One of the pleasures of my new job as Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies is that I now have a good excuse for reading widely beyond my own field–since most of our undergraduates specialize in modern American and international history, I have good reason to explore those fields and make sure that I’m current with their interests. And since two of my primary duties are (1) to advise new students on course selection, and (2) to connect the senior thesis writers in my seminar with individual advisers, I can also call it my “job” to read books by our faculty. I’ve recently read Maya Jasanoff’s Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East 1750‚Äì1850, and I’m now working through (only six years after the rest of the world!) Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. (Alright, so Menand doesn’t technically belong to our department–but he often teaches our students!) One of the most surprising aspects of my job is how frequently I meet undergraduates who simply aren’t aware of the kinds of research and writing that we do here in our department, and I’m embarrassed to say that I’m probably guilty of the same–but no longer!
October will be a busy month for me, as I’ll be presenting papers at two conferences. The weekend of 19-21 October I’ll be in Philadelphia for the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies Conference at Villanova; then, the weekend of 24-28 October, I’ll be in Minneapolis for the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. In both cases, I’ll be fortunate to share the floor with co-panelists whose work I very much admire. At PMR my paper, entitled “Believing is Seeing: The Holy Land among the Antiquarians,” forms part of a panel on “Historical Imagination and Religious Origins in the Later Renaissance,” and my co-panelists are Kate van Liere (Calvin College) and Howard Louthan (University of Florida); Emmet McLaughlin (Villanova University) will chair. At SCSC, I’ll be part of a panel on “Early Modern Spanish Constructions of National and Imperial Identities” with Thomas Dandelet (UC Berkeley) and Nick Bomba (Princeton); James M. Boyden (Tulane) will chair.
Antonio Agust??n (1517-1586), bishop of Tarragona, was one of sixteeenth-century Spain’s most famous antiquarian scholars. Like his contemporaries Ambrosio de Morales (1513-1591), Benito Arias Montano (1527-1598), and Juan Fern?°ndez Franco (ca. 1520-1601), Agust??n was skilled in epigraphy and numismatics, and profoundly interested in applying the information that could be had from material remains to writing the history of Spain.
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. Read More »
I was recently forwarded a link to the blog written by Mar??a Amelia L??pez of Mux??a, near A Coru?±a, in Galicia, Spain. In many ways, it’s a perfectly ordinary blog–do?±a Mar??a writes about her daily life, including (by her own admission) “anything that comes to mind” (todo lo que se le pasa por la cabeza). Yet there is one interesting way in which this is not just the average blog: Mar??a Amelia L??pez is 95 years old. As she humorously notes at the top of what was, presumably, her first post, “Today is my birthday, and my grandson, since he is very stingy, gave me a blog as a gift” (Hoy es mi cumplea?±os y mi nieto como es muy cutre me regal?? un blog). How very Spanish.
I can’t say for sure why I’m so taken with the blog (is it the campy hot pink color scheme?), but it may well have something to do with this videoclip–how often do you see news reports on “abuelas internautas”? Congratulations, do?±a Mar??a, on your newfound fame. I’ll be reading.
As the lone Hispanist in my history department, I’m often asked for references to Spanish history texts. I frequently answer these queries by turning to one of the most valuable resources for early modern Spanish history on the web: Jim Amelang‘s copious and au courant bibliographies, hosted on his website at the Universidad Aut??noma de Madrid. The bibliographies range across topics from witchcraft to anthropology to urban history, and are not to be missed!
My friend and Fulbright colleague Matt Crawford (see his website here) has just published his first article, on the basis of research he’s done in Madrid and Seville for his dissertation on the production of quinine in the Spanish empire in the eighteenth century:
Matthew James Crawford, “‘Para desterrar las dudas y adulteraciones’: Scientific Expertise and the Attempts to Make a Better Bark for the Royal Monopoly of Quina (1751-1790),” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 8:2 (2007): 193-212.
Quinine (quina in Spanish) was a tremendously important commodity, and the subject of so much scientific interest, because it was used to treat malaria.
Matt, currently a PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego, is one of a new breed of Spanish historians of science determined to dispel the “Black Legend” that surrounds Spain’s Scientific Revolution–the notion that, essentially, Spain never had a scientific revolution because the repressive Church and Inquisition stifled the sort of intellectual inquiry that was necessary to produce it. Congratulations, Matt, on a very interesting contribution to a good cause!
My wife has posted an assortment of her favorite photos from our Fulbright year in Spain (2005-2006); feel free to go have a look! We’ll probably post a few more as we get around to it. Though we lived in the center of Madrid, one or both of us also made it to: London, Segovia, Marbella, Ronda, Gibraltar, Granada, Valencia, Toledo, Munich, El Escorial, Chinch??n, Paris, Manzanares el Real, Sig?ºenza, Cuenca, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Aranjuez, Salamanca, Milan, Florence, Bologna, and Valladolid. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it up north, to Galicia and/or Navarre as hoped–but there’s always next time.
It’s just come to my attention that my friend Mar??a Tausiet will be presenting her latest book, Abracadabra Omnipotens: Magia urbana en Zaragoza en la Edad Moderna (Siglo XXI de Espa?±a Editores, 2007) on 8 June in Zaragoza.
Mar??a is one of the finest Spanish historians of religion, magic, and witchcraft around, and I’m sure that her new book will be a bestseller in Spain. If you are interested in reading some of her work in English, you might try her articles
- “Witchcraft as Metaphor: Infanticide and its Translations in Arag??n in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Stuart Clark, ed., Languages of Witchcraft. Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2001), 179-195.
- “Patronage of Angels & Combat of Demons: Good versus Evil in 17th Century Spain,” in Peter Marshall & Alexandra Washam, eds., Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 233-255.
Now go out and buy Mar??a’s book!
In 1848, while on a grand tour of the Iberian Peninsula, the French traveler Antoine de Latour passed through Seville. Among the many sites that caught his attention was the so-called “Casa de Pilatos,” or “Pilate’s House,” a rambling, whitewashed palace near the center of town long associated with the noble Enr??quez de Ribera family, the Marqueses de Tarifa. As Latour reported in his travelogue, the Casa’s unusual moniker could be traced back to the 1520s, when Fadrique Enr??quez de Ribera, the first Marqu?©s de Tarifa, had volunteered his residence as the starting point for Seville’s now-famous Stations of the Cross procession, celebrated every year on Good Friday. Enr??quez de Ribera’s gesture was motivated by his desire to make a public commemoration of his recent two-year-long pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as evidenced by the inscription over the entrance reading “A 4 d??as de Agosto 1519 entr?? en Jerusalem.” Don Fadrique did not, however, take any other steps to assimilate his residence to the building he had seen in Jerusalem and believed to be the actual residence of Pontius Pilate. The house remained a Renaissance, Mud?©jar edifice in classic Andaluc??an style. The name “Casa de Pilatos,” then, was purely an artifact of its role as the backdrop for Christ’s trial in the Sevillan Via Crucis. Read More »
