Abstract
Miguel de Cervantes’ work displays a broad range of people who transgress the limits defined by gender, ethnicity, nation and religious denomination. In recent Cervantes scholarship, this motley crowd of cross-cultural identities has been seen as examples of Cervantes’ opposition to the racially based identity politics of State and Church in Counter-Reformation Spain. However, Cervantes’ Barbary and Turkish captivity plays suggest that cross-cultural identities may also, and quite to the contrary, be viewed in relation to the limited reach of the State's power and its limited capacity to define, shape and control its subjects. This becomes particularly clear in El gallardoespañol where the soldier Fernando de Saavedra,in an act of disobedience to the king, crosses the border between the Christian and the Muslim world to become a renegade in order to defend his anachronistic and self-assertive idea of honour. If we are to understand the connection between honour and cross-cultural identity in El gallardoespañol, we should not look at the identity politics of State and Church, but at the way in which the play is concerned with the Spanish maurophilia.
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