In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Granada was a kingdom of silk. Silk work formed the basis of the Granadan economy, determined Granada's place in Mediterranean trade networks, and determined the rhythms of daily life for people in Granada's cities and its countryside. Granadan women dominated silk cultivation and spinning. When the Christians conquered the kingdom in 1491 and ended centuries of Islamic rule, Granada's Morisco population continued to make silk despite forced conversion, revolt, excessive taxation, and Inquisition until finally the silk industry collapsed when the Moriscos were expelled in 1570. The continuity through change in the kingdom's silk industry both mirrors religious and cultural change and differs from it in important ways. The silk industry reveals the ways that Moriscos resisted and cooperated with Spanish officials as their identity and culture was increasingly under threat in the sixteenth century. / text

I have been exposed since childhood to the conflictive relationship between Moroccans and Spaniards in Spain. My friend Hajar was teased in school for being Muslim and foreigner. In this text I wonder about the social reasons behind this being so. During my time in Iowa City, I read texts, from 1492 to 1650, related to the “morisco issue” – a term coined to refer to all discussion, political or religious, concerning those Muslims who converted to Christianity. Although the particular era is believed to be one of tolerance, my personal experiences and research show how moriscos were never truly accepted in Imperial Spain. Qué importa el mar, a book written in Spanish, is a partially autobiographical project on which I explore Spanish history and the consequences it has on my identity as a Spaniard, and the identity of Spain as country.

In this dissertation, I analyze the strategies of resistance employed by Morisco narrators featured in three texts written and circulated in early modern Spain. As a diverse minority population of Muslim converts to Christianity, and their descendants, the Moriscos were constructed as a dangerous, sexually perverse Other whose bodies and cultural practices became targets of intense public scrutiny and surveillance. I argue that the narrators of the texts under study embed disguised, ambiguous forms of resistance in their public performances that challenge the system of blood purity that marks them as categorically inferior. The acts of writing and speaking, I propose, provide them with a space to reflect on their own complex, hybrid identities and to advocate for more flexible and inclusive definitions of Spanish subjecthood. The first text that I examine is Francisco Núñez Muley’s Memorial to the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of Granada, composed in 1567 as an attempt to negotiate renewed taxation in exchange for the protected status of Morisco cultural traditions. The second is Miguel de Luna’s Historia verdadera del Rey Don Rodrigo (1592, 1600), a pseudohistorical novel that rewrites the foundational Spanish legend of Rodrigo and La Cava, aiming to reverse positive depictions of the Vigisoths and negative depictions of Arabic leaders. I conclude with an analysis of the Morisco characters from Part II of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote (1615), showing how resistance of narrow definitions of Spanish citizenship persisted even after the systematic expulsion of the Moriscos. My analysis draws on James C. Scott’s theory of public and hidden transcripts, which maintains that subordinate groups, even in the most controlled environments, have historically found ways to challenge their oppressors through veiled forms of resistance. To examine the tension between collective and individual Morisco identities within the texts, I unite Scott’s theory with the concept of intersectionality, looking to the ways in which lineage, religion and ethnicity collide with gender and class to facilitate and shape acts of resistance. I focus especially on how the narrators of the three texts engage questions of women’s sexuality to undermine oppressive discourses that masquerade as truth. I find that the revered figure of the virginal woman is a particularly potent symbol of resistance that the narrators develop to disrupt the normative parameters of Spanish subjecthood. In the process, they also open the paradigm of virginity to Morisco women, routinely stereotyped as hypersexual burdens to the empire, and create opportunities for these women to exert agency.

In 1492, the Catholic Monarchs Isabel and Ferdinand conquered Granada, the last Muslim Kingdom in Spain, issued the edict of expulsion of Jews and charged Christopher Columbus to find out a western route to Indies who by coincidence discovered America. These three momentous events led to construction of Spanish national unity and of the Spanish world empire. In this study, what we are looking for is the impact of the first two events, the conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews, on the formation of the Spanish national unity and the Spanish nationhood vis-&agrave / -vis Jews and Muslims in its historical context. In this study, the concept of nation-building would be employed not in economic but in political, religious and cultural terms. This study, by using the historical analysis method, found that centuries-long Muslim and Jewish presence in Spain and the Spaniards&rsquo / fight for exterminating this religious, cultural and political pluralism led to the formation of unitary Catholic state and society in Spain in the period under consideration.

