Lead Books

In 1601 the writer and jurist Gregorio López Madera published an ecclessiastical history text entitled Discursos de la certidumbre de las reliquias descubiertas en Granada. Desde el año de 1588 hasta el de 1598. The treaty contained a defense of the inventions of the Granada Plomos. The controversy over these findings opened an important space for experimentation on the capabilities of archeology to provide evidence to the historiographical debate. This situation favoured that among the arguments used by López Madera there was an interesting speech about archaeological methodology. He pursued to sustain the evidence of the antiquity of some architectural remains related to the relics. The first Plomos’ invention was produced in the remains of an old Muslim tower, but it was intended to establish that this construction had been raised in the time of the mythical origins of early Christianity in the peninsula. This argument needed some archaeological knowledge that exceeded the usual classical orientation of Spanish antiquarian texts; and therefore López Madera found the need to refine the methodological premises that had been set a generation ago by Ambrosio de Morales. In this purpose López Madera connected to the methodological enquiry that Pedro Díaz de Ribas performed a few decades later, in order to consider the specific case of Islamic architecture. These comments by López Madera have not received attention neither from the history of the Granada martyrs’ inventions, nor from the history of archeology. His ideas on the archaeological techniques offer a good case study to analyse the variety of interests acting in the birth of antiquarian literature on Muslim monuments.