Name: Ran Segev Affiliation: University of Texas-­‐Austin E-­‐mail: ransegev@utexas.edu Submission Type: Paper Brief Biography: Ran Segev is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin where he is completing his dissertation, The Science of Faith: Religious Worldviews and the Study of Nature in the Sixteenth-­‐ and Seventeenth-­‐Century Spanish Atlantic, under the supervision of Prof. Jorge Cañizares-­‐Esguerra. He is a winner of several competitive national and university-­‐wide grants, including an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library for Short-­‐Term Research, a Newberry Library fellowship, and a University of Texas-­‐Austin History Department Writing Fellowship. He was also a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin-­‐Madison for two years. Title: The Search for Mount Carmel in the New World: Fray Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa and Geography at the Service of Faith Abstract: Geography, with its associated skills of navigation and cartography, had immense importance in the history of science in the early modern era. The development of geography has been typically associated with humanist revival of classical knowledge and understood in terms of the formation of global commercial networks and imperial expansion. Yet the significance of religion, in particular the Tridentine Church, still remains marginal to the story of early-­‐modern geographical culture. My talk will explore the religious considerations behind geography, demonstrating a larger process of accommodation of scientific methods and idiom in the service of religion. Through the example of the seventeenth-­‐century Carmelite missionary Antonio Vásquez de Espinosa and his geographical writings of Spanish America, I will examine how geography was harnessed to propagate the Church’s doctrines and values. Espinosa’s geographical description was a literary product of a skilled missionary who had firsthand experience in the West Indies and was well versed in Renaissance cosmography and geographical literature. However, in addition to providing geographical facts about the New World, Espinosa self-­‐consciously fashioned his descripción to affirm the triumphant Church, sacralizing space through the recognition of natural “miracles” in his geographical account. My analysis of Espinosa’s work underscores the religious ideologies of the post-­‐Trent Church as well as spiritual and political developments within the Carmelites, a religious order that became a model for the Catholic redefinition of piety and the practice of faith. Through the employment of descriptive geography, Espinosa’s reader is not merely introduced to physical sites along the author’s route, but each space carry has the potential to tell a religious story. From this vantage point, geography was a useful instrument in recording new myths and legends in a virgin landscape and bringing them into a sacred, spatial repertoire.