Early Modern Iberia Research Articles

Forged Letters. Counterfeit Manumission Certificates and Subaltern Writing Practices as Used by Enslaved Individuals in Early Modern Iberia

The focus of the essay is the fabrication, circulation and use of ‘forged documents’ by subaltern groups, and in particular, counterfeit manumission certificates created for and by enslaved individuals in Iberia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The analysis of ‘forged documents’ provides a deeper insight into how official model documents were appropriated by these subaltern illiterate groups. Furthermore, it provides a testimony of the dynamics of subaltern responses to documentary norms and models along the lines discussed by Donald F. McKenzie.

Retelling the Narratives of the East in the West: The Unique Morisco Account of the Polemic of Wāṣil of Damascus

This article discusses the polemics of Wāṣil of Damascus at the Byzantine court in a hitherto unstudied Aljamiado manuscript copied by Moriscos, or Muslims converted to Christianity in Early Modern Iberia. This debate, which unfolded in the first centuries of the expansion of Islam, has so far been studied on the basis of a single Arabic manuscript. The present contribution adds to the discussion the Aljamiado materials and a number of relevant Arabic sources. It reassesses the character of Wāṣil, his involvement in Byzantine politics and iconoclastic controversies, and his identification with the early theologian Wāṣil b. ʿAṭāʾ (d. 2nd/8th c.). The historical data in Ibn ʿAsākir’s Taʾrīḫ (6th/12th c.) and the role of Wāṣil as the true hero of the story also justify the need for a detailed and extensive analysis of the Muslim readings of the text. The unique Morisco account will be discussed alongside the new evidence, paying attention to the uses of this narrative and its adaptation in the passage from East to West. The practices of retelling tie with the examination of how the original triumphalist story and the key issues of the early Eastern Muslim-Christian debates acquired meaning in the face of the expansion of Iberian Christian society that ended with the expulsion of the Jews and, ultimately, the Moriscos. Taken together, the evidence attests to the preservation of this polemics over the centuries in Muslim circles and its dissemination sometimes in contexts far removed from the original, such as the Muslim West.

Converso evangelisation, funerary practices, and social integration in Valencia, 1391–1482

ABSTRACT The religious beliefs of conversos, individuals of Jewish origin who converted either forcibly or voluntarily to Christianity in 1391 and during the following century, have occupied a central place in the history of minorities in late medieval and Early Modern Iberia. Nevertheless, most take their starting point in the establishment of the royal Inquisition by the end of the century or, at the earliest, in the Toledo revolt of 1449. By that time, however, conversos had been living as and among Christians all over the peninsula for at least fifty years. In this article, I examine how the massive conversion of Valencia’s Jewish community, one of the largest in the Crown of Aragon, prompted the monarchy to correct the burial practices of conversos, which may have reflected their religious heterodoxy, through intervention in their confraternities and the Christianisation of their funerary sites. For this case, I investigate unpublished private documentation preserved in notarial records. From a statistical sample of more than 1,850 Old Christian and a 100 converso testaments, I analyse both the aforementioned intervention by the monarchy and its effectiveness until the establishment of the royal Inquisition in Valencia in 1482.

Divided by blood: Race and religion in early-modern Iberia

This article argues that the mass religious conversions that took place in early-modern Iberia from the end of the fourteenth century had enormous consequences, one of which was the increasing racialisation of religion. Jewish and Muslim minorities were forced to receive baptism, and although in principle the Church made no distinction among people who had been baptised, in practice the presence of large numbers of recent converts to Catholicism called this theology into question. In the process, as I will demonstrate in this article, religion was racialised, as many people became convinced that religion (both beliefs and ritual) was biological and was transmitted by blood. To support this argument, the article will focus, as a case study, on the discussion about whether to deny baptism to the children of Moriscos (converted Muslims) in the years preceding the general expulsion from Spain of the Moriscos (1609–11).

