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Chapter 3: The Moorish Fashion
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3 The Moorish Fashion . . . los castellanos, lejos de sentir repulsión hacia los pocos musulmanes refugiados en su último reducto de Granada, se sintieron atraı́dos hacia aquella exótica civilizacio ́n, aquel lujo oriental en el vestuario, aquella espléndida ornamentación de los edificios, aquella extraña manera de vida, aquel modo de cabalgar, de armarse y de combatir, aquella esmerada agricultura en la vega granadina . . . la maurofilia, en fin, se hizo moda. —Ramón Menéndez Pidal, España y su historia [the Castilians, far from feeling any repulsion toward the few Muslims taking refuge in their last holdout of Granada , felt attracted toward that exotic civilization, that oriental luxury of dress, that splendid ornament in the buildings, that strange way of life, that mode of riding, arming oneself, and fighting, that painstaking agriculture in the plain of Granada . . . Maurophilia, in sum, became fashionable.] Tanta Zaida y Adalifa, Tanta Draguta y Darafa, Tanto Azarque y tanto Adulce, Tanto Gazul y Abenámar; Tanto alquicer y marlota Tanto almaizar y almalafa, Tantas empresas y plumas, Tantas cifras y medallas; Tanta roperı́a mora, Y en banderillas y adargas Tanto mote y tantas motas,¡Muera yo si no me cansan! [So much Zaida and Adalifa, so much Draguta and Darafa , so much Azarque and so much Adulce, so much Gazul and Abenámar; so much alquicer and marlota, so The Moorish Fashion 61 much almaizar and almalafa, so many devices and feathers , so many ciphers and medals, so much trade in Moorish clothing; and, on banderillas and shields, so many mottos and flecks, they’ll be the death of me!] There is an implicit tension in the philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s well-known account of literary maurophilia. While the critic rightly recognizes the profound hybridization of Iberian culture, he nonetheless describes the relation between Christian and Moorish forms as an unconsummated ‘‘attraction’’ to a civilization cordoned off in Granada. By describing maurophilia as a fashion, moreover, he delimits its effects, reinscribing the exoticism dislodged by his initial account of the Spanish familiarity and fascination with all things Moorish, in much the same way as does the satiric ballad that is my second epigraph. Moreover, Menéndez Pidal’s contradictory passage is itself part of a much longer discussion of maurophilia in which he provides evidence of such a long-term engagement between Christians and Moors that the notion of a momentary fashion seems increasingly insufficient. From this vantage point, the loud complaints of the ballad are most striking for their effort to circumscribe Moorishness to a literary vogue. This chapter explores the problem of the ‘‘Moorish fashion’’ in Spain in two registers: first, I trace the long-term Christian fascination with Moorish attire to counter the notion of temporary maurophile attachments in Spanish dress. Clothing thus serves as a case study for analyzing what is at stake in the various characterizations of Iberian culture as marked by a Moorish fashion rather than a more profound hybridization. Second, I demonstrate that the characterization of maurophile ballads that thematize the shared sartorial culture as themselves a mere fashion obeys a similar dynamic, serving to diminish the ideological import of the genre. In both cases ‘‘fashion,’’ in the sense of fad, indicates a temporary, chance attachment in opposition to a longstanding familiarity or interaction. For purposes of this chapter, then, I consider fashion not as the complex semiotic system of rapidly changing dress that it represents in our more recent critical understanding, but as it has been used in evaluating maurophilia: as a reductive alternative to a more sustained engagement with Moorish costume and custom.1 While it is clear that a cultural phenomenon such as the romancero morisco resonates in a particular time and place, the assumption that its popularity has no deeper significance because it is a vogue is deeply problematic. As I will argue, while the contemporary sa- [3.81.13.254] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:58 GMT) 62 Chapter 3 tiric responses to maurophile poetry attempt to write it off as a tiresome fashion, their loud protestations have occluded the much more complex relationship between that corpus and the contemporary debates on the place of Moorishness, and Moriscos, within Spain. Moorish Habits Although there is no Spanish equivalent for the resonant term fashion, connoting as it does in English the permanent making of subjects as well as their temporary attire,2 early modern Spain nonetheless obsessed over how...