Admiration and Awe: Morisco Buildings and Identity Negotiations in Early Modern Spanish Historiography by Antonio Urquízar-Herrera (review)

CHRISTIAN SPAIN HAS LONG BEEN AMBIVALENT about its Muslim heritage. After the 1492 defeat of the last Muslim polity on the Peninsula, two conflicting impulses could be found in Spanish Christian culture. On the one hand, an official historiography, rooted in medieval chroniclers and expanded by Renaissance humanist writers, treated the seven centuries of Muslim rule and Christian–Muslim coexistence on the Peninsula as a cultural, political, and religious aberration and rejoiced that the Catholic monarchs' victory over Muslim Granada had ended the contaminating effects of Arab and Muslim culture, especially, though not only, in religious life. Aided by the humanist tradition that celebrated and often magnified classical origins, the received narrative in Habsburg Spain told of a Roman and Christian Hispania, rudely but temporarily interrupted by the violent Arab invasion. This written history was enhanced by a host of "miraculous finds" of artificial Christian relics from the pre-Muslim era that have been much studied of late.

On the other hand, a persistent tradition of maurophilia in Christian Spain kept alive positive memories of Morisco culture, albeit in circumscribed contexts. Maurophilia's best-known incarnation is the literary tradition, stretching from medieval romanceros to Cervantes and beyond, that celebrated good-hearted and chivalrous Moors; this has been studied extensively by literary scholars since Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo in the nineteenth century. Barbara Fuchs's Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (U of Pennsylvania P, 2009) highlighted a much more tangible dimension of maurophilia: a "moorish habitus" that survived in architecture, clothing, and everyday practices such as cuisine and horsemanship. Fuchs characterized this enduring embrace of morisco culture as a largely nonliterary phenomenon and one at odds with the official stance of the Catholic Church. She contrasted the fondness for mudéjar architecture and domesticity, seen especially among the laity and the nobility, with the "official histories" written by ultraorthodox Spanish clergy who she alleges wrote Muslim history and Morisco culture out of the Spanish national story altogether. Citing passages from the chronicler Hernando de Pulgar and the Jesuit historian Juan de Mariana about the ephemerality of monuments, she suggested that most historians ignored the physical vestiges of the Muslim past in favor of idealized narratives of an eternally Christian Spain.

Antonio Urquízar-Herrera's Admiration and Awe demonstrates the falsity of any simplistic picture of maurophilia and maurophobia as representing different segments of the Christian Spanish population. Urquízar-Herrera's main subject is the attitudes of Spain's sixteenth-century humanist historians, many of whom were churchmen, toward the physical remains of al-Andalus. He documents exhaustively that these authors wrote a good deal about the architectural remains of al-Andalus, often professing admiration for them, as exemplified by the book's title, a comment on the great mosque of Cordoba made by Ambrosio de Morales in his Antiquities of the Cities of Spain (1575). But the attitude of these antiquarians, chorographers, and civic historians was also fraught with "contradictions and complexities" (218), which UrquízarHerrera carefully examines in his ten chapters.

In part 1, Urquízar-Herrera begins, appropriately, with three chapters of medieval background, both architectural and historiographical. He highlights the prevalence of the theme of "Spain's ruination" in medieval chroniclers, which ensured that "the notion of Islamic destructiveness was a good as etched into the DNA of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historiographical thought in Spain" (35). In this near-ubiquitous paradigm, Muslims were violent conquerors who, with savagery comparable to the Visigoths before them, had vindictively destroyed buildings—perhaps even for the explicit purpose of destroying sites of historical memory. This justified the treatment of conquered Muslim palaces and mosques in one of two ways: either complete destruction as vestiges of unworthy culture that was best forgotten, or preservation as "symbolic war trophies" that could be converted to Christian use while reminding viewers of the Christian victory over Islam.

Throughout...