JAVIER IRIGOYEN GARCÍA. Moors Dressed as Moors. Clothing, Social Distinction, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. 324 pp.

Rebecca Haidt

doi:10.18192/rceh.v42i1.2629

Abstract

JAVIER IRIGOYEN GARCÍA. Moors Dressed as Moors. Clothing, Social Distinction, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. 324 pp.

Highlights

In the opening pages of this fascinating study, Javier Irigoyen García observes that clothing “generates specific social meanings and strategies of interpretation that go beyond its mere materiality” (16)
This was as true in the eighteenth century − when notions of “decency” in dress went beyond sumptuary specifics into connotations of identity and character − as it had been centuries earlier, when, as the author points out, “the peculiarity of early modern Iberia” lay in complications arising from “the ambivalent status of Moorish clothing as a mark of both social status and ethnoreligious identity” (17)
Throughout, Irigoyen García stresses that, as “there was a high degree of sartorial influence between Muslims and Christians,” and as “Moorish clothing had a clear ceremonial value among Christians well into the early modern period” (7), the differences in Morisco dress − real or imagined − served to satisfy social needs

Summary

Introduction

In the opening pages of this fascinating study, Javier Irigoyen García observes that clothing “generates specific social meanings and strategies of interpretation that go beyond its mere materiality” (16).

Results

Conclusion