Sacred Habitat addresses the intersection of scientific and religious knowledge production in the context of Iberian imperialism across the Atlantic world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ran Segev, a University of Hamburg fellow at the time of the book's publication, provides a geographically broad yet refined and meticulous examination of, mostly, Spanish Catholic writers and scholars who engaged with the study and explanation of the social and natural landscapes that Europeans had observed, for the first time, in the so-called New World. Besides the relevance of introducing the Americas into the Western corpus of knowledge, these texts were written by ecclesiastical authors amid the Counter-Reformation efforts led by the Roman curia to defend and spread Catholicism, especially throughout the early modern Spanish Empire. This context of production, as Segev proposes in his book, made it impossible to think about science and religion as two discrete and contradictory realms. Instead,...
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