Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614 by L. P. Harvey (review)

REVIEWS 233 (“fate,” in Greek and Latin respectively) simply grant more narrative latitude in explaining the untimely death of the just or the temporary victory of the unjust. Bringing historical, literary and theological approaches to bear upon these texts, this study would prove interesting to the Early Modern scholar. Gregory ’s inclusion of definitions for such things as “gods” and “epic” (located a bit too late in the introduction given the fact that these two terms alone are used more than 100 times prior to their formal exegeses) suggests that he imagined his research accessible to a wider audience, as does some extraneous commentary on the role of literary scholarship (27). Gregory’s hermeneutical explanations are nevertheless skillfully rendered, granting the reader a fresh glimpse into a known past. From Many Gods to One thus manages, amidst a plethora of epic intrigues, to weave one cohesive and compelling tale: that of the demise of the epic. BENDI BENSON SCHRAMBACH, French Whitworth University L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2005) 448 pp. In Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, L.P. Harvey, the leading authority on Morisco culture, addresses the questions of status and population of the Muslim communities in Spain after the completion of the Reconquest. He begins with the Muslim revolt in the Albaicín in Granada, which is very often considered the catalyst for the expulsion movement, and ends with the final expulsion of Muslims in Spain in 1614. This book is a continuation of his previous work Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 (1990), but it can easily be read and understood independently of the first. The book is divided into eleven chronologically organized chapters, each dealing with a different “stage” in the process of expulsion. The first chapter begins with Harvey’s discussion of how crypto-Muslims came to be in the Iberian Peninsula. Harvey proposes and gives a thorough explanation of why he believes that the project of expulsion of Muslims in Spain was not a reaction to the revolt of 18 December 1499 but rather that the revolt was a reaction to what the Muslims perceived as a movement towards expulsion. Harvey argues that the expulsion of Muslims was not motivated by the perception that the number of Muslims in Spain was sufficient to be a threat to the monarchy since they numbered less than five percent of the total population. This chapter is particularly enticing since it proposes new ways to look at the birth of the expulsion movement in Spain and includes some events in Portugal that could serve to inform our understanding of this period. The second chapter discusses how the monarchy and local governments dealt with new converts, the legislation that was put into place to ensure that converts acted as Christian-like as possible, and the consequences of not converting; it also gives the Muslim reaction to such edicts. Harvey presents examples of new Christian laws whose purpose was to ensure proper conversion , including some dealing with wine consumption, instruction in the Christian religion, the method of celebrating the Christian religion, weddings, and even bathing. He accompanies this discussion with responses by Muslim intellectuals (muftis) to the hardships imposed on the converts by the new laws and traditions they had to follow. REVIEWS 234 In the third chapter, Harvey addresses the apparently contradictory attitude of Ferdinand II towards the Mudejars of Castile and those living in the kingdom of Aragón (which included Aragón, Valencia, and Catalunya) and the reasons for allowing Muslim communities not to convert during the initial conversion and expulsion period (pre–1520). The fourth chapter deals with the process of conversion, supervision, and assimilation of recent converts into Christian society. Chapter 5, the most extensive of the book, deals with the intellectual life of crypto-Muslims in Christian Spain and the consequences they suffered due to sustained Muslim intellectual activity and production of books. Harvey includes a detailed discussion of both the oral and written languages of the Muslim communities after the Reconquest, presenting factors that contributed to the sustained use of Arabic, Arabic characters, and factors which contributed to the decline of the use...