Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain by Seth Kimmel (review)

Combining analytical perspectives of intellectual history and comparative literature, Seth Kimmel casts new light on the pastoral strategies and scholarly practices that theologians, church leaders, and crown officials mobilized to remove the "danger" of heresy they associated with New Christians. While the book heeds issues related to conversos and Amerindians, the foremost attention centers on the scholarly and pastoral debates that focused on peninsular Spain's native Hispano-Muslim minority (Moriscos) required to convert to Christianity from circa 1502. As Kimmel states up front, his aim is not to provide another social history of religious minorities in early modern Spain, though his chapters and notes attest to an appropriate engagement with recent and classic studies in this field. Parables of Coercion offers a wide-ranging exploration of how the struggle to eliminate Islam and its traces from Iberia mobilized intellectuals within the Spanish Monarchy to reconceive the boundaries and scholarly practices of such disciplines as history writing, canon law, and theology. Analysis in the six chapters thus delves into the textual practices of prelates, preachers, inquisitors, theologians, classicists, Hebraists, and court councilors as well as recent converts seeking some modus vivendi within the Spanish Monarchy.

Chapter 1, "Legible Conversions," examines how Augustinian notions of coercion became the dominant paradigm for ritual efficacy and its enforcement after a brief interlude in the late 1490s where advocates of voluntary conversions and gradual assimilation set policy. Suggesting new lines of inquiry in realms of study mapped out by scholars as formidable as Julio Caro Baroja, Bernard Vincent, and Mercedes García Arenal, Kimmel ponders a seeming paradox: the very inquisitors who focused scrutiny on Moriscos alleged to be practicing taquīyya (dissimulation) practiced their own concealment, using lies to root out suspected heretics (29–30). Chapter 2 ("Glossing Faith") considers the implications of the crown policy of coercion in the context of Spain's global imperial expansion. Assaying how the debates about and struggle for Morisco assimilation shaped academic debates about the nature of language, the discussion here shows how Francisco de Vitoria and other Salamanca theologians "glossed" or theorized the Catholic faith to speak to an increasingly global evangelization project. Along the way, the chapter proposes a fresh examination of the Valladolid debate of 1552 between Las Casas and Sepúlveda, concentrating on an elucidation of the clash of interpretive methods. In closing this section, Kimmel examines the longer-range intellectual implication of the mid-sixteenth century turn to the study and grammaticalization of Amerindian languages with the goal of New Christian assimilation: in separating the heresy of the nonbelievers' sacred texts and traditions from the linguistic forms of expression within them, priests and friars practiced a nascent comparative philology.

Inevitably, these comparative analyses of languages in the New World refracted back to peninsular Spain, with its fraught traditions of Arabic and Hebrew study. The anxieties tied to the study of Semitic languages anchor Chapter 3 ("Polyglot forms"), a tour-de-force of interdisciplinary research and textual analysis. Indeed, this section would be an excellent choice for the busy reader with time for just one chapter or to model scholarly inquiry in a graduate seminar. Here, Kimmel's point of departure is the examination of how the need for improved communications within Spain's global empire nourished new modes of study of Semitic philology. While Hebrew itself was not the language of an unassimilated rural population—in contrast to Arabic in Granada and Valencia—Kimmel reveals how the two Semitic languages intertwined in libraries and scriptoria. The chapter thus charts the contradictory forces that informed the study of Arabic. Although the risk of inquisitorial scrutiny acted as a brake limiting the depth of study, the most skilled humanists came to understand that Arabic was a powerful tool for Christian exegesis. The result was a "thriving economy of distinctly inexpert Arabic" (83).

Yet Kimmel pays special attention to a notable exception to the amateur Arabism: Benito Arias Montano. A...