Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies-2007-Fuchs-493-510

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

1492 and the Cleaving of Hispanism
Barbara Fuchs
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
In every country that has yet obtained a rank among those nations whose
intellectual cultivation is the highest, the period in which it has produced the
permanent body of its literature has been that of its glory as a state. The reason
is obvious. There is then a spirit and activity abroad among the elements that
constitute the national character, which naturally express themselves in such
poetry and eloquence as, being the result of the excited condition of the people
and bearing its impress, become for all future exertions a model and standard
that can be approached only when the popular character is again stirred by a
similar enthusiasm. . . . Just so it was in Spain. The central point in Spanish
history is the capture of Granada.
George Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature ()
Perhaps inevitably, has long been a crucial marker for Spanish historiography and literary periodization. It is no surprise that it should occupy
such a place: the year seemed to usher in a new order from its very beginning, with the January fall of Granada to the forces of Ferdinand and Isabella, in the culmination of the Christian territorial expansion tendentiously
known as the Reconquista. But that was just the start: this overdetermined
date also marks the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Columbuss arrival
in the New World. As if all this were not enough, is the year, too,
in which the humanist Antonio de Nebrija published his Gramtica castellana, the first vernacular grammar an achievement in the linguistic realm
widely regarded as complementary to the political and military landmarks
of the same period.
is often taken as the starting point for the Siglo de Oro or
Golden Age of Spanish literary production. This rather arbitrary marker
persists despite the fact that, as scholars have long agreed, the lengthy gestaJournal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37:3, Fall 2007
DOI ./-- 2007 by Duke University Press
Published by Duke University Press
tion of humanism in Spain makes it impossible, as far as Spanish literature

is concerned, either in Castilian or Catalan, to separate a Renaissance sixteenth century from a medieval fifteenth. (In practice and in pedagogy,
the Celestina, one of the undisputed masterpieces of Spanish literature,
does double duty as the last medieval or first modern classic.) Nonetheless,
the Golden Age (a term variously proposed by the neoclassicist Luis J.
Velzquez in his Orgenes de la poesa castellana [], and again by George
Ticknor in his widely influential History of Spanish Literature []), with
its focus on the great figures of Garcilaso, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and
Caldern, is in many ways the most celebrated period in a hypernational
Spanish literary history. The connection between the periodization of a
great national literature and the apotheosis of the nation is patent in Ticknors account of , cited in my epigraph above.
Yet early attempts to complicate the hegemonic status of the Golden
Age by situating its literary production within the fraught ideological context of the age paradoxically reinscribed as a boundary. Perhaps the
most influential of twentieth-century Hispanists, Amrico Castro, argued
that the so-called Reconquista and the expulsion of the Jews had greatly
impoverished Iberian culture. Although Castro was intent on demonstrating
how many of the great masterpieces of the Golden Age had been penned
by Spaniards of Jewish ancestry, and how thoroughly they contested the cultural mythology of their age, his own historiography reinscribed the distinction between a time of plenitude and convivencia (shared existence), before
, and a repressive, exclusionary Spain after that date. Thus whether the
birth of the discriminatory, centralizing nation is celebrated or deplored,
nonetheless retains its place as chronological boundary.
How can we reimagine the periodization of Hispanic studies so as
to privilege neither supersession nor nostalgia? What kinds of methodological
or interdisciplinary innovations might best achieve this? While critics have
largely abandoned the rubric of Golden Age for the more historicist early
modernity, the boundary has not shifted perceptibly. If anything, the
change in terminology has made it seem even more crucial: as Tzvetan Todorov has argued, has always oered an irresistible starting point for modernity. For Hispanism it has functioned as a kind of guarantor that, despite
its exceptional, eccentric history, Spain had a Renaissance, and a modernity.
As I suggest below, within our new early modern paradigm, transatlantic
studies or studies of empire more generally might serve to suture a history
artificially severed by locating the beginning of empire in . Where the
Peninsula itself is concerned, reimagining Iberian history to deemphasize the
494 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.3 / 2007
teleology of the Reconquista may well require looking beyond texts to other
kinds of historical artifacts and cultural domains. If we switch our focus to
architecture or language, I propose, the neat chronologies separating Moor
and Christian, medieval and early modern become far more complex. By
, Iberian culture is so profoundly hybridized that the year itself does not
constitute a meaningful boundary of any sort. From this perspective, the Iberias before and after share far more than what dierentiates them, and
the teleological drive to an imperial Spain seems somewhat attenuated.
