Burton Postdoctoral Fellow, Ph.D.
Department of History
St. Joseph's University
5600 City Avenue, B/L 112
Philadelphia, PA 19131-1395
Contact Me


Left: Engraving of Cardinal Bernardino Lopez de Carvajal (1455-1523), one of the Plasencia Carvajal family's most successful ecclesiastical leaders.


Right: December 2007
@ Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris
EARLY FALL 2008 NEWS

Interested in the history of the Medieval Mediterranean World? (August 17, 2008)

  • As a part of my St. Joseph's University course, HIS 2591, "From Baghdad to Burgos: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean World (600 to 1600 c.e.), I'll be podcasting class lectures and discussions using iTunes U. If you are interested in being a "listening participant" in our class, please subscribe to the podcast. Also, you can download the syllabus and read along with us. --Learn More--

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Listen to the Opening Panel from the 18th Annual Society for Crypto Judaic-Studies Conference (August 17, 2008)

  • In this panel, Dr. Seth Kunin (University of Durham) discusses the "Diversity in Crypto-Jewish Religious Choices." Following is a response by Dr. Stanley Hordes (University of New Mexico).
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SUMMER 2008 NEWS

Personal News and Upcoming Events (July 2008)

 SPRING 2008 NEWS

Conferences of Interest

 Websites of Interest

  • The United Nations' Alliance of Civilizations. An incredible project involving academics and policy makers focused on celebrating our cultural commonalities. Its mission: "The Alliance of Civilizations (AoC) aims to improve understanding and cooperative relations among nations and peoples across cultures and religions and, in the process, to help counter the forces that fuel polarization and extremism."
  • Cultura Monterrey, The new municipal web for the Dirección de Cultura de Monterrey, Mexico. I posted this link as early modern Monterrey was a "hotbed" of secrets Jews in the New World.

Online Articles and Exhibitions of Interest
  • "A Man of Two Worlds," Saudi Aramco World, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Jan/Feb 2008). An interesting article on the 16th century Granadan Humanist, Al Hassan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fassi (a.k.a. Leo Africanus).
  • The Treaty of Tordesillas. The 1494 agreement negotiated between Spain and Portugal that laid the foundation for their shared claims in the Americas. It is a difficult document to "appreciate" given the negative consequences of the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas, but nonetheless, very significant. Among the Spaniards responsible for concluding the agreement was the Placentino Garci Lopez de Carvajal, the brother of Cardinal Bernardino Lopez de Carvajal. More reading: A digitalized copy of the original agreement (5.7 mb download) at the Ministerio de Cultura, Yale University's translation, and Wikipedia's discussion of the agreement.
FALL 2007 NEWS

NOVEMBER 8, 2007

On Protecting Our Civil Liberties: Freedom of Movement/Association and Censorship

I wanted to share some of my increasing concerns about civil liberties, privacy, and government censorship with others that visit my website.

If you travel internationally, one way you can do that is by learning more about what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is tracking regarding your movements in and out of the country, who you associate with during those trips, and even the books that you carry. --more--

If you receive packages from overseas, you might be interested to know the US government is actively censorsing audio-visual materials being mailed into the country. --more--

NOVEMBER 1, 2007

The Sixteenth Century Studies Conference and Eight Great Books

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending the annual Sixteenth Century Studies Conference held in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The conference brings together U.S. and international scholars of the historical, literary, and cultural events of the early modern world. This year, a considerable number of academic papers focused on Spain and colonial Spanish America -- most of which provided fascinating perspectives on: the "making" of Spanish saints, the impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the Americas, Spanish foreign policy, Spanish and Indian identities, the Jesuits, the lives of women, slavery and race, and religious reform. I would encourage you to review the conference program to learn more about this new scholarship. If you would like to read some of the most recent and best scholarship on these topics, do look into these recent texts:

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Jodi Bilinkoff's Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450-1750. "In early modern Catholic Europe and its colonies priests frequently developed close relationships with pious women, serving as their spiritual directors during their lives, and their biographers after their deaths. In this richly illustrated book, Jodi Bilinkoff explores the ways in which clerics related to those female penitents whom they determined were spiritually gifted, and how they conveyed the live stories of these women to readers." -more-

A. Katie Harris' From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City's Past in Early Modern Spain. "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." -more-

Gretchen D. Starr-LeBeau's In the Shadow of the Virgin: Inquisitors, Friars, and Conversos in Guadalupe, Spain. "On June 11, 1485, in the pilgrimage town of Guadalupe, the Holy Office of the Inquisition executed Alonso de Paredes--a converted Jew who posed an economic and political threat to the town's powerful friars--as a heretic. Wedding engrossing narratives of Paredes and other figures with astute historical analysis, this finely wrought study reconsiders the relationship between religious identity and political authority in late-Medieval and early-modern Spain. Gretchen Starr-LeBeau concentrates on the Inquisition's handling of conversos (converted Jews and their descendants) in Guadalupe, taking religious identity to be a complex phenomenon that was constantly re-imagined and reconstructed in light of changing personal circumstances and larger events." -more-

