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

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 wa...