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 [...]
Though I’m a historian primarily of early modern Spain, I pay close attention to modern Spanish politics, as well, and hope that I’ll have the chance in the not-too-distant future to teach a broad course on modern Spanish history from Fernando and Isabel to Zapatero. As someone interested in questions of Spanish identity and nationhood, [...]
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.” [...]
Today’s New York Times reports on the results of a study using genetic testing to determine how many Jews and Muslims converted to Catholicism in the 15th and 16th centuries:
The genetic signatures of people in Spain and Portugal provide new and explicit evidence of the mass conversions of Sephardic Jews and Muslims to Catholicism in [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Last weekend I fortunate to attend a ‘Scholars’ Day’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, focused on their new exhibition “El Greco to Velazquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III.” The morning consisted of a guided tour of the exhibition led by William B. Jordan and Richard Kagan, and both the tour and [...]
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 [...]
I was recently forwarded a link to the blog written by Mar??a Amelia L??pez of Mux??a, near A Coru?±a, in Galicia, Spain. In many ways, it’s a perfectly ordinary blog–do?±a Mar??a writes about her daily life, including (by her own admission) “anything that comes to mind” (todo lo que se le pasa por la cabeza). [...]