This volume is the fourth in a series edited by Kevin Ingram that provides a comparative approach to the history of Spanish converts from Judaism and Islam to Christianity known respectively as Conversos and Moriscos. It comes out of a 2017 conference that addressed the ways that Conversos and Moriscos confronted the constraints that the purity of blood legislation and increasing surveillance on their religiosity placed on their daily lives and affected the diverse broader communities of which they formed part. The volume includes an introduction by the editor, seven essays focused primarily on Converso humanists, and five essays that engage the Morisco context.
The authors raise important questions regarding the ways that new Christians confronted challenges to their social status stemming from increasing anxieties about the inheritance of belief in late medieval and early modern Spain. Examples of resistance covered in the essays include the more public and visible forms that were often adopted by aspiring elites, such as marriage into old Christian families, especially into the ranks of the nobility as studied by Enrique Soria Mesa, or the patronage of devotional art and architecture as analyzed by Nicola Jennings. Another strategy focused on the promotion of literary circles that embraced texts in Hebrew and Arabic and produced histories that elevated lineages and presented Jews and Muslims as among the first converts to Christianity on the Iberian Peninsula. Such works promoted the argument that merit mattered more than religious ancestry for access to prestigious offices and high status. Carlos Gilly, Michel Boeglin, Francisco Javier Perea Siller, Jennings, and Ingram evaluate the ways that Converso humanists produced texts that established their position as faithful Christians and active participants in the debates over Catholic reform and renewal. Stephanie Cavanaugh examines widespread efforts by Moriscos to petition for old Christian status, and Patrick O'Banion evaluates how some ordinary Moriscos cultivated private spaces to practice Islam.
Strategies used by people accused of being Conversos and Moriscos varied, reflecting their diverse geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds and the opportunities available to them. From noble families to scholars, merchants, artisans, and laborers, individuals could contest the religious and socioracial labels ascribed to them and thereby attempt to empower themselves and their communities. Some would have identified as devout Christians, others as Muslims or Jews, proud of their heritage in each instance. Ingram points out in the introduction the importance of knowing more about the social and religious backgrounds of the humanists and by extension their family histories in order to ascertain what was at stake for the individuals who contested their social position, and to try to attribute intention and by extension resistance. A more sustained dialogue running through the essays and framed in the introduction regarding how resistance is defined by each contributor, as well as its limits, could have been helpful here.
William Childers provides one theoretical approach that could be raised productively to evaluate the unstable social position of Moriscos and Conversos. Childers emphasizes the diverse ways that individuals labeled Moriscos could have identified, according to their socioeconomic status, religion, or geographic location, and he notes the subsequent problems of applying a single model to “reconstruct their own point of view as historical agents” (210). Evaluating individual actions on a binary scale as either “compliance” or “rebellion” becomes “not a function of moral rectitude or weakness, but of the colonial situation itself” (204). Childers draws from the works of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu to argue that Moriscos experienced a cleft habitus—that “their behavior was in conformity with both systems” but could appear alternately as assimilation or resistance depending on the observer (213).
Soria Mesa highlights the flexibility inherent in the system—that despite official attempts to exclude new Christians, practical necessity dictated that the majority be incorporated into Spanish Catholic society. Mechanisms were encouraged therefore to intermarry with old Christian families or to overlook ancestry in applications for entry into the military orders or prestigious offices. However, as Cavanaugh cautions, descendants of Muslims and Jews were often stigmatized based on their religious ancestry and racialized in discourses that were focused on purity of blood. On the eve of the 1609–1614 expulsions, Morisco families could and did find ways to gain support of local priests to be acknowledged as loyal Christians who could remain. Nonetheless the suspicion that they and others faced, also glimpsed in the precarious position of the Ramírez family studied by O'Banion, placed pressures on their ability to thrive.
Physical spaces become suggestive as sites that shaped responses to the constraints of surveillance of marginalized communities: the Seville prison described by Mohamed Saadan in which Mateo Alemán might have encountered Fernando Muley, accused of plotting a Morisco rebellion, and mulled over the implications of false accusations of treachery. Román Ramírez's garden becomes for O'Banion a secluded place where Deza's Moriscos could gather to observe Islam. Jennings comments on the architectural projects of Converso families that conveyed through their magnificence the nobility of lineages and their support for Spanish religious and political projects.
Like its predecessors, this volume provides an important touchstone for scholars working on conversion and religious identity in the Iberian world. Several authors suggest new directions for research, including Luis F. Bernabé Pons's call for paying closer attention to the role of mysticism among Moriscos whose encounters with sufism could be complementary to the Christian mysticism increasingly embraced by the alumbrados, or the popular devotional practice of imitatio Christi. We must continue to move away from viewing Moriscos and Conversos through a binary lens and look at the richness of their lived experience as individuals who sought creative ways to adapt to religious changes, to confront prejudice, and to sometimes adopt and contribute to the lifeways and beliefs of multiple religious traditions.
