BOOK REVIEW
Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain. Seth Kimmel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. 239. Islamic Spain, or al-Andalus as it is more properly called, arose in 711 when Muslim troops crossed over from North Africa into Visigothic Iberia and in short order came to rule over nearly the entire peninsula. A major Islamic polity remained in control of a substantial portion of Iberian terrain until the mid-thirteenth century by which time Castilian strength and Andalusi weakness reduced the territory ruled by Muslims to Granada and its geographic environs. Subsequently, Nasrid Granada paid tribute to the Christian monarchs of Castile for nearly 250 years until it capitulated in 1491 and surrendered to Fernando and Isabel on January 2, 1492. Al-Andalus’s eight hundred years have been the subject of inquiry in literary-historical and literary-critical scholarship; social, intellectual, and religious history; philosophy, art, and architectural history; linguistics; musicology; and history of science and technological study, with most of the attention falling on the years prior to mid-thirteenth century. That is but one of the contexts in which Seth Kimmel’s Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain will be read and appreciated as a highly original, critically minded work of socioreligious and intellectual history devoted to a relatively understudied period in the posthistory of al-Andalus: when Islamdom and then Muslims were eliminated from Iberia while crypto-Muslims (or Moriscos as they were called), that is, converts and their descendants, remained in early modern Spain for a century. In Parables of Coercion Kimmel expertly practices the writing of intellectual history, delving deeply into the various ways through which Catholic religious intellectuals grappled with the perceived problems posed by the ongoing presence of Moriscos in Spanish society. What with their real and Modern Philology, volume 114, number 4. Published online February 20, 2017 For permission to reuse, please contact
[email protected].
E000
This content downloaded from 128.059.141.114 on March 24, 2017 07:01:46 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
E000
MODERN PHILOLOGY
imagined Islamicizing practices and thinking, efforts to fully assimilate the Moriscos during the sixteenth century—a period of great socioeconomic tension—gave way to heightened anxieties regarding their tenacious socioreligious otherness and through them the supposedly infectious persistence of Islam in Christian Spain. Kimmel invites the reader to pause and examine in depth the competing discourses of power through which the Muslims’ capitulation (and their rebellion of 1499–1500) morphed into their forced conversion and failed attempts to assimilate them (and their second rebellion of 1568–71) turned into expulsion in 1609. Parables of Coercion thus represents, among other things, an important counterpart to works such as Muslims in Spain, 1500–1609, by L. P. Harvey (University of Chicago Press, 2005), with its specific focus on the development of clandestine Islam and the inner and outer lives of its adherents. Parables of Coercion relates and analyzes the debates among Christian intellectuals arising from the problems of what to make of and what do to with the Moriscos and how these questions are informed by different understandings of the nature of religious commitment. As with the cryptoJews (conversos) in the previous century, evangelization proved an insufficient solution to the “Morisco problem,” requiring religious intellectuals of various backgrounds and orientations to dispute publicly “the legitimacy and limits of religious coercion” (2). The high stakes of their respective agendas produced texts in various literary genres, from personal correspondence and chronicles to biblical commentary, epic poetry, and polemical treatises. One of Kimmel’s most significant insights identifies the innovative avenues and methods of inquiry and new discourses produced with the origins of the modern disciplines of philology and historical writing. Through its sustained, immensely sophisticated critical readings of original sources in Latin, Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew, the six chapters of Parables of Coercion follow the social and intellectual arc of the sixteenth century and Christian efforts to confront the unsettled and unsettling socioreligious presence of crypto-Muslims in the body of Spanish church community. The first two chapters (“Legible Conversions” and “Glossing Faith”) examine in detail the turn to regulating ritual performance in light of serious doubts about the sincerity of conversion as well as the theological implications of religious coercion and its treatment in canon law. Chapter 3 (“Polyglot Forms”) proceeds to analyze Christian ritual and liturgy through the lens of biblical interpretation. Its methods of inquiry yielded an early modern comparative philology based in part on the model established centuries before by Andalusi Jewish scholars interested in the similarities between Hebrew and Arabic. Accordingly, it was an enterprise fraught with heretical dangers. Chapter 4 (“Heterodoxy in Translation”) turns to the discovery of theologically minded Arabic etchings and other relics on a hillside in Granada and the controversy surrounding their meaning
This content downloaded from 128.059.141.114 on March 24, 2017 07:01:46 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
Book Review
E000
in the reproduced form of the famous “Sacramonte lead books.” As with contemporary biblical interpretation and glosses, translation and interpretation of the lead books was contested and aroused even more suspicions of flirtations with heresy. Chapter 5 (“War Stories) tackles the second Morisco uprising (the Second Alpujarras Civil War) and the controversies surrounding control of its narrative in early modern Spanish writing of history. The concluding chapter 6 (“Archives of Failure”) draws the reader’s attention to important regional differences regarding the Moriscos’ plight and treatment, and it analyzes the complex discourses of proponents and opponents of expelling the Moriscos/“imperfect Christians.” Here, Kimmel boldly determines that “Spanish history itself was a product of the Morisco question and its contentious resolution” (150). In Parables of Conversion Kimmel succeeds wonderfully in excavating the intersection of early modern Spanish socioreligious and intellectual history and in deciphering its various discourses. He never yields to the still prevalent scholarly practice of isolating the interrelated fate of Jews and the Muslims, and crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims in the same land. Kimmel further uncovers the dialectical relationship between socioreligious discord and innovative cultural production by religious intellectuals in seventeenth-century Spain, and in the process he manages brilliantly to render meaningless the conventional, simplistic characterization of early modern Spain as a purely intolerant society. It was far more complicated during the sixteenth century afterlife of Islamic Spain than historiographical orthodoxy suggests. Ross Brann Cornell University
This content downloaded from 128.059.141.114 on March 24, 2017 07:01:46 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
