Early modern geographia sacra in the context of early modern scholarship

During the early modern period, sacred geography was a vibrant and innovative scholarly field, building upon older exegetical traditions of mapping the sacred text. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, in view of the major developments in geographical knowledge and method, as well as the sharpening of its antiquarian and philological tools, sacred geography responded to an urgent set of contemporary questions, ranging from the location of Eden to the distribution of Noah’s progeny. Paying particular attention to early modern ideas of the fertility of the Holy Land, Shalev demonstrates the ways in which the debate served as a meeting point for several contemporary discourses—exegetical, providential, political, and natural-historical.