Anticipating empire
In Nebrijas famous preface to the Gramtica, one begins to discern the teleological thrust of the massive temporal coincidence that is . Despite
its grammatical tense, Nebrijas sonorous claim that siempre la lengua fue
compaera del imperio [language always was the companion to empire] has
primarily been read proleptically, as a harbinger of linguistic indoctrination
in the New World empire that Spain had not yet acquired. The humanists
habitual stance of looking back to Rome while transcending it in this case
by endowing Spanish with the scholarly trappings of Latin is thus transformed into an anticipatory how-to manual for empire. Nebrijas Roman
imperium, or sovereignty, becomes instead an overseas empire that, at the
time, lay almost entirely in the future.
For, as Bernard Vincent has noted, Nebrija cannot be referring to
the New World, given that Columbus reached his unexpected and uncomprehended destination some months after the publication of the Gramtica.
Instead, one presumes, it is the teleological force of the amazing coincidences
of that seems to endow Spain with an almost magical understanding of
the imperial challenges and possibilities that lie ahead. It is unduly proleptic even to read in Nebrija a reference to the Muslim population of Granada
or Valencia, who in spoke Arabic, for in the late fifteenth century it was
still widely accepted that Muslims conquered by Christians would retain
their language. While Nebrija may be an early harbinger of change, the
peace treaty governing the surrender of Granada to Ferdinand and Isabella
punctiliously respected the rights of the Muslim inhabitants of the city to
preserve their religion, their culture, and, ipso facto, their language. It was
not until , in the wake of significant social turmoil over these generous
terms, their alleged ineectiveness, and the resistance of the harassed Granadans, that the treaty was mooted and all the Muslims of Castile were forced
to convert to Catholicism or face expulsion.
Fuchs / The Cleaving of Hispanism 495
The emphasis on as both the culmination of Spains territorial

consolidation and the beginning of its empire threatens to cleave Hispanic
studies into a medieval before and a modern after. It thus erases fundamental continuities: the ongoing struggles to achieve centralization and create
a national identity over the course of the sixteenth century are, one might
argue, part of a much longer process of consolidation and the establishment
of sovereignty. With Columbuss arrival in the New World, the chronological cut maps spatially and disciplinarily onto a division between Peninsular and colonial (eventually Latin American) studies, sundering the field.
To take , even with everything it represents, for all Spanish imperial
endeavors, is to commit a grave synecdochal error. While the year marks the
start of a tremendously important era, the New World does not constitute
the extent of Iberian empire, which ranges further in both chronological and
geographical terms.
For overseas empire, the historiographical apotheosis of overlooks the fifteenth-century Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands, in
much the same way as the English experience in Ireland is routinely forgotten when critics argue about how early England had colonies. To escape the
rigidity of a discipline organized around , one could consider also Aragons extensive Mediterranean empire, which included Sardinia, Sicily, and
even Naples. Because this empire long predates , it is often overlooked
when conceptualizing Iberian expansion, as is the properly Spanish empire
in Europe in the sixteenth century. Moreover, because the earlier empire is
Aragonese, privileging and Spains arrival in the New World has the
added eect of reinforcing the teleology of the modern nation, identified
in the popular imagination with the rapacious conquistadors of the Black
Legend. Thus on multiple levels the emphasis on oversimplifies Iberia,
promoting the most powerful modern nation (and language) to emerge from
an earlier multiplicity of medieval kingdoms.
As the field gradually adopts a transatlantic paradigm, and considers the complexities of Spanish imperium in a plural Iberian context, the
strong conceptual grip of as New World anniversary is somewhat loosened. This reconception has important implications not only for the shape
and reach of the discipline, but for the study of Iberias complex nationformation. As I argue below, by considering what one might call an Iberian
vernacular beyond the purely linguistic, it may be possible to revise some of
the more embedded chronologies within the Peninsula.
A Mudjar Spain?
The proleptic force of a periodization organized around falters when

one reconsiders the place of Andalusi culture in early modern Spain. As
noted above, in both Maurophobe and Maurophile readings of Spanish
history, is taken as an absolute point of division. The nationalist fiction of supersession celebrates the Christian, Gothic Spain that, through
the Reconquista, succeeds the Moors in Spain, while the Castro tradition
of convivencia mourns a medieval ideal that, by the sixteenth century, has
definitely passed. Despite their profound ideological dierences, the two
versions of Spain share a sense that, with the fall of Granada, changes
everything.
