As this review in El Público makes clear, Nicolás’ study has yielded some interesting conclusions, among which are his determination that Zaccheus must have climbed a sycamore, and not a common fig tree, in order to catch a glimpse of Jesus; evidently fig trees are too spindly and too flexible to support the weight of the typical ancient Israelite! Unfortunately, however, Nicolás was unable to resolve what he calls “one of the most serious problems in biblical research,” namely, the proper identification of the fruit which Eve is said to have plucked from the tree of knowledge in Eden. As Nicolás notes, the convention of describing the fruit as an apple is surely mistaken, for apples are not native to Palestine. Note a few fascinating assumptions: [1] that the Garden of Eden was in Palestine, and not further East as it is often depicted (on this subject, see Alessandro Scafi‘s wonderful Mapping Paradise [Chicago, 2006]); [2] that it should be possible to reconcile the flora of Eden with modern counterparts; and [3] that knowing precisely what kind of fruit Adam and Eve are supposed to have eaten will shed meaningful light on the their story.

So why am I gobsmacked? Well, for two reasons. First, for the same reason as many of my Spanish friends and colleagues: at a time when the Spanish government is withdrawing resources from (and reducing the salaries of) the many brilliant young professors and researchers active in Spanish universities today, it can nevertheless find subsidies to publish amateur projects like this one. Secondly, because it’s not everyday that one sees a subject that was all the rage in the seventeenth century resuscitated, with complete seriousness, in the twenty-first. Though I expect that Nicolás is not familiar with his early modern ancestors, the kind of study of biblical flora and fauna which he has produced was a mainstay of seventeenth-century biblical criticism. In works like Wolfgang Franz‘s Historia animialium sacra (1613), Samuel Bochart‘s Hierozoicon, sive, bipertitum opus de animalibus sacrae scripturae (1663), and Johann Ursin‘s Continuatio historiae plantarum biblicae (1665), early modern scholars worked feverishly to find precisely the same kinds of correlations between biblical and modern plants and animals that evidently animates Nicolás and his benefactors at the Ministerio. Readers interested in these projects may want to look at Jonathan Sheehan’s article ”From Philology to Fossils: The Biblical Encyclopedia in Early Modern Europe,”¹ as well as my chapter on “Scholarly Pilgrims: The Holy Land Among the Antiquarians” in the forthcoming volume on Renaissance historia sacra edited by Kate van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan.

I suspect that there is some kind of Masson-de-Morvilliers-esque joke in all of this about the supposedly stalled nature of Spanish intellectual culture—viz. that even when the Spanish create a sophisticated apparatus of state patronage for scientific research, they wind up stuck in the seventeenth century—but that would be profoundly unfair to the legions of splendid Spanish historians who seem to be in danger of missing out on the enthusiastic sponsorship that they deserve.

1. Jonathan Sheehan, “From Philology to Fossils: The Biblical Encyclopedia in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (January 2003): 41–60.

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

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.

1. 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.
2. ff.  86v–87v.

Though I can’t claim that sort of familial connection to my subject matter, I do now think that I have to confess another kind of familial debt. My grandfather passed away a week ago, and though I wouldn’t have realized it on my own, I think that he played an important role in my formation as a historian. Both in my research and in my teaching, I’m fascinated by the way that people assimilate the new knowledge gained from travel and autopsy to the knowledge they previously had—or thought they had—on the basis of oral and textual tradition. While glossy brochures from study abroad programs routinely promise that the experience of different cultures will “broaden one’s mind/horizons,” I am less certain that travel is ever such a uniformly mind-expanding experience. For tourist sites must disappoint as often as they gratify, and foreign cultures must also offend or provoke as often as they educate. Going abroad is a complicated experience, which answers questions and quiets doubts as often as it raises them.

My grandfather served in World War II, and I remember that of all of the things that we talked about over the years, it was his experience in Northern Italy (in and around Livorno, aka Leghorn) that I remember most vividly. Like hundreds of thousands of his fellow soldiers, my grandfather lived most of his life in small town America—with the one glaring exception of a few months, or even a few years, spent in Europe, Africa, or the Pacific islands. I still remember thinking the first time that I heard him talking about his service how strange it would be to see my grandfather—whom I strained to picture outside of Snyder County, PA, let along across an ocean—sleeping out in the fields of Tuscany. And yet that’s exactly what he was doing as an 18- or 19-year-old. I wouldn’t presume to say what, exactly, the experience meant to him; but suffice it to say that it taught him as much about the superiority of the American way as it did about the charm of espresso. I’m sure that it was mind-expanding to encounter a foreign culture, but it was also a self-ratifying experience that confirmed that the homeland that had sent him there to fight for that foreign culture’s liberty was about as good as it gets. (I daresay that he never changed his mind, which made recent American foreign relations a heated topic!)

I’m not sure about the methodological soundness of it, but I know that every time I read a medieval or early modern travel account, I think of my grandfather in Italy. Historians are always tempted to find rupture and change, to be blinded by the flash of something new or different in their sources. Historical travel accounts are most interesting when they reveal the impact of the New, Different, and Other, right? When we can see Europeans transformed by their encounter with foreign peoples? I’m not so sure. The questions that I ask of my sources have at least as much to do with what struck my travelers as merely… different; perhaps even… disappointing. The marks that such seemingly anticlimactic experiences leave on travelers are deeply significant, but they often go unnoticed. Not unlike my grandfather’s influence on me, actually.

If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.

Indeed, something is wrong, though not in the way that the student means it. While I’m all for rewarding effort, and I try to recognize improvement as well as raw performance in my grading, ultimately grades are meant to account for something more complex than enthusiastic compliance with course expectations. They should reflect a student’s mastery of material; those who have learned both the skills and the content that the instructor attempts to impart should earn higher marks than the students who have not. Learning is not simply about following a recipe, completing tasks, or ticking boxes; it’s about reflection, struggle, false starts, and‚Äîeventually, hopefully‚Äîmastery. Merely “doing” the reading isn’t the same as processing it.

Perhaps the most alarming thing about this article, however, is not its documentation of students’ increasing sense of entitlement or decreasing sympathy with the goals of education. Anyone on the front lines of college teaching must surely have noticed that already. What bothers me more is the fact that faculty seem so happy to go along with it. How else can we explain the fact that A’s and A‚Äì’s make up fully half of Harvard grades? It’s been suggested that the answer may lie in the steadily-increasing quality of our student body. The more harrowing the admissions statistics, the better the quality of student work, one supposes. That may in fact be true‚Äîperhaps our current students are better at completing the kinds of assignments we tend to give them‚Äîbut isn’t it a failure of higher education if we respond to that trend by simply giving all of our students A’s?