The African Presence in Iberian Art*

The African presence in early modern Iberia increased with the emergence of the transatlantic slave trade following the discoveries of the Americas from the middle of the fifteenth century. This article focuses on the visual representation of Africans in the Kingdom of Portugal and the Spanish Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile until the seventeenth century. It focuses on the depiction of urban enslaved and liberated Africans in the main cities of Lisbon and Seville, in religious compositions, as the most popular Adoration of the Magi and the violent Castilian iconography of The Miracle of the Black Leg and in portraiture.

Material Methodologies in Early Modern Iberian Treatises

Abstract Early modern culture was most fully expressed in events where materiality and textuality are inextricably intertwined: theatrical spectacles, royal parades, triumphal arches, processions, poetic tournaments, and jousts. At the other end of the spectrum, mainstream trends of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hispanic philology—a prism through which early modern texts have been used and read for years—are part of a genealogy of thought that privileges form over matter. As a result, the radical importance of materials is frequently overlooked in the study of early modern culture. However, if we pay attention to early modern poetic and philosophical treatises, we can clearly notice the anxiety to justify the medium in which texts themselves were produced and transmitted. This article stresses the importance of materiality in two types of treatises from early modern Iberia: three sensory treatises by Oliva Sabuco (1587), Lorenzo Ortiz (1687), and Diego Calleja (1700); and three manuals of textual production by Juan del Encina (1496), Francisco Lucas (1580), and Alonso Víctor de Paredes (1680). The article sets out an argument for a materialist practice of literary criticism, a way to read early modern texts in terms of their own material theory.

“Redesigning the Past”: Interview with Marcelo D’Salete

ABSTRACT In this interview, Miguel Valerio (a scholar of Afrodiasporic culture in colonial Latin America and early modern Iberia) engages in a conversation with Marcelo D’Salete, a well-known graphic novelist whose works center on the experiences of Black people in Brazil. The range of topics they discuss include Palmares, the seventeenth-century maroon community that is at the center of D’Salete’s Angola Janga (2017); the history, future, and present of Black struggles in Brazil; the ability of comics and other art forms to re-desenhar (meaning both “redraw” and “redesign”) the past; Afro-pessimism and the central role of slavery in the formation of modernity; and the importance of Black joy.

Practical Cosmography in Early Modern Iberia: Alonso de Chaves and his Espejo de Navegantes

Ancient cosmography had to adapt to new historical circumstances during the early modern period in Europe, leading to a proliferation of roles and even a sort of identity crisis. This entailed the revival of cosmography as a new and modern science, which, however, was neither unitary nor homogeneous. Cosmography was not associated with a single epistemic community, a certain scholarly profile or a specific corpus of literature, but with different groups and practitioners who produced diverse kinds of documents. Numerous practices emerged, and knowledge circulated in several forms. The article explores so-called practical cosmography in the Iberian world from the early sixteenth century. This will be illustrated not by the classical works of the period (Faleiro, Medina, Cortés, Oliveira) but by the lesser-known figure of the Pilot Major Alonso de Chaves and his nautical encyclopaedia Quatri partitu en cosmographia pratica (c. 1530). Chaves’ responsibilities as cosmographer of the Casa de la Contratación in Seville, the subjects and structure of his treatise, the intended audience and the style and language used show that there were substantial differences between the cosmography practised in Seville and Central European cosmography. The characteristics of this cosmography will be interpreted from the perspective of artisanal epistemology.

New World of Gain: Europeans, Guaraní, and the Global Origins of Modern Economy

New World of Gain: Europeans, Guaraní, and the Global Origins of Modern Economy

Teaching the Female in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia : Introduction

Teaching the Female in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia : Introduction

Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean

This concise yet deeply researched volume joins a growing body of work that attends to the enslavement of Indigenous people in the colonial Americas. Distinguishing her book from studies of Indigenous slavery that focus on the North American mainland and that consider the period from the seventeenth century onward, Stone traces the enslavement of people native to the circum-Caribbean from the beginning of Spanish colonization in the 1490s until the passage of the New Laws in 1542. Arguing that “the search for and profit from Indian captives was central to the development of Spanish colonial institutions,” Stone convincingly demonstrates that Indigenous slavery and the slave trade were integral to Spanish exploration, conquest, and settlement of the Americas (p. 30). By combining archaeological and written colonial sources, she also succeeds in creating a detailed ethnohistorical account of the Caribbean's original inhabitants and their initial experiences of and responses to Spanish contact. The resulting work highlights the key role that Indigenous slavery played in early Iberian expansion while simultaneously striving to keep Indigenous people at the center of analysis.Among the most welcome elements of Stone's work is her careful attention to Indigenous social and political dynamics from the precontact era until the mid-sixteenth century. In chapter 1, Stone makes deft use of available archaeological and archival evidence to analyze fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Iberia and the Greater Antilles, respectively, demonstrating that both societies were dynamic, expanding, and already engaged in practices of slavery that would continue to evolve after contact.Stone's careful reconstruction of the precontact Caribbean—a society that she convincingly shows was shaped by long-distance trade networks long before European arrival—in turn allows her to explore varied Indigenous responses to Spanish arrival. In chapter 2, Stone reconstructs why some Antillean caciques allied with the Spanish, while others—usually those who wielded more power at the time of Spanish contact—did not.Whereas Nancy van Deusen's Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (2015) explored how freedom suits brought by Indigenous Americans enslaved in early modern Iberia shaped metropolitan understandings of race, Stone is primarily concerned with the demographic, economic, legal, and social consequences of this large-scale trade in human beings in Spain's newly claimed colonies. In chapter 3, she shows how early sixteenth-century debates over Indigenous slavery reveal its importance in both religious and secular affairs, while also illustrating the limits of crown authority in the Americas.Chapters 4 and 5 explore how slaving shaped Spanish colonization of Florida, Mexico, and Central and South America, as Indigenous slavery became “one of the largest businesses in the New World” by the 1520s (p. 104). While some Indigenous captives became “involuntary collaborators” who served as translators and guides for Spanish explorers, thousands more were trafficked to the Andes or the Caribbean (p. 94).As Stone shows in her final chapter, Indigenous slavery in the circum-Caribbean eventually ended not because it was replaced by African slavery but because it became unsustainable. Although African and Indigenous people worked alongside one another in the first decades of the sixteenth century, repeated Indigenous and interethnic uprisings in the 1520s and 1530s, coupled with the increasing availability of enslaved Africans, led the crown to pass the New Laws in 1542. Realizing that “indigenous cooperation was crucial for the economic prosperity of their American colonies,” Spanish officials banned Indigenous slavery even in cases of war (p. 155). Yet much damage had already been done: as Stone shows, Spanish enslavement and forced movement of Indigenous people played an important and little-recognized role in facilitating early colonial expansion. Just as important, other imperial powers “followed the path of Spanish slavers, continuing to enslave indigenous peoples” elsewhere in the Americas (p. 162).The lack of specificity with respect to numbers is a common problem in studies of Indigenous slavery, and Stone's estimate that “between 250,000 and 500,000” individuals fell victim to the Spanish trade may frustrate some readers (p. 7). As Stone explains, however, the nature of available documents complicates the task of quantifying Indigenous bondage. Whereas European slavers trafficked people from West Africa as human cargo, leading them to produce shipping records, Indigenous people were often captured by individual raiders who sought to hide their activities, and “labor-starved residents of the Greater Antilles” proved willing to conceal the origins of their laborers (p. 113). Rather than focusing on numbers, Stone emphasizes how slavery “scattered diverse ethnic groups and cultures across the Americas,” changing the lives of countless individuals and helping to forge new ethnic groups, such as the Kalinago (p. 157).Captives of Conquest is short and readable, making it an excellent choice for courses on comparative slavery, Indigenous history, colonial Latin America, and the Caribbean-Atlantic world. Scholars interested in the origins and consequences of Indigenous slavery in the Americas have much to gain by engaging with this groundbreaking work.

Rewriting Maya Religion: Domingo de Vico, K'iche’ Maya Intellectuals, and the “Theologia Indorum.”

