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.
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