The Spanish Arcadia: Sheep Herding, Pastoral Discourse, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Spain by Javier Irigoyen-García (review)

Common practice, when a ewe loses a newborn lamb, places with her the lamb of a second ewe that has birthed multiples, wrapping the dead lamb’s skin around the new lamb, allowing the disconsolate ewe to recognize her offspring and to habituate herself to the scent of the new lamb, which she will then happily raise. Harmony seems to prevail, as each rears a respective lamb. Javier Irigoyen-García unveils that “other” lamb, exposing the putrid ruse in The Spanish Arcadia, where he argues that the pastoral romance is “aimed at opposing the Moorish cultural and genealogical legacy” (25). Irigoyen-García asserts the following: 1) Spanish letters deliberately looked to Italy for models with the express intent to expunge Moorish features from the Spanish literary landscape in order to devise a fictional Old Christian homogeneity, in which the figure of the shepherd inevitably and intentionally conflated with monarch, and ultimately, with Christ the Good Shepherd; 2) the rise and the decline of pastoral romances (which coincides with that of maurophile literature) originates in and duplicates the repression of the Moriscos and their subsequent expulsion between 1609 and 1614; 3) the pastoral romances invoke Classicism in order to create a spurious continuum between pre-Christian and Old Christian Spain; 4) the deletion of all things Morisco leads to the ironic eradication of practices that are culturally Old Christian; and 5) once the Morisco is expurgated from the landscape, the shepherd figure loses its urgency, to return when Spain’s Old Christian homogeneity appears to be under question.

Irigoyen-García examines pictorial representations of the Old Testament figure of Jacob, whose father-in-law Laban agrees to give him the spotted sheep and goats, whilst the latter retains the pure white livestock having the highest market value (60); Jacob, however, having influenced the impressionable ewes to conceive only spotted sheep, thereby takes possession of the entire herd. Yet the paintings of Orrente and Murillo contain only white Merinos:

The thorny outcome of the biblical story is counterproductive in a society in which the language of genealogical purity ensures the reproduction of only white offspring from Merino sheep, repressing the genetic instability of colour. Therefore, even when biblical scriptures require the depiction of spotted sheep (‘ovejas con raça’), early modern artists avoid doing so by any means.

(66)

In the same way, the writers of the pastoral romance reject the combination of white herds with spotted, or Old Christian with Islamic Spain, whereby the pastoral romance “chooses not to know that racial discourse comes into play” (71). Literarily and pictorially, Moriscos and shepherds are mutually exclusive (77).

Irigoyen-García teases out several strands heretofore woven together in the pastoral romance, differentiating disguises worn by non-shepherds participating in pastoral spectacles from authentic shepherding indumenta. Overlap exists, to be sure. Zamarras and pellicos (apparently made of sheepskin, with one side fleece and the other hide, and worn respectively by literary rustics and nobles posing as shepherds) ranged from the crude to the highly ornamented. The garment’s primary objective is to remove both rustic and nobleman from any perceived Morisco association (76). Accuracy aside—Irigoyen-García notes that early to mid-sixteenth-century Moriscos very likely did not distinguish themselves sartorially from Old Christians—shepherds and peasants most likely wore sayos, or long rustic tunics (104).

Moorishness, Irigoyen-García contests, is additionally filtered by the omission of Arabic place names, a removal which “conveys the image of an idealized community of shepherds and nymphs that inhabit a classical Iberian Arcadia where the Islamic period has never taken place” (121). In the same way, the opening line of Montemayor’s La Diana (c. 1559)—“Bajaba de las montañas de León el olvidado Sireno”—then, for Irigoyen-García, takes on additional significance, for “León has a particular symbolic value for the discourses of...