Moors Dressed as Moors: Clothing, Social Distinction, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia by Javier Irigoyen-García (review)

In his most recent book, Moors Dressed as Moors: Clothing, Social Distinction, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia, Javier Irigoyen-García enriches critical scholarship on the production of legal and sartorial codes surrounding the uprising of the Alpujarras in Granada in 1568. The author reframes the issue of Moorish dress through an interdisciplinary reading of its social and commercial value as a vehicle for economic mobility, against the common tendency to read Moorish clothing exclusively as a marker of religious and ethnic identity.

Through a wealth of archival research of edicts and decrees stipulating sumptuary prohibitions; inventories, festival books, and municipal archives; and literary works, most pointedly the Lopean legacy of the nueva comedia, Irigoyen-García debunks the common assumption that "passing" (as Moor) was unequivocally tied to a decontextualized and dislocated politics of Moorish-Christian identity. The author builds his thesis, issuing from the pun after which he titles his book, with a compelling analysis of how Moorish clothing, and the surrounding material conditions of its use and production, came to designate hidalguía, if not nobility, and, from the end of the Reconquista until Philip III's edict of expulsion (1609-14), was thereby coveted by Moors and Christians as real and imagined social capital. A first to reinvest emphasis in the concrete import of dress as a positive strategy in favor of social distinction, this book successfully argues that the material conditions of the cultural domains in question, and the legislation that arises from these conditions, have been underexamined as generators of historical assumptions and frames for confronting Spain's complex past and the "ambiguous semantics … of the Spanish moro" (4), during roughly a century and a half of autos de fé, forced religious conversions, and expulsions of Moors and moriscos from kingdoms across Iberia.

Irigoyen-García divides the book into two parts. The first part purports to "disen-tangle the cultural chiasmus" of Moorish-Christian relations (11), often misconstrued by scholars as a mix of infatuation and imitation of the idealized Moor, per romancero representations, pitted against the expurgation of ethnic otherness through political edicts. The author's misgivings about facile interpretations of a Christian-Moor identity complex, by now a well-worn commonplace within literary and cultural studies, extricates from the stalemate fresh perspectives that help readers move beyond abstractive and blighted views of the post-c onvivencia epoch that have been tailored to meet predictable narratives of cultural conflict. He achieves this in Chapter 1 with an overview of the royally-sanctioned game of canes, treated as military exercises and social practices instead of "extraordinary, carnivalesque performances" (34), as has become the norm of analysis for Moorish artefacts in recent years. Chapter 2 chronicles the trickle-down effects of these equestrian performances at the municipal level, funneled through real motivations and not simply nostalgic or folkloric imaginings of otherness. Chapter 3, although less innovative in its assessment of the figure of the idealized Moor ("literary maurophilia") as a constant of late sixteenth-century ballads, coaxes from the literary imaginary some important elisions from official discourses about "the social demand for models of Moorishness" (60), and contrasts these exempla with the romances anti-moriscos featuring impoverished Morisco laborers to highlight the important point that the game of canes equally bred maurophobic reactions(61). Chapter 4 furthers the real-imaginary dialectic, arguing that Lope's plays were not standalone cases of authorial self-fashioning, but that plots and characters were selected in corroboration with the circulation and availability of liveries. Once again, the author does well to prove that these liveries had real and not just imagined value, and that they had a hand in cementing the social and economic landscape of seventeenth-century Iberia.

The second part of the book ventures into the moralist thought of royal authority and town councils, arguing that legislation, akin to visual...