The Gypsies of early modern Spain, 1425-1783 (review)

Literary scholar and professor of Spanish at the University of London, Richard Pym has produced the first full-length study in English of the early history of Spain's Gypsies or Gitanos. It covers the period from the first documented arrival of what were most likely patrilocal bands of "Egiptanos" to the lands of Aragon in 1425, to the last royal ordinance specifically directed at their dissolution as a distinct group at the end of the Ancient Régime. The text is well researched and extensively documented, rigorous to the detail and tersely written even if sometimes the chronological sequence is broken by the analysis of cases from different periods, and there is some redundancy concerning the main arguments, such as the limitations of absolute royal power to implement policy locally. Overall, the book is highly recommendable for students and scholars of ethnicity, ethnic policies, Romani studies, and Spanish history and literature in general.

The author has carried out wide archival research and unearthed important documents, although most relevant information was already present in the work of other historians such as Helena Sánchez Ortega, Bernard Leblon, Amada López Meneses, and Antonio Gómez Alfaro. Pym, however, excels in contextualizing, interpreting and interconnecting the data available in relationship with larger developments in Spanish history. Thus, the reader becomes very aware of the particular socio-political climates and developments in every period and how they affected anti-Gypsy legislation, policy and discourse.

In its central chapters the book reads as the chronicle of an obsession: how the most varied and multicultural society in Western Europe became obsessed with effacing religious, linguistic and moral difference through forced baptism, coercion and expulsion, and by a fixation with purity and "clean blood" ("pureza de sangre"). By 1618, with Jews, Moriscos, Erasmistas and any other alternative groups expelled or forced into oblivion, there was nobody left to blame for the decadence, pestilence, famine and depopulation that plagued the country. As Pym concludes, "the facile pathological displacement of Spain's perceived woes onto this despised pariah group reflected the acute crisis of confidence that had by now begun to affect important sections of the nation's intellectual and religious elite" (page 2). In the Spain of its Golden Age, Gypsies thus became both a moral scapegoat and a literary and artistic theme of immense potential for the exotizing, orientalizing and bohemian (literally) projections so dear to baroque and, later, romantic spirits.

These outcasts, however, proved more resilient than other larger and more important minorities, and this paradox is one of the leitmotifs of the book that allows for the application to the case of hotly debated ideas of Spanish historiography such as the unfinished, confederate nature of the Spanish Habsburg state, the limitations of the absolute monarchy to implement its designs in areas under church or noble jurisdiction, and the seemingly constant support and protection of Gypsies by many of their neighbours, both lay and clerical. All these are important arguments and enrich our view of this period.

It is arguable, however, that this is not primarily a book about Gypsies as a distinct, separate group, but about the reaction of Spain's authorities to an imagined, foreign community that seemed irredeemable and inassimilable. The main actors of the book are Spanish religious, political and intellectual elites and, crucially, the Spanish state. Living Gitanos, "history's real Gypsies", as the author recognizes, remain elusive, "pretextual", their voices and persons always conjured through the discourse of inimical, prejudiced, ignorant others. Even their identity was misjudged, their incomprehensible language reduced to a delinquent slang or "jerigonza" (literally, a jargon), and their difference characterized by dress and life ways that could, seen from outside, be easily mimicked by a number of vagabonds, deserters and criminals. But the book is focused on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period when little of factual value is known about Gypsies, and when "the task of writing about...