It would, in fact, be absurd to argue otherwise: clearly the last
decade of the fifteenth century sees profound transformations in attitudes
toward religious and cultural dierence and a newly triumphant sense of
national purpose. Yet at the same time it is important not to lose track of
the much more gradual nature of the processes associated with and the
continuities that transcend it. If, as I propose here, we expand our disciplinary focus from literature and history to art and material culture, which follow their own chronology, the picture looks very dierent.
Recent work on the controversial category of Mudjar art provides
one way to challenge the absoluteness of . In its early nineteenth-century
uses, the art-historical notion of the Mudjar (from the Arabic mudayyan,
those who stay behind after the Christian conquest) referred to the artistic
production of Muslims living under Christian rule starting in the thirteenth
century. Thus the widespread production of Mudjar art and architecture
was ascribed to actual persons marked by their religion or (after the forced
conversions of and ) ethnicity. More recent scholarship has sought
to focus on the actual object of inquiry, rather than its supposed origins.
The recognition and conceptualization of the Mudjar served to
contest schematic models of art-historical periodization as they were applied
to Spain, in what Rafael Lpez Guzmn calls transpyrenneic historiographic
colonization. The Iberian experience of hybridization and acculturation
over the long period of Christian expansion clearly diered radically from
what occurred in northern Europe, so that both its duration and its frequent
eclecticism defy traditional periods and styles. As Lpez Guzmn points
out, cumbersome terms such as Romanesque-Mudjar or Gothic-Mudjar are
simply attempts to reinscribe the Mudjar within those traditional parameters. Taking this position even further, many critics argue that the MudFuchs / The Cleaving of Hispanism 497
Figure .
Pavilion of Spain, with tourist
boat on the River Seine, Paris
Exposition, . Library of
Congress, photoprint LOT ,

no. . Courtesy of the Library
of Congress, Washington, D.C.
jar is not merely a style like any other, but a much broader and ahistorical
form. Here the recognition of Spanish dierence becomes fetishized into a
kind of exceptionalism, with the Mudjar as a privileged, timeless marker
of Spanishness. This is clearly the sense of the Mudjar that applied by the
late nineteenth century, when the academic neomudjar was deployed as a
marker of national or regional identity in everything from railway stations
to bullfighting rings to, perhaps most strikingly, the Spanish Pavilion at the
Paris Universal Exposition (see fig. ).
Recent work on the Mudjar has developed a more nuanced understanding of its Spanishness, rejecting both the narrower biographical
understanding and the ahistorical national character of earlier definitions.
Gonzalo Borrs Gualis, in an authoritative summation, challenges the definitions that attempt to reinscribe a Christian essence in the Mudjar (as
in the cases of the Romanesque-Mudjar or Gothic-Mudjar noted above),
however mixed its manifestations might appear. Yet in order to delimit the
Mudjar in some fashion, this scholar describes it as a particularly Hispanic,
Reconquista phenomenon yoked to late medieval tolerance:
In the birth and development of Mudjar art, the fundamental
elements are the social acceptance of the preexisting Islamic
monumental heritage, the social acceptance of the permanence
of Moors as a religious minority, and the social acceptance of a
Hispano-Muslim building system that will adapt itself to the new
functions and needs of a predominantly Christian society.
Nonetheless, Borrs Gualis is careful to note that the Mudjar does not end
abruptly with the expulsions or forced conversions, but instead becomes
linked to the slow process of sociocultural transformation over the course
of the sixteenth century.
While his attention to sociocultural factors and his emphasis on gradual transitions are useful, this critics privileging of a specific political context
the late medieval tolerance of Muslim minorities in Christian polities artificially delimits the Mudjar. One might argue instead for a much broader realm
of cultural production, not only because, as Borrs Gualis notes, the Mudjar
does not end with the disappearance of that context, but because much of what
is identified as Mudjar becomes, over the long period of cultural exchange,
fully integrated into local vernaculars. This seems to be the conclusion of some
recent scholarship, which notes the prevalence of Mudjar in a broader chronological and geographical context, including the New World. Rafael Lpez
Guzmn goes even further, to argue that Mudjar art not only persists after its
original sociopolitical framework disappears, but that it is adopted by Ferdinand
and Isabella and the Hapsburgs as the expressive medium for a monarchy that
is visually unifying its territory. In this view, the Mudjar does function as a
national style, but in a specific and motivated political context.
