columbia University, 2001.
Am?©d?©e Teetaert da Zedelgem, ‚ÄúAper?ßu historique sur la d?©votion au chemin de la croix,‚Äù Collectanea franciscana 19 (1949): 45‚Äì142.
Herbert Thurston, The Stations of the Cross: An Account of their History and Devotional Purpose (London: Burns & Oates, 1906).
Dorino Tuniz, ed., I Sacri Monti nella cultura religiosa e artistica del Nord Italia (Cinisello Balsamo [Milan]: San Paolo, 2005).

Carmelite Deserts

Trevor Johnson, ‚ÄúGardening for God: Carmelite Deserts and the Sacralisation of Natural Space in Counter-Reformation Spain,‚Äù in Will Coster & Andrew Spicer, eds., Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 193‚Äì210.
J.M. Mu?±oz Jim?©nez, ‚ÄúYermos y Sacromontes: Itinerarios de V??a Crucis en los Desiertos Carmelitanos,‚Äù in Los caminos y el arte. Actas, VI Congreso Espan?µl de Historia del Arte C.E.H.A., Santiago de Compostela, 16‚Äì20 de junio de 1986, 3 vols., Cursos y congresos da Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 54 (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 1989), 3:171‚Äì182.

Benito Arias Montano online

Adam — Sun, 11 May 2008 23:51:57 +0000

Readers familiar with my dissertation will know that the Spanish antiquarian Benito Arias Montano (1527‚Äì1598) and his theory that Spain was settled by Nebuchadnezzar’s Jewish captives play an important role. Now you, too, can read Arias Montano from the comfort of home, as the Spanish Culture Ministry’s Biblioteca Virtual del Patrimonio Bibliogr?°fico (BVPB) has put most of his works online! (Click here to be taken to an all-Arias-Montano index.) The BVPB is, of course, a wonderful resource for many other Golden Age Spanish authors‚Äîjust another reason to study the Spanish Renaissance…