Bound and Burdened: How Contemporary Empalaos Rituals in Valverde Rewrite Crypto Muslim and Jewish History in Late Medieval Iberia

Abstract

Abstract: Los Empalaos is a Semana Santa practice and living medievalism maintained today in the town of Valverde de la Vera in Extremadura, Spain. The town situates this practice in opposition to the luxurious daytime Holy Week festivities of major Spanish cities like Seville. A ghostly, endurance-based midnight performance enacted by lace-draped devotees, this spectacle draws pilgrims and tourists from across the world to the tiny town. Los Empalaos is traced by contemporary practitioners to fifteenth-century festivities that grew up around the expulsions of Jews. These recalled forced performances by converts intended to display their total transformation into "good Spanish Christians" through public bodily suffering and humiliation. This article argues that Los Empalaos uniquely incorporates a complex interplay of gender, rural and ethnoreligious identity, and traumatic historical memory while drawing on acts and events from late medieval Spain. This festive ritual encoded traces of Crypto-Jewish and Crypto-Muslim lamentations. The article reflects on the historicizing narrative of contemporary Semana Santa festivities as critical cultural spectacles whose repertoire recreates and transforms the medieval imaginary, obfuscating Jewish and Muslim histories.