Sacred Geography in Spain: One of the Oys of History?

• In Event: Between Jericho, Tarshish, and Heidelberg: Devotion and Scholarship in Late Renaissance Sacred Geography

Abstract

While biblical scholars had always been interested in identifying the locations of the Hebrew Bible’s many mysterious toponyms—particularly places like Tarshish and Ophir, from whence Solomon was supposed to have imported the precious resources used to build the Temple—these questions of sacred geography reached a fever pitch in Renaissance Spain. Other scholars have attributed the robustness of these discussions to the dramatic expansion of
Iberians’ geographical knowledge in the sixteenth century. I argue, however, that much of the passion and contention of these debates stems from a less obvious change in the intellectual culture of Late Renaissance Iberia: namely, a growing unease about the interpenetration of (hebraizing) biblical exegesis and (classicizing) humanist historiography. I use a particularly ferocious polemic over Juan de Mariana’s General History of Spain to illustrate this early attempt to articulate disciplinary boundaries between “history” and “religious scholarship.”

Author

• Adam G. Beaver, Princeton University