title: Construction of morisco identity in the Spanish literary imaginary (1492-1614)
title: The construction of morisco identity in the Spanish literary imaginary (1492-1614)
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Blakemore, Elizabeth Liliann
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: moriscos
subject: race-making
subject: early modern Spain
subject: literature
subject: Cervantes
subject: Lope de Vega
subject: race
subject: religion
subject: morisco expulsion
subject: premodern critical race theory

description: The expulsion of the moriscos from Spain between 1609 and 1614 marked the end of more than a century-long struggle for the New Christian population to be accepted within Christian Spanish society. From the moment they were forcibly baptised between 1499 and 1526 until they were ordered to leave the Peninsula, the moriscos faced constant and intense scrutiny from the church, crown, and their Old Christian neighbours regarding the sincerity of their faith. Through the expulsion orders that denounced them as heretics and apostates, the moriscos were treated as a single nation that was inherently Muslim, irrespective of their geographical origins, class, gender, or degree of assimilation within society. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the moriscos’ perceived intractable Otherness would be interpreted through two lenses: cultural and genealogical difference. Their preservation of cultural practices linked to their Muslim ancestors, as well as the refashioning of the limpieza de sangre statutes by official authorities, would cast the moriscos as an internal Other within Spain. This study posits that the perception of the moriscos as an internal Other is a form of early modern race-making. Through the lenses of cultural and genealogical difference, what we see is the racialisation of religion, presenting the moriscos as irrevocably Muslim in spite of their conversion to Christianity. In the absence of phenotypic differences like skin colour, the moriscos’ racial Otherness was “identified” through other “visible,” or affected, differences, such as clothing and the speaking of Arabic, and the “invisible” difference of “impure” lineage. The study will reveal how the conceptualisation of the morisco figure in early modern Spanish literature centres around four rhetorics of race-making, which each serve to uncover or confirm the moriscos’ inherent Otherness through: their cultural differences; the changing relationship between the labels moro and morisco; the notion of limpieza de sangre; and the idea of the nación morisca. The study will explore the manifestation and perpetuation of these four rhetorics across a number of key literary discourses, including the novela morisca, romancero morisco, historical chronicles, drama, and prose fiction. It will also highlight how the image of the New Christian population in literary discourses revolves around three pivotal moments in the moriscos’ history: the fall of Granada, marking the end of Islamic rule within Spain (1492); the War of the Alpujarras (1568-1571), and the morisco expulsion (1609-1614). Starting with the novela morisca genre in Chapter One, I will explore how the characterisation of the Granadan noble moros provides the foundations for the image of the moriscos as innately tied to their Muslim ancestry through their cultural practices. The importance of Arabic and morisco clothing in the collective imaginary is reinforced in the romancero morisco, a style of ballad whose resurgence can be attributed to the popularity of the novela morisca. The discord between the idealised world depicted in the novela morisca and the reality of the moriscos becomes apparent in Chapter Two, which details the events of the War of the Alpujarras. Looking at three major chronicles, I will explore how terminology became an important tool in defining the morisco as a religious Other, aligning the New Christian rebels with their ancestral faith through the renovation of the term moro. Chapter Three explores how the events of the civil war had serious repercussions on the collective image of the moriscos, with them all perceived as dangerous thereafter. In Lope de Vega’s dramatic verse, we see the potential threat that the moriscos posed to Spain emerge in plots that recognise the moriscos’ lack of fixed physical differences. Through the theme of passing, earlier rhetorics of race-making begin to be questioned, with Lope de Vega highlighting the performative nature of the moriscos’ cultural differences that are at the centre of Chapter One. Furthermore, within his drama, I will consider Lope de Vega’s focus on the third rhetoric of race-making, one which is based on the moriscos’ alleged genealogical difference: the concept of blood purity. Finally, Chapter Four will examine the representation of the nación morisca within Cervantes’s prose fiction. Written around the time of the expulsion, the collective image of the moriscos is one influenced by polemical writings that sought to characterise the moriscos as inherently incapable of following the Christian faith in order to justify the expulsion. And yet, Cervantes contradicts this essentialising image of the moriscos through individual characters who profess to be “true” Christians. With these characters, Cervantes challenges the notion that the moriscos were a homogenous group, instead revealing the heterogenous nature of the New Christian population. What is more, it is in Cervantes’s prose works that earlier rhetorics of race-making are once again challenged or dismantled. By tracing the construction of morisco identity across various discourses throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this study reveals how these four rhetorics of race-making are embedded within the image of the morisco as a racialised, religious Other within Spain. And yet, while each author perpetuates the ideas of the church and crown that the moriscos were a distinct nation or race through these rhetorics, within each discourse we also see instances where these ideas are contested. The result is that, in engaging with these rhetorics of race-making to construct the morisco as a racialised, religious Other within Spain, these authors simultaneously assert and destabilise the essentialised image of the New Christian population, revealing the fallibility and artificiality of these rhetorics that sought to cast the moriscos as inherently different. Nevertheless, while these authors recognise that the moriscos were not all the same, nor were they inherently different from Old Christians, the potential danger they posed to Spain was a concern these authors could not shake. Consequently, the prevailing image of the moriscos is one shrouded in uncertainty. The authors’ repeated engagement with these essentialising rhetorics of race-making would subject the New Christians to perpetual suspicion, and would continue to influence the image of the moriscos within Spain’s collective imaginary long after their expulsion.