Whether we take the narrower definition oered by Borrs Gualis,
or the broader one in Lpez Guzmn, the notion of the Mudjar usefully
complicates any periodization that would radically divide Iberian culture at
. What art historians recognize is that even as the Christians expand and
consolidate their territories Iberia becomes profoundly hybridized, so that
the victors at Granada inhabit a culture profoundly marked by al-Andalus.
The Christian advance is not only a gradual process (and hardly a linear
one), it is complicated also by the converse movement of ideas, fashions, and
Andalusi culture more generally.
To take just one example of the complexity of this process, consider

the palace of the Ribera family in Seville, commonly known as the Casa
de Pilatos. The palace was built over the course of two centuries, from the
late fifteenth to the seventeenth, long after the city had fallen into Christian hands. It presents a fascinating combination of the local vernacular and
Italianate Renaissance imports. The buildings organization around courtyards of various sizes, and such decorative elements as the stucco (with Arabic inscriptions) or tile revetments serve as what Lpez Guzmn calls an
umbilical cord to its own urban tradition, one that can mix cleanly with the
correctness of an imported Renaissance that the court aristocracy adopted
as its own.
The palace includes a number of meaningful syntheses: panels of
typical azulejos bordering the family coat of arms, also in tile (see figs. and
); a main patio with Andalusi arches above columns of imported Genoese marble, punctuated by Greek and Roman sculpture (most of it added
in later periods) surrounding an Italian fountain, all against a backdrop of
more azulejos and stucco (see fig. ). Moreover, the various elements do not
follow a simple progression of styles: while it is clear that increasing contact
with Italy over the course of the sixteenth century led to more Renaissance
elements, the local vernacular building continued apace, with thousands
upon thousands of tiles, for example, commissioned to decorate the grand
and novel staircase. Certain architectural elements seem hybridized in
their own right. Vicente Lle Caal argues that the curious smooth capitals
on the courtyard columns, which were part of a Renaissance remodeling of
the earlier space, recall the simplified pseudo-Nasrid capitals that were so
popular in the medieval city [of Seville]. Clearly, for the noble family who
built this palace, it was not necessary to leave behind local vernacular forms
in order to signal their cosmopolitanism and familiarity with Italy, much
less their Spanishness. Even though the palace was built shortly after the
fall of Granada, the new Italian fashion was superimposed on the enduring
backdrop of local style, with no attempt to excise or censor it.
The striking hybridization of the Casa de Pilatos suggests how
architecture and material culture more generally might help us rethink the
periodization of Iberian culture. The developing interdisciplinary dialogue
on the question of the Mudjar takes the problem from architectural history,
where it has always been most at home, to a much broader swathe of cultural
productions. This is clearly in evidence for the twelfth to fifteenth centuries
in Cynthia Robinson and Leyla Rouhis groundbreaking collection, Under
Figure .
Tiled wall. Casa de Pilatos,
Seville. Photograph by Barbara
Fuchs.
Figure .
Tile detail. Casa de Pilatos,
Seville. Photograph by
Barbara Fuchs.
Figure .
Patio. Casa de Pilatos, Seville.
Photograph by Barbara Fuchs.
the Influence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile, which resolutely challenges the assumptions inherent in notions of appropriation, literary or material. Elsewhere, Robinson has argued that, however traditional its
parameters, Mudjar art must be read for its deliberate and specific meanings
in specific sites. In her case, this has included reconstructing the peculiarly
Iberian material supports for devotional experience at the Mudjar convent
of Santa Clara de Tordesillas.
Moreover, a similar case can be made for the Mudjar in the sixteenth century. In her interdisciplinary dissertation, Mara Judith Feliciano
examines the category of the Mudjar on both sides of the Atlantic to argue
that in a colonial context Mudjar goods actually signify Iberianness, and
that Mudjar luxury items are used in distinct ways by dierent segments of
Iberian society. Juxtaposing carpentry and ceramics, costume and custom,
Feliciano radically redefines this pan-Iberian aesthetic:
from its early-medieval origin as a mediatory practice that helped
to ensure the cultural survival of a multi-ethnic society, Mudjar
art (comprised of objects, structures, building techniques, and
even modes and manners) traveled unrestricted through Iberian
social and cultural geographies. As a result, each groups manipulation of the Mudjar aesthetic produced dierent meanings
(ranging from regal, Castilian and Catholic to Andalusi, Islamic,
Sephardic, and Jewish, etc.) and facilitated dierent lifestyles
(from contemplative monasticism and regal performance to rural
dwelling and manual labor).
