“Local Antiquaries and the Expansive Sense of the Past: A Case Study from Counter-Reformation Spain” in Local Antiquities, Local Identities: Art, Literature, and Antiquarianism in Early Modern Europe, Kathleen Christian and Bianca Divitiis, eds. (Manchester University Press, 2019) (original) (raw)

In the seventeenth century, Spanish antiquarians collected inscriptions, coins, and other evidence of their community’s illustrious Christian origins, conflictive medieval past, and glorious present. Efforts to compile a suitable local history were particularly determined and prolific in the Andalusian diocese of Jaén, where two local enthusiasts of the past – Francisco de Rus Puerta and Martín Ximena Jurado – generated a voluminous body of manuscripts and printed books under the sponsorship of Jaén’s bishop. Like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, Jaén’s antiquaries documented the past in both text and image, as the authors sketched coins, ruins in situ, and ongoing excavations for antiquities and saints’ relics. In these efforts, Greco-Roman antiquity played the handmaiden to the early Christian era, for it was of intense concern for Andalusian Catholics to prove that the Islamic invasion had not disrupted the region’s deep and essential Christian identity. In this way, ‘antiquity’ was a rather motley-colored creature, encompassing not only the remains of Roman Hispania, but also including pre-Roman antiquities from Spain’s early Greek, Phoenician, and Celtiberian peoples, as well as Visigothic and some Islamic artifacts. This promiscuous sense of antiquity is evident in the historical texts and images – including sketches, woodcuts, and other visual representations of coins, inscriptions, and ruins – compiled and produced by these local antiquarians. This distinctive vision of the past is only aberrant when viewed from the perspective of Renaissance Italy; as modern scholarship on the shape of local antiquarianisms continues to evolve, it has become evident that, both in their methods, preoccupations, and distinctly broad sense of ‘antiquity,’ the Jaén scholars were far from unique in the intellectual and social environment of early modern Europe.