From Muslim to Christian Granada

From Muslim to Christian Granada
Author: A. Katie Harris
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2007-03-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801891922

Honorable Mention, 2010 Best First Book, Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies In 1492, Granada, the last independent Muslim city on the Iberian Peninsula, fell to the Catholic forces of Ferdinand and Isabella. A century later, in 1595, treasure hunters unearthed some curious lead tablets inscribed in Arabic. The tablets documented the evangelization of Granada in the first century A.D. by St. Cecilio, the city’s first bishop. Granadinos greeted these curious documents, known as the plomos, and the human remains accompanying them as proof that their city—best known as the last outpost of Spanish Islam—was in truth Iberia’s most ancient Christian settlement. Critics, however, pointed to the documents’ questionable doctrinal content and historical anachronisms. In 1682, the pope condemned the plomos as forgeries. From Muslim to Christian Granada explores how the people of Granada created a new civic identity around these famous forgeries. Through an analysis of the sermons, ceremonies, histories, maps, and devotions that developed around the plomos, it examines the symbolic and mythological aspects of a new historical terrain upon which Granadinos located themselves and their city. Discussing the ways in which one local community’s collective identity was constructed and maintained, this work complements ongoing scholarship concerning the development of communal identities in modern Europe. Through its focus on the intersections of local religion and local identity, it offers new perspectives on the impact and implementation of Counter-Reformation Catholicism.

Sacred Habitat

Sacred Habitat
Author: Ran Segev
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2023-08-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0271096497

Known as a time of revolutions in science, the early modern era in Europe was characterized by the emergence of new disciplines and ways of thinking. Taking this conceit a step further, Sacred Habitat shows how Spanish friars and missionaries used new scholarly approaches, methods, and empirical data from their studies of ecology to promote Catholic goals and incorporate American nature into centuries-old church traditions. Ran Segev examines the interrelated connections between Catholicism and geography, cosmography, and natural history—fields of study that gained particular prominence during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and shows how these new bodies of knowledge provided innovative ways of conceptualizing and transmitting religious ideologies in the post-Reformation era. Weaving together historical narratives on Spain and its colonies with scholarship on the Catholic Reformation, Atlantic science, and environmental history, Segev contends that knowledge about American nature allowed pious Catholics to reconnect with their religious traditions and enabled them to apply their beliefs to a foreign land. Sacred Habitat presents a fresh perspective on Catholic renewal. Scholars of religion and historians of Spain, colonial Latin America, and early modern science will welcome this provocative intervention in the history of empire, science, knowledge, and early modern Catholicism.

Queen's Apprentice

Queen's Apprentice
Author: Joseph F. Patrouch
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004180303

This study seeks to examine a number of themes relating to the roles of the women's court of the central European Habsburgs. These include its role in helping consolidate their holdings in central Europe and the Holy Roman Empire and structure their relations with the rest of Europe.

Fray Luis de Granada

Fray Luis de Granada
Author: Antonio García del Moral
Publisher:
Total Pages: 544
Release: 1993
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain

Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain
Author: Enrique Fernandez
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2015-01-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442618906

Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain brings the study of Europe’s “culture of dissection” to the Iberian peninsula, presenting a neglected episode in the development of the modern concept of the self. Enrique Fernandez explores the ways in which sixteenth and seventeenth-century anatomical research stimulated both a sense of interiority and a fear of that interior’s exposure and punishment by the early modern state. Examining works by Miguel de Cervantes, María de Zayas, Fray Luis de Granada, and Francisco de Quevedo, Fernandez highlights the existence of narratives in which the author creates a surrogate self on paper, then “dissects” it. He argues that these texts share a fearful awareness of having a complex inner self in a country where one’s interiority was under permanent threat of punitive exposure by the Inquisition or the state. A sophisticated analysis of literary, religious, and medical practice in early modern Spain, Fernandez’s work will interest scholars working on questions of early modern science, medicine, and body politics.