La tesi si propone di analizzare il personaggio del morisco nel teatro spagnolo dei Secoli d’Oro. Scopo dello studio è dimostrare che la figura affiora come riflesso dell’immagine stereotipizzata del cristiano nuevo de moro, costruita dai membri della comunità cristiano-vieja. Il primo capitolo è incentrato sull’esposizione delle circostanze storiche che hanno contribuito a determinare, tra i secoli XVI e XVII, la cuestión morisca, identificandone i punti primari a livello socio-politico, geografico ed economico. Allo stesso modo, si intende presentare il protagonista della ricerca, l’individuo ispano-musulmano, contestualizzandolo da un punto di vista religioso, culturale e sociale. Il secondo capitolo comprende lo studio della rappresentazione deformata del soggetto morisco. L’analisi dei meccanismi di stereotipizzazione, messi in atto dalla classe dominante, evidenzia l’effettività di un progetto di discriminazione e marginalizzazione nei confronti degli appartenenti alla minoranza. Al fine di verificare se gli stessi processi si consolidino anche nel discorso letterario dell’epoca, il terzo capitolo della ricerca intende rintracciare la figura all’interno del teatro spagnolo rinascimentale e barocco ed esaminarne l’evoluzione. Nell’ambito del teatro della seconda metà del secolo XVI, l’analisi si sofferma sulle modalità di raffigurazione del personaggio nella produzione di tre significativi autori dell’epoca, Diego Sánchez de Badajoz, Juan Timoneda e Lope de Rueda. In un secondo momento, l’attenzione si focalizza sull’osservazione del ruolo che ricopre la figura all’interno di un corpus di nove commedie di Lope de Vega, esaminando nello specifico quattro aspetti del procedimento comico di cui sembra essersi servito il Fénix per ribadire la categorizzazione sociale anche a livello letterario. / The dissertation focuses on the analysis of the character of the morisco in the Spanish Golden Age theatre. The aim of the study is to demonstrate that the figure emerges as a reflection of the stereotyped cristiano nuevo de moro image constructed by the members of the cristiano viejo community. The first chapter concentrates on the description of the historical circumstances that have contributed to determine, between the 16th and 17th centuries, the cuestión morisca, identifying its main aspects from a socio-political, geographical and economic points of view. Meanwhile, the protagonist of our research, the Hispano-Muslim individual, is also examined from a religious, cultural and social perspectives. The second chapter provides the study of the deformed representation of the morisco subject. The analysis of the social stereotyping mechanisms reveals the efficiency of a discriminating scheme arranged by the ruling class towards the historical morisco figure. In order to verify whether the same processes are also enclosed in the literary discourse of the time, the third chapter aims to detect the figure in the Spanish Renaissance and Baroque theatre and to examine its evolution. Firstly, the analysis focuses on how the character is represented in the production of three main authors of the second half of the 16th century, Diego Sánchez de Badajoz, Juan Timoneda and Lope de Rueda. Afterwards, the attention concentrates on the observation of the role that covers the figure of the morisco in a corpus of nine plays written by Lope de Vega, especially on four aspects of the comic procedure which seem to have served to the author to reaffirm the social categorization also on the literary level.

In Spain, in 1501 the conversion of Muslims to Christianity was thought possible, hence the decreed baptisms; by the end of the century metanoia was deemed impossible. Similarly, religious otherness was thought to be surmountable; yet, it ultimately became indelible or racialized. These construction processes helped to discursively justify the expulsions of Christians, baptized descendants of Muslims, in the years 1609-1614. The importance of language in these justifications was arrived at through the study of referential language in texts, and a trans-Atlantic comparative approach. The discursive (re)construction and (re)inscription of otherness were traced through a variety of sixteenth-century ecclesial texts. Before these communities came to be named the so-called “moriscos” there were important changes in meaning and usage of other phrases and terms, such as “new Christian” and “newly converted.” The referential language was still in transition throughout the century and the processes are easily hidden by the historiographical premature and (over)use of the term “morisco.” Moreover, the full transition toward the racialized term “morisco” occurred closer to the eighteenth century and mostly across the Atlantic. The justifications rely on these communities being non-Christian and non-Spanish: suspect and alien. “Morisco” is not often a good metonymy. The fact that “moriscos” discursively came to be considered non-Spanish and non-Christian did not mean that there was actual discernible or insurmountable otherness. Therefore, a level of difference in the peninsula was posited through the study of referential language related to Amerindians before and after baptism: especially given that Amerindians remained “indios” after baptism—an indication that difference could be overcome in the peninsula. Furthermore, an analysis of the Sistema de Castas where “morisco” was used revealed that the proliferation of categories on both sides of the Atlantic was to prevent these communities from ever reaching the status of old Christian or Spanish.