Felicianos expanded sense of the Mudjar inhabits the longue dure. Clearly,
this hybridization and shared usage do not disappear with the advent of
a loudly Christian historiography, or with the change of regime in .
Instead, when recognized, they complicate the construction of the new
national identity, purportedly in rejection of all things Moorish. If the
Mudjar is pan-Iberian, to what extent is Spain Mudjar?
Fighting words
Nosotros pronunciamos la x como los rabes, de cuya vezindad nos la dejaron

en casa, con otros trastos cuando se mudaron . . .
[We pronounce the x as do the Arabs, our neighbors, who left it in our home
with some other bits and pieces when they moved . . .]
Mateo Alemn, Ortografa castellana ()
Let me now turn from the architectural to the linguistic vernacular. One
striking register of the ambivalence about a hybridized or Mudjar Spain
occurs in debates about the role of Arabic within the Castilian vernacular,
which, as Nebrija had claimed, had an important role to play in the establishment of Spanish sovereignty. These writers are concerned with the mark of
the Moorish occupation on quotidian practices and how these in turn determine the words that people use. The humanist Juan Valds, in his Dilogo de
la lengua (), charts the eects of centuries of Arabic in Iberia:
En este medio tiempo no pudieron tanto conservar los espaoles
la pureza de su lengua que no se mezclasse con ella mucho de la
arviga, porque, aunque recobravan los reinos, las cibdades, villas y lugares, como todava quedaban en ellos muchos moros por
moradores, quedvanse con su lengua, y aviendo durado en ella
hasta que pocos aos ha, el emperador les mand se tornassen
cristianos o se saliessen de Spaa, conversando entre nosotros
annos pegado muchos de sus vocablos.
[During this interval, the Spaniards were unable to preserve the
purity of their language from having much of the Arabic mix
with it. For although they recovered the kingdoms, cities, towns,
and villages, the many Moors who remained living within them
kept their language so that it lasted until a few years ago, when
the emperor ordered them to become Christians or leave Spain,
and speaking among us they have given us many of their words.]
The language of the moros-moradores exceeds the temporal and geographical limits of the Reconquista, just as the etymologically false echo in Valdss
prose unwittingly supplements his meaning. The author tries to contain the
Arabic influence, noting that the romance language oers perfectly good
alternatives for the Arabic words:
Y avis de saber que, aunque para muchas cosas de las que nombramos con vocablos arvigos tenemos vocablos latinos, el uso
nos ha hecho tener por mejores los arvigos que los latinos; y de
aqu es que dezimos antes alhombra que tapete, y tenemos por
mejor vocablo alcrevite que piedra sufre, y azeite que olio; y, si mal
no mengao, hallaris que para solas aquellas cosas que avemos
tomado de los moros, no tenemos otros vocablos con qu nombrarlas sino los arvigos que ellos mesmos con las mesmas cosas
nos introduxeron.
[You should know that for many of the things that we name with
Arabic words we have Latin words; custom has made us prefer the
Arabic to the Latin, and thus we say alhombra rather than tapete
[for carpet], and consider alcrevite a better term than piedra sufre
[for sulfur stone], and azeite than olio [for oil]; and, if I am not
mistaken, you will find that it is only for those things that we
have taken from the Moors that we do not have any other words
to name them than the ones in Arabic with which they introduced those things to us.]
Valdss attempts to reexoticize Arabic are undermined by his admission that,
despite having a choice, Spanish-speakers privilege Arabic terms. Even more
significant, I submit, is his reminder of how many things are designated by
Arabic terms because they represent Andalusi contributions to Iberia. By the
sixteenth century, is it so easy to determine which parts of Spanish culture
are imports? And does anyone in fact regard them as such? As the lexicographer Covarrubias more broadly claims in his definition of romance (the
vernacular), lo turbaron todo los rabes [the Arabs altered everything].
