Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (review)

In this study Barbara Fuchs interrogates the place of Moorishness; i.e. the Andalusi past and the Spanish customs and ways of thought indebted to and inherited from the Peninsula's Muslim inhabitants, in the process of Spanish self-fashioning as well as in shaping other European nations' perceptions of Spaniards in the early modern period. Fuchs locates what she calls maurophilic literature composed in early modern Spain (after the fall of Granada in 1492 and before the expulsion of the moriscos in 1609)—a corpus of texts that recognize Andalusi history and Moorish customs as part and parcel of what would become Spanish history and culture—as but one example within many other such maurophilic customs and practices, that include but are not limited to clothing and fashion, language, architecture or the organization of lived spaces, and equestrian forms and entertainments. The texts she examines include the romances on Moorish and frontier themes, the Abencerraje, the Guerras civiles de Granada, and the Guzmán de Alfarache.

Fuchs begins by pointing out how Spain's Moorish past—the 700 years of Muslim presence on the Peninsula, several centuries during which Muslims would be the colonizers of Spain—problematizes Edward Said's concept of Orientalism. Perhaps more importantly for scholars of Spanish studies, it complicates Georges Cirot's and Menéndez Pidal's concept of maurophilia, or the idea that the obvious Spanish attraction for things Moorish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rather than being the product of a deep cultural hybridity, was a mere fashion popular among a Spanish public that differed fundamentally from the Muslim cultures of Iberia. In the following five chapters Fuchs offers case studies, pairing a cultural phenomenon such as fashion or architecture with literary texts, to expose how such maurophilia was a far more complex and often contradictory cultural phenomenon defined by negotiation and self-fashioning.

In the first chapter, "The Quotidian and the Exotic," the author examines how Moorish elements, including dress, food, and entertainment—which Spaniards saw as being essential to their own identity qua Spaniards—were perceived by other Europeans, particularly the French and English, as markedly oriental or exotic and foreign to the latter's notions of Western European identity. For French businessmen, the Spanish estrado, the "luxurious household space" characterized by low benches, pillows, and tapestries, which women in Spain used in the Middle Ages and early modern period, was conflated with the exotic seraglio of the East. While critics such as María Feliciano and Colin Smith argue that Spanish Christians' fondness for such Andalusi styles was not a sign of Islamicization, Fuchs points out that, on the other hand, there was no stigma attached to such styles (17). Fuchs then moves to a presentation of how such maurophilia did come to be marked as different and non-Spanish. Enrique IV's supposed maurophilia was demonized by fifteenth-century chroniclers sympathetic with Isabel, and his maurophilic tendencies are conflated with sexual and moral deviancy—a discourse adopted by foreign European travelers who visited Spain at the time, such as the French courtier Antoine de Lalaing whose account of Spain's "white Moors" Fuchs cites (21). In the second half of the chapter Fuchs turns toward sixteenth-century self-conscious definitions of the role of Arabic in the Spanish vernacular language, showing in quotes from Don Quijote, Antonio de Nebrija's Gramática, and Juan de Valdés's Diálogo de la lengua illustrate how these authors index (and reveal anxiety about) Spanish cultural practices and concepts as derived from the Moors and things Moorish.

Chapter 2, "In Memory of Moors: History, Maurophilia, and the Built Vernacular" outlines how Spanish historiography, particularly Juan de Mariana's Historia general de España portrayed the conquest of Granada as part of a history of the nation, being "the heroic endpoint to which all of Spanish history has tended" (32), while imaginative...