The anxiety of sameness in early modern SpainPosted in Books, Europe, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Passing, Religion on 2019-01-29 16:26Z by Steven |
The anxiety of sameness in early modern Spain
Manchester University Press
November 2015
264 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-7849-9120-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-5261-3434-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-7849-9635-2
Christina H. Lee, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
- Provides a counter-point to studies on marginality by focusing on how dominant groups reacted and responded to the social and racial ‘passing’ of lowborns and New Christians
- Provides a new intervention in our current understanding of how Spanish identity was constructed in the early modern period
- Uses a vast array of literary and non-literary sources to discuss the social tensions that existed between the established elite and the socially mobile
- Written in a clear style, accessible to both historians and literary critics
This book explores the Spanish elite’s fixation on social and racial ‘passing’ and ‘passers’, as represented in a wide range of texts. It examines literary and non-literary works produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that express the dominant Spaniards’ anxiety that socially mobile lowborns, Conversos (converted Jews), and Moriscos (converted Muslims) could impersonate and pass for ‘pure’ Christians like themselves. Ultimately, this book argues that while conspicuous sociocultural and ethnic difference was certainly perturbing and unsettling, in some ways it was not as threatening to the dominant Spanish identity as the potential discovery of the arbitrariness that separated them from the undesirables of society – and therefore the recognition of fundamental sameness. This fascinating and accessible work will appeal to students of Hispanic studies, European history, cultural studies, Spanish literature and Spanish history.
Contents
- Introduction
- Part 1: The usurpation of nobility and lowborn passers
- 1. Theorising and practicing nobility
- 2. The forgery of nobility in literary texts
- Part II: Conversos and the threat of sameness
- 3. Spotting Converso blood in official and unofficial discourses
- 4. The unmasking of Conversos in popular and literary texts
- Part III: Moriscos and the reassurance of difference
- 5. Imagining the Morisco problem
- 6. Desirable Moors and Moriscos in literary texts
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
