In any case, what has caught my eye today is the Spanish government’s decision to extend citizenship to the descendants of refugees who fled the country during the Civil War of 1936‚Äì1939. From the Reuters report:

As many as 500,000 children and grandchildren of Spaniards who fled the country during Gen. Francisco Franco’s dictatorship can now apply for Spanish citizenship, the Justice Ministry said Monday. Citizens who left Spain from 1936, when its three-year civil war began, until as late as December 1955 — and their descendants — are eligible to apply by producing documents showing that they left the country during those years, the ministry said in a statement.

The decision is interesting not least of all for the impact that it will have on (for lack of a better term) ‘amateur’ historical scholarship on the Spanish Civil War. In my many trips to Spain, I’ve come across a striking number of amateur historians and antiquarians determined to discover, reconstruct, and perserve memories of their town or family which the Civil War, and the post-Francoist “pacto de olvido,” have all but erased. In C??rdoba, for example, I met a young seminarian determined to write a history of the leftist campaign to execute priests in and around his village. In the Archivo Hist??rico Nacional in Madrid, I met an elderly man hoping to unearth evidence that a family member had been executed while a political prisoner of the Francoist regime, in the hope of collecting reparations payments from the state. I can only imagine the number of people I will find on my next trip to the archives…

While democratic Spain has become famous for its unwillingness to deal openly with the legacy of the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship‚Äîmy favorite author, Javier Mar??as, has written searingly of the silence in his newspaper column and his recent novel Tu rostro ma?±ana‚Äîit’s been my experience that policies like this recent decision to extend citizenship to exiles reflect (and stimulate) a lively humus of amateur history and fragmentary commemoration that may be doing the job of settling accounts with the past that Mar??as and others would rather see conducted at a more public, or professional, level.

This is not to say that I agree or disagree with this, or any other, commemoration policy. Rather, it’s just to observe the resilience of historical memory, and the odd ways that it surfaces, in societies whose official stance toward the past seems to be one of studied indifference.

Click here to read the full article in the New York Times.

• 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.

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 the 15th and 16th centuries after Christian armies wrested Spain back from Muslim control, a team of geneticists reports.

Read the full article here.

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?

1. 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.

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!

Two paintings in particular stood out to me. The first was Juan Bautista Maino’s 1612 Adoration of the Magi. (Apologies for the terrible picture, but it’s all that I could find to link to. A better image is available in the slideshow on the MFA’s website.) To my untrained eye, the painting looks virtually identical to one of the belenes, or cr?™che scenes, still popular in Spain. The ivy on the stones, the appearance of the Magi… Maino’s scene is a dead-ringer for its modern three-dimensional counterparts. This makes perfect sense to me: “Belenismo,” the art of making lifelike belenes, was essentially imported from Naples in the early seventeenth century, at precisely the time that Maino was painting. (Fow what it’s worth, iIt is still considered a high art in Spain, and every December the city of Madrid assembles a walking tour of the city’s most impressive examples.)

The other painting that caught my eye was Luis Trist?°n de Escamilla’s 1613 Crucifixion. (No online photo, I’m afraid.) As one of my fellow participants pointed out, deep in the background of the painting, barely visible behind the crucified Christ’s feet, the city of Toledo stands in for Jerusalem. This may just be an example of a tendency which I tend to associate with northern art of the period: that is, to transpose biblical events to local landscapes, perhaps to make it easier for the beholder to feel that he/she is really witnessing the scene before him/her. But this may also be a reference to the legend, popularized in the early 1570s by the court historian Esteban de Garibay, that Toledo literally was the New Jerusalem. The legend rested on two bases: first, the alleged topographical identity of Jerusalem and Toledo; and second, the fact that Toledo is supposed to have been founded by a contingent of Israelites brought to Spain in the sixth century BC by Nebuchadnezzar, in the period commonly known as the “Babylonian Captivity.”

In any case, it is a terrific show, and I hope that it will receive many visitors!

Agust??n was educated at the Spanish college of Bologna, founded by Cardinal Gil de Albornoz in the 14th century. From there, he became Auditor of the Sacred Rota in 1544.

Agust??n was most famous in his own time as a legal scholar, and without a doubt his most famous work is his De legibvs et senatvs consvltis liber (Rome, 1583). Most interesting to me, however, is his 1587 Di?°logo de medallas, inscriciones y otras antiguedades, essentially a manual for teaching antiquarian methodology.¹

Agust??n’s Di?°logo is well known to historians for its vituperative opposition to Annius of Viterbo’s famous forgeries, the Antiquitatum Variarum, published in 1498 at Rome by Eucharius Silber and republished many more times throughout the sixteenth century, including by the vaunted Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija at Burgos in 1512. (Readers may recall that Annius’ invented chronicles play an important role in Anthony Grafton’s study of academic forgeries.)² Agust??n‚Äîlike Pietro Ricci, Marcantonio Coccio, Raffaello Maffei, Erasmus; Jacques Lef?®vre d’?âtaples, Juan Luis Vives, Beatus Rhenanus, Melchor Cano, Antonio Agust??n, Gaspar Barreiros, J. J. Scaliger, and Isaac Casaubon‚Äîrefused to believe in Annius’ texts. As Agust??n related,

A. … Latino Latini, a citizen of Viterbo, a learned and trustworthy man, told me that fr. Johannes Annius had sculpted certain characters on a slab, and he had it buried in a vineyard near Viterbo that was soon to be excavated. And when he heard that there were excavators in the vineyard, he had them excavate around the spot where he had buried his slab, saying that he had read in his books about a temple, the oldest in the world, that had stood in that area. And as they excavated near the slab, the first person to hit upon the stone came to Annius to tell him; and he had them uncover it bit by bit, and he began to marvel at the stone and its characters. And, making a copy of it, he went to those in charge of the city, and told them that it would bring great honor on the city to put that stone in the most honorable part of it, because it proved the foundation of Viterbo, which preceded Romulus by two thousand years, since Isis and Osiris founded it; and he told them his fables. And everything that he wished was done. And there are molds of this stone in circulation, and I think that it begins, ‘EGO.SVM.ISIS,’ etc.

C. This must be the authority that Florian de Ocampo adduced, saying that he glossed Berosus [the Chaldean]. I would have considered his work a fraud, if it weren’t for the fact that he dedicated it to the Catholic Monarchs of immortal fame.

A. Luis Vives says of Berosus and of the friar, ‘Alter mulget hircum, alter supponit cribrum,’ which saying Lucian applied to a different end. Giovanni Pontano, Pomponio Leto, Giovanni Camerte, and Cyriac of Ancona were no less ingenious, but they invented their fictions with more elegance; and I don’t know if there are others who forged inscriptions and had medals made with a certain amount of learning.³

1. The Di?°logo was reprinted in 1592 in Italian translation as the Dialoghi … intorno alle medaglie, inscrittioni et altre antichit?†.
2. Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
3. Di?°logo, 447‚Äì449.