The discomfort with imports from the Arabic is widespread by the
early seventeenth century. The humanist cleric Bernardo de Aldrete is generally regarded as the heir of Nebrija, elaborating on the role of linguistic
domination in empire. In his history of the Spanish language, Del
origen y principio de la lengua castellana, Aldrete focuses above all on the
Latin origins of the language, arguing that the Roman conquest had marked
Spain linguistically. Yet although he acknowledges also the Moorish conquest of Iberia, he seems far more reluctant to spell out the influence of Arabic on Spanish. He begins by arguing that many words shared by the two
languages in fact derive from Latin, and then proceeds to list his evidence.
After this partial rebuttal, he comes to the influence of Arabic on Spanish.
When he dutifully proceeds to compile his examples alphabetically, no

less he is overwhelmed by the sheer number of words to list. He gives over
forty words beginning with a, by f he is down to two, and the rest of the
alphabet is dispatched with six more examples: Para exemplo bastan estos,
pues no a sido mi intento traer los todos [These suce by way of example,
for it is not my intention to list them all]. Aldretes exhaustion suggests
how futile is any attempt to excise Moorishness from a Spanish culture
that loudly proclaims its purity, post- it is so fully integrated as to
be, if not indistinguishable, then inseparable. More striking even than the
actual proportion of Arabic words is the discomfort that they produce in the
humanist stewards of a Castilian imagined as the enabler of a discriminating
empire.
As Marshall Brown has cannily noted, while we cannot do without periodization, the uses to which we put periods depend crucially on how we
delimit them. As historiography and Hispanic studies more generally
grapple with the supplement of Moorishness beyond , periodization
itself becomes a vexed category. It is not so much that we need to find new
markers any temporal boundary would present some of the same problems as that we need to remember the important continuities that transcend the scission of . Even for scholars working on these problems it
becomes very dicult to keep in mind the hybridized, multiple Spain, and
to refuse the dichotomies and teleologies so loudly proclaimed by the state.
(There are only so many times that one may use the term Reconquista, however much one distances oneself from it, before it takes on a kind of reality.) This may be the final payo of challenging periodization: not only to
achieve a more precise understanding of the relationship between historical
events, but to change our entire conception of what is and is not Spain.

Notes
All translations of Spanish sources quoted in the text and notes are my own.
Mara Rosa Menocal has written eloquently on the compartmentalizing historiography that keeps Columbuss voyage apart from the simultaneous exile of the Jews.
While I agree with Menocals call for considering multiple meanings of simultaneously, I am primarily concerned here with how the coincidence has overdetermined
periodization. See Menocal, The Horse Latitudes, in Shards of Love: Exile and the
Origins of the Lyric (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), .
Alexander A. Parker, An Age of Gold: Expansion and Scholarship in Spain, in

Denys Hay, ed., The Age of the Renaissance (New York: McGraw Hill, ), .
George Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, vols. (New York, ), :. While
Ticknors analysis seems almost impossibly nationalistic, it is striking to note how literary history has canonized precisely such periodization. Take, for example, the conflation in the popular imagination of Elizabethan literature, including Shakespeare,
and the plucky England that defeated the Spanish Armada, never to look back. An
interesting counterexample might be that of Italy, whose literature is soberly organized according to centuries and which is therefore incapable, in Ticknors terms, of
either periodization proper or national greatness.
Menocal attempts to problematize the chronology by distinguishing between the
period from the tenth through thirteenth century and the much darker fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. But she recognizes the diculty of distinguishing the latter
without a proper nomenclature to set it o: Where, then, does this leave poor old
Columbus? Will we be reduced to calling him a fourteenth-fifteenth century man?
Names sometimes are everything (Shards of Love, ).
For a fuller discussion of the problems with associating empire exclusively with the
New World, see my Imperium Studies: Theorizing Early Modern Expansion, in
Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, ed. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle
R. Warren (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), .
On the relation between the multiple medieval kingdoms and the idea of Spain, see
Luis Gonzlez Antn, Espaa y las Espaas (Madrid: Alianza, ).
Antonio de Nebrija, Gramtica de la lengua castellana, ed. Antonio Quilis (Madrid:
Editora Nacional, ), .
For this kind of proleptic reading, see for example Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ),
, where Nebrija is invoked in the context of Cortss use of the interpreter Doa
Marina.
Compare the similar use of the term by Henry VIII, in his famous Act in
Restraint of Appeals, also ripe for proleptic readings: This Realm of England is an
Empire.
