The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Conflict (review)

Abstract

grieve, patricia e. The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Conflict. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009. xii + 312 pp.Every schoolchild knows that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, an event that initiated Spain's rapid imperial expansion westward. Less well known is the fact that the same year marked an important ending in Spain's narrative of nationhood. With the of the Muslim Kingdom of Granada to Isabel and Fernando, the political power of Islam in Iberia (although by no means its cultural influence) came to an end. Patricia Grieve's new book studies the creation and evolution of Spain's most influential foundational myth, the story of the rape of the noblewoman known as La Cava by the Visigothic King Rodrigo. That legend of sexual misconduct and the revenge/betrayal that followed sought to justify a stunning military defeat, the fall of Christian Spain to the Muslims in 711. Grieve demonstrates that the story of the sinful couple of La Cava and Rodrigo has remained central to Spain's concept of itself as a pure - and purely Christian - nation. Eventually the seductive La Cava came to dominate a moralizing gendered narrative of nation building in which the slow Christian recovery of territory conquered in 711 was seen as a return to the paradise from which they had been expelled by the sin of the Eve. Such is the hold of this tale of and redemption on the Spanish cultural imaginary that as recently as 2004 Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar explained that year's terrorist attack in Madrid as Muslim revenge for the Christian Reconquest that ended triumphally in 1492 (9).The Eve of Spain is a solidly researched literary history focused on the longstanding symbolic link between the female body and the body politic. In its questioning of Spain's official history, it joins similar scholarship published the same year: Barbara Fuchs's Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain, and Daniela Flesler's The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration. In its chronological scope and its intended readership, however, it is significantly more ambitious. The author readily acknowledges the risks inherent in a project that covers thirteen centuries of Spanish history in two hundred and fifty pages and that was written with both specialists and general readers in mind.In Act One: Fall and Redemption (711-1492), Grieve discusses how as early as the mid-eighth century Muslim and Christian chroniclers began crafting a tale that slowly and increasingly came to blame La Cava for her rape and for informing her father Count Julian of her dishonor, thereby triggering Julian's treasonous invitation to the North African Muslims to invade southern Spain. An important secondary character in the legend became the Christian warrior Pelayo, who from the mountains of Asturias began the eight-centuries-long push southward to wrest control of Muslim-dominated lands. The author points out the interesting fact that it was, indeed, the Muslim chroniclers who introduced the story of La Cava's rape, which was subsequently elaborated by misogynistic Christian writers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries before receiving Pedro de Corral's defining treatment.Grieve identifies two distinct traditions arising at this time: the more general decadence tradition, focused on the iniquity of the population at the time of the Muslim conquest, and the more individualized rape narrative, which locates that decadence in the bodies of a sinful couple. The latter tradition began to dominate with Archbishop Rodrigo Ximenez de Rada's chronicle De rebus Hispaniae (1243) and the anonymous Refundicion toledana de la Cronica de 1344, composed around 1440, both of which still locate the cause of the more in Rodrigo's than La Cava's lasciviousness. Although these accounts expand the role of La Cava, none of them make her rape central to the legend as does the version created by the fifteenth- century minor author Pedro de Corral, whose historical romance Cronica del Rey don Rodrigo, postrimero rey de los godos was written around 1430. …