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”‚Äîis he a biographical figure, or merely the vehicle for a microhistory of North Africa and Renaissance Rome?
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!
I recently returned from Grand Rapids, MI, where I attended a small conference on “Renaissance Visions of Christian Origins” organized by Kate van Liere, Howard Louthan, and Simon Ditchfield. The conference was marvelous, and I hope to post a some new thoughts about historia sacra here in the near future. In the meantime, though, I should mention one of the ancillary benefits of attending the conference: the opportunity to get to know Calvin College, and Grand Rapids, a little bit better. Calvin has a lovely campus and some very engaged students, and the Grand Rapids Art Museum has quite an impressive collection of prints. Not to be outdone are the Meijer Gardens, a nature preserve-cum-sculpture garden patronized by the supermarket moguls of the same name. Among the open air exhibits we found Bill Woodrow’s “Listening to History.” Not exactly the most enticing portrait of historical study, is it? However long the hours and hard the work of our conference, at least it never came to this…
25 September 2008 – 06:18
As the Asst. Director of Undergraduate Studies in the History Department, I’m always happy to meet with students interested in studying history at Harvard‚Äîwhether to answer questions about policy or their intellectual interests. I typically hold four office hours per week, though I routinely spend at least a few additional hours meeting with students unable to attend my regular appointments.
To make an appointment, please visit the Office Hours page of the History Department’s undergraduate resources website (Harvard only).
22 September 2008 – 21:10
In 1860, the Parisian polymath Ernest Renan (1823‚Äì1892) stepped off a ship in Syria and surveyed the landscape that unfolded before him. Renan had come to the Levant on behalf of the French government, assigned by his doting patron Napoleon III to oversee an archaeological inquiry into ancient Phoenician antiquities. Though still young‚Äîhe was not yet forty‚ÄîRenan was already considered a superstar among Western Orientalists, his published scholarship at the cutting edge of nineteenth-century Semitic philology. In 1856, he was elected to the great antiquarian Acad?©mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in recognition of his antiquarian studies of the societies of the ancient Levant. Decades after his death, later generations of Orientalists still considered Renan (to quote one among many admirers), ‚ÄúMaster of many languages ancient and modern, erudite in the lore of ages and places, expert in the technique of investigation and interpretation, imbued with the ideal as well as the methods of modern science.‚Äù ‚ÄúHe was master of all the varied and complex material of language, history, tradition, locale, which went into the making of his work,‚Äù he continued, noting that Renan‚Äôs imagination ‚Äúis the imagination of the archaeologist who constructs a city from broken stones, of the paleontologist who conceives an extinct animal from scattered bones and teeth.‚Äù Over the course of the next two years, Renan applied his archaeologist‚Äôs sensibilities to his dig, which ultimately would yield a comprehensive and well-received report, 884 pages in length and graced with dozens of leaves of maps and plates illustrating the French team‚Äôs discoveries. Reading through this report, it is hard not to agree that, for all intents and purposes, Renan‚Äôs expedition is a good fit for Edward Sa?Ød‚Äôs now-classic paradigm of the ‚ÄúOrientalist‚Äù project‚Äîthe expedition and its report are textbook examples of the French empire‚Äôs attempt to use scholarship in order to lay claim to, or take possession of, the history, artifacts, and terrain of its Near Eastern subjects. Read More »
I recently ordered a copy of How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors; the book consists of a series of brief essays by well-known authors, in which they pay tribute to their favorite totems. While I wait for the book, I figured that I’d share a photo of my favorite writing totem: my 1960s-vintage Royal Futura 600 typewriter. (Ironic name and everything!)
I’ve always preferred writing on a typewriter; it’s how I wrote before coming to college in 1996, soon after which I joined the laptopped masses. My students look at me with a mix of horror and benusement when I extoll the virtues of my typewriter‚Äîfor all I know, they probably compose their papers via text messaging software, typing faster with two thumbs than I can with two hands‚Äîbut I still think that there is something to the plodding and deliberate pace that the typewriter imposes. When I write on my laptop, I’m far too tempted (1) to edit before I’ve finished composing and (2) to paste everything I’ve ever annotated into baggy, long-winded sentences. Writing on my little Futura, on the other hand, I am much more economical, much more thoughtful about my language, and much more aware of the need to keep moving forward with my argument. Editing will have to wait.
I have only one complaint about this little machine‚Äînamely, that it’s too heavy to cart home every night from the office, meaning that (sigh) I’ll have to keep writing into the night bathed in the sickly glow of Word.
One of the best parts of my job as the Asst. Director of Undergraduate Studies in the History Department here at Harvard is the opportunity it gives me to work closely with our Senior Thesis writers. One would be hard-pressed to find a brighter or more thoughtful group of students, and their individual projects‚Äîwhich took them from the college library to Manchuria‚Äîwould, in many cases, compare favorably with graduate theses. It has been a pleasure this year to teach all thirty-two of them in our department’s Senior Thesis seminar.
Today the Secretary of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced the 83 winners of this year’s Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize, which recognizes outstanding undergraduate research projects. (The majority of Hoopes Prizes go, as one might imagine, to Senior Theses.) I’m thrilled to report that nine of our thirty-two thesis writers have won! I congratulate all of them.
For a complete list of Hoopes Prize recipients, click here (PDF).
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! Read More »
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…
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 the exhibition itself were tremendously enjoyable‚ÄîI highly recommend a visit when the exhibition opens to the public tomorrow.
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!