Bernard Vincent, : Lanne admirable ([Paris]: Aubier, ), . For a fascinating account of the extent of the confusion surrounding Columbuss discovery, see
Edmundo OGorman, La invencin de Amrica: investigacin acerca de la estructura
histrica del nuevo mundo y del sentido de su devenir, rd. ed. (Mxico: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, ). Menocal notes that, in the very year that the Gramtica is
published, Columbus takes with him an Arabic translator, recognizing that this was
the lingua franca of the civilized world (Shards of Love, ).
An interesting response to the overwhelming historiographic emphasis on is
Charles C. Manns : New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, in which
this science writer attempts to convey the complexity of a world about to be destroyed
by the encounter. Clearly, in scholarly work, too, the emphasis on early peoples of the
Americas is another way to counter the teleological force of .
The forcible conversions will occur even later, in , for the Kingdom of Aragon.
The striking gap between Castile and Aragon serves as a useful reminder of how
incomplete any national program remained decades after the fall of Granada. For a
historical overview, see L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of
Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York: Little, Brown, ), Mara Rosa Menocals
popularizing account, updates Castros nostalgic vision, with the added poignancy of
the books completion shortly before /.
The term Mudjar was introduced by Jos Amador de los Ros in his acceptance
speech to the Real Academia de las Bellas Artes de San Fernando. For a good survey
of the terms history and of current debates, see Rafael J. Lpez Guzmn, Arquitectura mudjar: del sincretismo medieval a las alternativas hispanoamericanas, nd ed.
(Madrid: Ctedra, ). The most famous example of the Mudjar, by any definition, is Pedro Is Alczar palace in Seville, built in the s by this Christian conqueror of the city in the same style and in dialogue with the Nasrid palaces of the
Alhambra in Granada.
Introduction to Under the Influence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile,
ed. Cynthia Robinson and Leyla Rouhi (Leiden: Brill, ), .
Lpez Guzmn, Arquitectura mudjar, .
There has been some discussion of whether the Mudjar applies also to Sicily and
southern Italy, which experienced long periods of Arab settlement. See Gonzalo Borrs Gualis, El arte mudjar: estado actual de la cuestin, in Mudjar iberoamericano:
una expresin cultural de dos mundos (Granada: Universidad de Granada, ), .
Borrs Gualis, El arte mudjar, .
Ibid., .
Ibid. When applied to persons, Mudjar refers to a Muslim who lives under Christian rule.
The critics who favor a narrower definition of the Mudjar refer to the New World
examples as survivals. See Lpez Guzmn, Arquitectura mudjar, .
Ibid., .
For a rich interdisciplinary account of the resulting cultural productions, see Under
the Influence. Robinson and Rouhi not only question the idea of influence, but problematize the notion of discrete, stable groups influencing each other in Iberia.
For a detailed account of the various stages in building and expanding the palace, see
Vicente Lle Caal, La Casa de Pilatos (Madrid: Electa, ). Lle Caal calls the
palace a strange hybrid of medieval and Renaissance ().
Ibid., .
Cynthia Robinson, Mudjar Revisited: A Prolegomena to the Reconstruction of Perception, Devotion, and Experience at the Mudjar Convent of Clarisas, Tordesillas,
Spain (th Century A.D.), Res (Spring ): .
Mara Judith Feliciano Chaves, Mudejarismo in Its Colonial Context: Iberian Cultural Display, Viceregal Luxury Consumption, and the Negotiation of Identities in
Sixteenth-Century New Spain (diss., University of Pennsylvania, ).
Ibid., xv xvi.
Juan de Valds, Dilogo de la lengua, ed. Juan M. Lope Blanch, rd ed. (Madrid:
Clsicos Castalia, ), .
Ibid.
Sbastian de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o espaola (), ed. Martn
de Riquer (; repr. Barcelona: Alta Fulla, ), .
See Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, ). For a contextualization of Aldrete in light of contemporary
debates about the purported Christian past of Granada, see Kathryn A. Woolard,
Bernardo de Aldrete and the Morisco Problem: A Study in Early Modern Spanish
Language Ideology, Comparative Studies in Society and History (): .
Curiously, Woolard does not discuss Aldretes own reflections on the role of Arabic in
Spanish.
Bernardo de Aldrete, Del origen y principio de la lengua castellana o romance que oi se
usa en Espaa, facsimile edition ed. Lidio Nieto Jimnez (Madrid: Visor, ), .
Marshall Brown, Periods and Resistances, in Periodization: Cutting Up the Past,
a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly . (): .

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