The Spanish Disquiet: The Biblical Natural Philosophy of Benito Arias Montano

Author:   Maria M. Portuondo
Publisher:   The University of Chicago Press
ISBN:  

9780226592268


Pages:   448
Publication Date:   11 March 2019
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
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The Spanish Disquiet: The Biblical Natural Philosophy of Benito Arias Montano


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Overview

In this book, historian María M. Portuondo takes us to sixteenth-century Spain, where she identifies a community of natural philosophers and biblical scholars. They shared what she calls the “Spanish Disquiet”—a preoccupation with the perceived shortcomings of prevailing natural philosophies and empirical approaches when it came to explaining the natural world.   Foremost among them was Benito Arias Montano—Spain’s most prominent biblical scholar and exegete of the sixteenth century. He was also a widely read member of the European intellectual community, and his motivation to reform natural philosophy shows that the Spanish Disquiet was a local manifestation of greater concerns about Aristotelian natural philosophy that were overtaking Europe on the eve of the Scientific Revolution. His approach to the study of nature framed the natural world as unfolding from a series of events described in the Book of Genesis, ultimately resulting in a new metaphysics, cosmology, physics, and even a natural history of the world. By bringing Arias Montano’s intellectual and personal biography into conversation with broader themes that inform histories of science of the era, The Spanish Disquiet ensures an appreciation of the variety and richness of Arias Montano’s thought and his influence on early modern science.

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Author:   Maria M. Portuondo
Publisher:   The University of Chicago Press
Imprint:   University of Chicago Press
ISBN:  

9780226592268


ISBN 10:   022659226
Pages:   448
Publication Date:   11 March 2019
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

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Reviews

Only a dexterous philologist and a keen observer of nature could unravel the mysteries of creation already contained in Biblical accounts. The polymathic Arias Montano produced a new Mosaic natural philosophy from scratch, away from the many ancient systems European humanists had revived. Like her subject, Portuondo radically shifts the ground, offering a strikingly novel interpretation of early modern Spanish science as relentlessly innovative and radical. --Jorge Ca izares-Esguerra, Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History, University of Texas-Austin As erudite as Joseph Scaliger, as inclined to reform natural philosophy as Francis Bacon, as encyclopedic as Athanasius Kircher, and as interested in biblical exegesis as Isaac Newton, Benito Arias Montano, librarian of Felipe II and editor of the Antwerp Polyglot, was a key figure of Renaissance humanism. This essential book opens up to us his Magnum opus, whose epistemology falls between empiricism and Hebrew philology. Mar a Portuondo restores Hispanic culture to its place in the republic of letters and sheds light on an age of uncertainties, disquiet, and shadows, that is to say, a period of sharp inquiries into the Book of Nature and audacious attempts to reconcile it with the Sacred Scriptures. --Juan Pimental Igea, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CSIC


Author Information

Mar a M. Portuondo is associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches the history of science and technology. She is the author of Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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