To Live Like a Moor: Christian Perceptions of Muslim Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain by Olivia Remie Constable (review)

In her posthumously published work, To Live Like a Moor: Christian Perceptions of Muslim Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, Olivia Remie Constable analyzes Christian perceptions of Muslim cultural practices in late medieval and early modern Iberia. Constable shows how once-tolerated customs surrounding food, clothing, and hygiene were increasingly infused with religious significance following the forced conversion of Iberian Muslims. She traces the growing Christian condemnations of certain morisco (communities of Muslims who were forcibly converted to Christianity) customs surrounding food, clothing, and hygiene thought to be holdover religious practices maintained by the recently converted moriscos. These dietary, hygienic, and clothing-related customs were viewed with suspicion by the Christian authorities and subject to suppression in the late medieval and early modern peninsula even as moriscos themselves worked to separate cultural practices from their former religious rituals.

Constable first tackles the subject of clothing and appearance and the relationship between clothing and cultural/religious identity. Much has been written about the restrictive sumptuary laws of the late medieval period, which mandated that religious minorities—especially Jews—adopt identifying markers separating them from their Christian neighbors. Constable investigates the less understood and largely understudied topic of sumptuary laws and their enforcement as they related to Muslims and converted moriscos. In the multicultural world of postconquest Spain, Muslims (and Jews) were forced to dress differently from their Christian contemporaries in order to visually distinguish themselves as religious minorities. Beginning in 1239 with the Council of Tarragona, detailed laws requiring visual distinction appeared in the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula. These early sumptuary laws sought to regulate fabric, color, and ornamentation rather than explicitly condemning distinct clothing styles or fashions. Constable argues that the means of exclusion transformed after prolonged conquest and conversion. She writes:

The conversion of entire populations from Islam to Christianity, from moro to morisco, fundamentally changed the language of legislation about identity in sixteenth-century Spain, but without shifting any of the underlying assumptions about the proper relationship between appearance and religion. New Christians should now look the same as Old Christians, and if they did not, the burden was on them to change their appearance just as their faith had been changed by baptism.

(46)

Following the ascensions of Fernando and Isabella and the conquest of Granada in 1492, legal restrictions shifted from prohibitions on Muslims in the kingdoms wearing certain colors and high-quality ornamentation (which Constable notes also applied to lower-class individuals in the peninsula) to prohibitions on converted moriscos wearing the almalafa, a long form of clothing covering the body from the shoulders to the feet especially associated with Granadan women, and decorating their hands with henna. Constable likewise notes that the restrictions on appearance emerging in early modern Spain are more explicitly concerned with morisco women than with moors in the medieval Christian kingdoms of the peninsula. While issues relating to gender and morisco identity are hinted at in the work, the author leaves the reader to speculate on the implications of such issues, as the relationships between femininity, domesticity, and identity are not deeply theorized.

Constable then turns to the practices surrounding bathing and hygiene and the increasing legal restrictions morisco communities faced in the sixteenth century regarding such practices. Throughout the Middle Ages, bathhouses had dotted the Iberian Peninsula, serving as a means of revenue for Muslim, and later Christian, rulers. While ceremonial washing was a major religious feature within Islam, Constable shows that the bathhouse was much more than a religious establishment in the multicultural world of medieval Spain. Bathhouses became a significant aspect of Mudejar (Muslims who remained in Christian Iberia) and later morisco culture. Furthermore, medieval Spanish Christians adopted this cultural feature for themselves, patronizing bathhouses and acquiring the revenue associated...