In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER FIVE Creating Christian Granada Lay Initiative and the Invention of Local Religious Traditions, I492-I550 G ranada's earliest immigrant community in the I490S included a small group of laborers from Asturias and Spain's other mountainous northern coastal regions. On arrival, most of these Asturian immigrants, prohibited by the surrender agreement from residing within the city itself, concentrated themselves in a marginal neighborhood outside the city walls, in an area stretching out from the lower city toward the plains to the west. Within the first few years after the conquest, the Asturians had constructed within their new neighborhood a small chapel dedicated to Our Lady and San Roque-the cult of San Roque being a devotion typically strong in the far northern regions of Spain from which they had come. Around this chapel there grew also a confraternity, or lay religious brotherhood, dedicated to the Virgin and San Roque. In implementing the 1501 foundation document establishing Granada's parishes, Archbishop Talavera took advantage of the existence of this new chapel, converting it into the neighborhood's parish church of Santa Maria Magdalena . Through the early decades of the new century, nonetheless, the cult and confraternity of the Virgin and San Roque still provided the devotional, organizational, and social focus of the religious life of the new parish. It was the confraternity itself, in fact, that undertook and paid for the work necessary to expand the parish church structure between the years 1508 and 1520 to meet the needs of the growing neighborhood as new immigrants continued to arrive.1 Postconquest Granada presents a unique opportunity to observe the creation of a new, local, urban Christian religious culture within the Iberian Peninsula. In the cities, towns, and villages of late-fifteenth- and earlysixteenth -century Castile from which the vast majority of the immigrants came, local religious cultures reflected centuries of development stretching back into the poorly documented mists of the Reconquest period. Because conquered Granada had no longstanding local Christian tradition, the comparably well-documented growth of Christian culture in the city during the 91 92 :: CREATING CHRISTIAN GRANADA period under study was quite literally a continuous process of creation and innovation. Bearing in mind the particularly dynamic nature of frontier Granada's social and institutional landscapes outlined thus far, this chapter returns to some of the central questions raised in the introduction to this book: who created Christian Granada, how, and to what ends? Answers to these questions are predictably complex, but the example of the relatively humble Asturian immigrants, who shaped and developed their own parish church with little apparent guidance from archbishops or parish clergymen, is emblematic of a general trend. In the absence of strong leadership from either the upper echelons of the local church hierarchy or the parish clergy through the first half of the sixteenth century, local Christian culture in Granada grew in ways shaped primarily by the lay residents of the city itself. Local clergymen-especially the mendicant friars who established local foundations very quickly in the years after the conquest-must certainly be counted among the creators. Many of the most important and enduring religious institutions and traditions that comprised Granada's local Christian culture, however, grew from lay initiatives and lay-initiated dialogue with local clergy. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of these initiatives came from the Christian immigrant community. Though not entirely excluded from this process, the role of the moriscos in the creation of the frontier city's developing Christian religious culture was, by contrast, extremely limited. Although the religious life of the postconquest frontier city involved the introduction of customs and traditions that were entirely new to Granadan soil, it would be an exaggeration to say that the city's religious life was created entirely ex nihilo. Obviously, religious beliefs and activities among much of Granada's "native" community continued to reflect their particular spiritual inheritance, as many of the city's supposedly Christian moriscos still rested their hope for salvation on the secret practice of the faith of their ancestors. Granada's immigrants also brought with them to the frontier city their own religious legacies, including not only myriad local devotions and practices specific to the hundreds of hometowns from which they had come, but also customs and controversies common to cities and villages across early modern Catholic Europe. The creation of Christian Granada, in fact, coincided with an era that was for all of Spain and most of Europe remarkable because of its creativity, vitality...

Share