The fourth volume in this valuable series focusing on both Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity in late medieval and early modern Spain—the conversos and moriscos of the title—breaks new ground as it revisits the familiar question of how such converts responded to the diverse pressures to which their Old Christian neighbors and their institutions subjected them. While several of the chapters center on theology and intellectual history, most combine this with a social history approach. Virtually all of them rely heavily on inquisitorial documents as their main sources—an irony that few among the clerics who originally composed and compiled them, as well as the defendants in these cases, would have appreciated, much less approved.
This brief review can only suggest something of the diversity of the themes the authors of this collection address. Following an introduction by the series editor Kevin Ingram, it opens with Carlos Gilly's analysis of one of the earliest (and unusually interesting) theological discussions regarding Hispanic Jewish converts to Christianity. Nicola Jennings then explores artistic patronage by high-ranking converso prelates in fifteenth-century Burgos, Segovia, and Valladolid, and ends by suggesting that it helped keep the Inquisition at a safe distance during its especially repressive opening phase.
Enrique Soria Mesa then offers a lively discussion of the curious phenomenon of the linajudos, professional genealogists some of whom used the local documentation of conversos either to provide them with more acceptable (i.e., fake) family trees or to blackmail them into paying for their silence. Michel Boeglin follows with a close examination of the Doctrina Cristiana treatise, the most important surviving text by the converso Protestant Constantino de la Fuente (1502–60). Ingram then steps in as he probes the writings of the scholar Juan de Malara for traces of a New Christian humanism. The overlap between Renaissance culture and conversos also informs Francisco Javier Perea Siller's focus on the recourse to the Hebrew Bible by sixteenth-century Spanish theologians. Ingram then closes the first half of the book with a historiographical essay on how beginning in the fourteenth century Spanish historians—and conversos in particular—identified and depicted this socio-spiritual category in their writings.
In the second and shorter half Mohamed Saadan shifts the focus toward moriscos in his brisk examination of their representation in the well-known “Ozmán and Daraja” episode/story/romance within Mateo Alemán's picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache (1599–1604). Patrick J. O'Banion explores a particular incident (and place) in late sixteenth-century Deza, the Castilian town whose well-documented converted Muslim population he has been subjecting to unusually close scrutiny for some two decades. William P. Childers makes a complex and theory-laden argument for “strategic assimilation” as the leading form of the “resistance” with which the moriscos responded to the pressures of the dominant culture in early modern Spain.
Luis F. Bernabé Pons then follows with a call for a closer and more careful look at contemporary assessments of the spiritual loyalties of moriscos. To this end, he surveys a wide range of writings for signs of connections between them and various forms of dissidence, ranging from the mystics labeled as alumbrados (literally, “illuminated ones”) to more exalted types of visionaries. Stephanie M. Cavanaugh closes the book by exploring internal discussions within the Spanish bureaucracy regarding the sincerity of morisco adherence to Christianity and exposes many of the disagreements within what tried to impress outsiders as a unified position being carried out by a strong and still triumphant state.
One steps back from this wealth of data and analysis with a strong sense of the dynamism and forward movement that currently marks the study of these two minorities. This volume brings together strenuous and convincing efforts to respond to the difficulties of studying the inner as well as outer histories of two groups largely known through the documents of their persecutors. Its findings provide ample proof that the documentation produced by persecutors can, when applying the proper cautions, shed substantial light on those individuals and groups who ran afoul of the ever more stringent orthodoxy of Counter-Reformation Spain. That certain early modern Spaniards showed considerable ingenuity—as well as courage—in coming up with their own answers to the mysteries of the spirit in the face of such strong opposition provides eloquent, if partial, proof of a more pluralistic, if problematic, sphere of belief than the one found in most histories of Spain.
