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!
Though it has been up for several months, only today did I notice David Plotz’s “Digging the Bible” series over at Slate.com. The series is essentially Plotz’s travel journal from an extended visit he made to Israel, in the course of which he toured a number of archaeological sites associated with the Bible. As he told readers during a recent chat session, his decision to visit the holy places in situ was inspired by the year he spent “Blogging the Bible” for Slate. (I highly recommend both series, for their humor as well as their educational value.)
I was interested to read about Plotz’s experience because it struck a chord with my recent research into biblical antiquarianism of the Renaissance. In many ways, my subjects‚Äîfigures like Benito Arias Montano and Joseph Scaliger‚Äîtraveled much the same intellectual arc as did Plotz. Determined in the first instance to understand the Biblical text, and to “translate” its arcana into useful knowledge for their contemporaries, Renaissance antiquarians and Plotz alike found themselves drawn ineluctably into the study of biblical geography and biblical antiquities. Read More »
… Continued from “Digging the Bible, I” …
This history of destruction and disregard was only reversed in the fourth century, well after all memory of the actual localizations o the Holy Places had been forgotten. What accounts for the resuscitation of interest in the Holy Land was the Christianization of the empire under Constantine (ca. 280–337). The surge of official interest in localizing the Holy Sites and relics of Palestine, some historians have conjectured, may have been orchestrated for the purposes of increasing imperial prestige. Throughout the 320s and 330s Constantine and his mother, S. Helena, carried out an aggressive campaign to recover and restore places of biblical and/or Christian significance throughout Palestine, and particularly those in the vicinity of Aelia Capitolina (which Constantine rebaptized Jerusalem in 325). In these early days, this meant essentially the excavation of buildings and objects in neighborhoods loosely thought to have been of some biblical significance, the “identification” of the resulting discoveries as authentic Holy Places and relics, and the construction of new, commemorative churches over them. While on pilgrimage in 328–329, for example, Helena presided over the excavation of Calvary and the Holy Sepulcher, the discovery of the True Cross, and the erection of basilicas in Bethlehem and on Mount Sion. Eusebius of Caesaria (ca. 260–ca. 340), Constantine’s contemporary and the first Church historian, accordingly memorialized Constantine as the inventor of the Holy Land in his Vita Constantini.
Read More »
I’ve recently returned from the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, where I received the 2007 Carl S. Meyer Prize for the paper I delivered last year (entitled “A Holy Land for the Catholic Monarchy: Spanish Reconstructions of Palestine, 1469‚Äì1598;” see here for the abstract). The Meyer Prize, as the SCSC website explains, “is awarded annually for the best paper delivered at the yearly meeting by a scholar who is still in graduate school or has earned the Ph.D. in the last five years.”
I’m honored by the distinction, and pleased that so many found the paper of interest!
In addition to the two research papers I’ll be presenting this month (see “Two October Conferences,” below), in November I’ll also be heading out to Worcester, MA to participate in the New England Faculty Development Consortium (NEFDC)’s fall Teaching Conference. I’ll be joining forces with Cassandra Volpe Horii from Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning (where I used to be a Lead Teaching Fellow) to lead a “Case Discussion on Video-based Faculty/TA Consultations: Handling the Challenges.” (You can read the abstract on p. 6 of the conference program.)
For anyone in the Greater Boston/New England area and interested in teaching, I highly recommend registering and attending the conference!
For the uninitiated, that’s the state motto of New Hampshire, where Maria and I spent the Columbus Day weekend hiking, leaf-peeping, and eating as much diner food as possible. (The Littleton Diner in Littleton, NH gets high marks!)
We took a bunch of photos out in the woods around Mount Washington; have a look, and enjoy the New England autumn!