Carla Rahn Phillips' The Treasure of the San José: Death at Sea in the War of the Spanish Succession. "Sunk in a British ambush in 1708, the Spanish galleon San José was rumored to have one of the richest cargos ever lost at sea. Though treasure hunters have searched for the wreck's legendary bounty, no one knows exactly how much went down with the ship or exactly where it sank. Here, Carla Rahn Phillips confronts the legend of lost treasure with documentary records of the San José's final voyage and suggests that the loss of silver and gold en route to Spain paled in comparison to the loss of the six hundred men who went down with the ship." -more-

Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt's Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister. "Through an examination of the role of nuns and the place of convents in both the spiritual and social landscape, this book analyzes the interaction of gender, religion and society in late medieval and early modern Spain. Author Elizabeth Lehfeldt here examines the tension between religious reform, which demanded that all nuns observe strict enclosure, and the traditional identity of Spanish nuns and their institutions, in which they were spiritually and temporally powerful women. Lehfeldt's work is based on the archival records of twenty-three convents in the city of Valladolid, and peninsula-wide documents that include visitation records, the constitutions of religious orders, and spiritual biographies." -more-

Martin Nesvig's Local Religion in Colonial Mexico. "The ten essays in Local Religion in Colonial Mexico provide information about the religious culture in colonial Mexico. Carlos Eire's essay begins the study with the meaning of "popular religion" in colonial Mexico. Antonio Rubial García looks at the use of icons. Martin Austin Nesvig's essay discusses Tlatelolco, a city near Tenochtitlan and the site of Mexico's college for Indian education where the Indians studied classical Latin, Spanish grammar, and Catholic theology in preparation for the priesthood." -more-

Mary Elizabeth Perry's The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain. "In 1502, a decade of increasing tension between Muslims and Christians in Spain culminated in a royal decree that Muslims in Castile wanting to remain had to convert to Christianity. Mary Elizabeth Perry uses this event as the starting point for a remarkable exploration of how Moriscos, converted Muslims and their descendants, responded to their increasing disempowerment in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Spain. Stepping beyond traditional histories that have emphasized armed conflict from the view of victors, The Handless Maiden focuses on Morisco women. Perry argues that these women's lives offer vital new insights on the experiences of Moriscos in general, and on how the politics of religion both empowers and oppresses." -more-

Jonathan P. Decter's Iberian Jewish Literature: Between al-Andalus and Christian Europe. "This stimulating and graceful book explores Iberian Jewish attitudes toward cultural transition during the 12th and 13th centuries, when growing intolerance toward Jews in Islamic al-Andalus and the southward expansion of the Christian Reconquista led to the relocation of Jews from Islamic to Christian domains. By engaging literary topics such as imagery, structure, voice, landscape, and geography, Jonathan P. Decter traces attitudes toward transition that range from tenacious longing for the Islamic past to comfort in the Christian environment." -more-


OCTOBER 2007

Greetings fellow historians of Spain and colonial Spanish America. Please feel free to make youself at home and use the various resources on my website -- links to Spanish archives and Spanish history sources, bibliographies of important Spanish history works, my original research on Carvajal family genealogy, my long-term project to map the genetic profile of the Carvajal lineage, and several photo albums and short video clips, including Semana Santa in Toledo, Spain! In the forthcoming weeks I'll be posting course syllabi for those interested in learning more about medieval and early Spain. In the meantime, you might enjoy my PowerPoint slides and notes for my lecture, Through the Eyes of the Historical Record: Convivencia and Tolerance and Intolerance in Islamic Al-Andalus.

Dissertation Overview

My dissertation, From Sword to Seal: The Emblematic Rise of the Carvajal Family in Early Modern Spain (1390-1516), examines the late 14th through early 16th century transformation of the Catholic Carvajal family, a lower noble clan of knights (caballeros), into critical ecclesiastical leaders and royal administrators in Ferdinand and Isabel’s Catholic Spain. My findings reveal the concerted, strategic, and multigenerational efforts undertaken by the family to re-envision their social and occupational identities. My research also explores the previously undocumented relationship between the consequential yet religiously suspect Santa Maria family of conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity) and the Carvajal family. Cumulatively, my dissertation argues that although early modernity in Spain was characterized by the continuity of the medieval modalities of family and religious identities, this period was distinctive from the Middle Ages because social mobility could be enhanced through occupational metamorphoses.

Within Spanish historiography, the study of early modern families remains an underdeveloped field. Other than Helen Nader’s 1979 published work on the elite Mendoza family of caballeros (1350-1550), which details a knight clan’s competition with royal bureaucrats, a comprehensive study of Spanish families before the 16th century is almost entirely absent. My study of the Carvajal family is significantly different from Nader’s research in that it examines in detail how a family of lower social stature rose to prominence by abandoning the battlefield and assuming positions within both the church and royal administration. Specifically, my dissertation analyzes the occupational, as well as the patronage, wealth generation/preservation, religious endowment, and marriage strategies employed by the Carvajals to create a family on par with the Mendozas by the 1500s. Although not explicitly discussed in my dissertation, I plan to incorporate a Trans-Atlantic component of the Carvajal’s lineage into my future book manuscript by following their 16th century migration to colonial Spanish America. --more--

Recent Additions and Updates:

Dissertation Abstract
Curriculum Vitae
Current and Future Research Plans
Teaching Philosophy and Experience
Sample Chapter from My Dissertation - Chapter Four


Carvajal Genetic Genealogy Project
3 July 2007 Status Report
Results in Detail

Contact Me:
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