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.
James M. Lang has the first in a series of posts about the danger of letting “common sense,” rather than research into cognitive neuroscience, dictate one’s pedagogical practice. (He also had some salutary words about trusting that research too much.)
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…
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.”
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.
I’ve been thinking recently about the relationship between my historical interests and my personal life. It’s a question that most historians get at some point in their careers, I suppose, and one that some must get quite often. Historians reading this blog will probably be familiar with some variant of the “Ah, you do [insert region or nation here] history… do you have family roots there?” question. (I actually don’t get that version of the question very much, perhaps since I’m too teutonic to be of Iberian extraction—though for some reason Spaniards often guess that I’m Italian[!] when they sense that I’m a non-native speaker.) Read More
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.
Following on my last post about Good News on Teaching, a bit of bad news: Tuesday’s New York Times included an article (now one of the “most emailed”) about the impact of current students’ sense of entitlement on their professors’ ability to give them honest grades pegged to something more than basic compliance with course norms. Among the most depressing findings is the discovery that “a third of students [in a recent University of California Irvine study] said that they expected B‚Äôs just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.” The problem is neatly summed up by one of the students quoted in the article:
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?
As someone with a strong interest in applying recent scholarship on teaching and learning in the classroom, I was heartened by this article from today’s New York Times. Note the appearance of Eric Mazur, a Harvard physicist who has collaborated with Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, where I’ve also worked as a teaching consultant.