Garry Sparks's recent book examines the interreligious encounters in the highland Maya region of Guatemala during the early decades after Spanish contact. In this volume, intended as a companion to The Americas' First Theologies: Early Sources of Post-contact Indigenous Religion (2017), Sparks presents a theological and intertextual analysis of the Theologia Indorum, or the “Theology for and of the Indians,” presumably written in K'iche’ Maya by the Spanish Dominican friar Domingo de Vico. Completed in 1554 and never published, the Theologia Indorum spanned two volumes and over 800 manuscript pages, becoming the first original theology produced in the Americas. Sparks's assiduous theological and linguistic analysis of the remaining fragments from multiple Theologia Indorum copies uncovers its important role in the transmission of Catholic and Maya religions. Sparks argues that to fully understand its impact, it must be evaluated in relation with contemporaneous religious and legal highland Maya texts, especially the Popol Wuj (1554–58) and the Title of Totonicapán (1554). Sparks demonstrates how Vico, literate K'iche’ Maya intellectuals, and later mendicant priests learned and borrowed from each other to reconfigure highland Maya religious theology.Through careful evaluation of Vico's understudied work and a broader corpus of K'iche’ Maya texts, Sparks focuses on the challenges of translation and the commensurability of ideas between Hispano-Catholic and K'iche’ Maya worldviews. Sparks highlights the diversity of Catholicism in early modern Iberia, which had to be reconciled into the highly localized contexts of the Americas. While Vico's Franciscan counterparts used either Latin or Spanish to present key topics, Vico relied instead on Indigenous terms. Sparks explains Vico's use of K'iche’ Maya linguistic ideology and moral anthropology as evidence of his training in scholastic Thomism, which emphasized the importance of language and the value of analogical reasoning (chapter 2). While the Theologia Indorum was designed for Maya conversion to Catholicism, Vico did not view the two religions as incompatible, nor did he rule out a “mixture of Catholic theology and indigenous culture” in creating the manuscript (p. 162).Sparks traces how Vico and highland Maya intellectuals such as Diego Reynoso reconciled their religions and used Maya terms and images to establish analogies for Catholic concepts. To do so, the volume's first of three parts establishes the “Old World” backgrounds of the highland Maya and Iberian mendicants. Vico's life and work are carefully evaluated in part 2, which provides background on Vico (chapter 3), discusses the Theologia Indorum's structure and creation (chapter 4), and explains his theological method (chapter 5). Through impressive linguistic analysis, Sparks examines how Vico adeptly utilized both the high register (language for ritual speech and elders) and low register (quotidian speech) of K'iche’ Mayan in the Theologia Indorum. By balancing high and quotidian speech and drawing on Maya knowledge, Vico constructed a text that accommodated Maya culture and religiosity. Transcribed or translated over 18 times, the Theologia Indorum became a foundational text in the region, as it was mentioned implicitly or explicitly in many contemporaneous highland Maya writings.In the same way that Vico accommodated Maya religiosity in his work, Sparks reveals how the K'iche’ Maya authors accommodated Vico, as the Theologia Indorum often became synonymous with Christianity in their writings. Part 3 assesses the Theologia Indorum's impact via expert intertextual analysis of contemporaneous K'iche’- and other Mayan-language texts, including the Popol Wuj (chapter 6), the Title of Totonicapán (chapter 7), and other legal writings (chapter 8). Sparks defines these diverse manuscripts as theologies that reveal the various levels of engagement with and responses to the Theologia Indorum by Maya intellectuals. The Title of Totonicapán's authors, for example, took a more conciliatory approach to the Theologia Indorum while also redacting, rather than merely copying, the manuscript in their work. In contrast, the authors of the Popol Wuj presented a slight resistance to Vico by portraying the Theologia Indorum as an “incomplete and deficient” version of the creation story and Maya ancient truths offered by the Popol Wuj (p. 198). Later sixteenth-century writings, however, increasingly saw the Theologia Indorum as an authoritative text and as “truth of God” (p. 297).Sparks's latest work reflects his mastery of the K'iche’ language and offers a welcome addition to the fields of religious studies, ethnohistory, and Maya linguistics. The book contains extensive footnotes and charts comparing the intertextual analysis of the various manuscripts, including a useful “Maya and mendicant intertextual reception history” chart (p. 287). The inclusion of maps could have helped situate readers and further illustrate aspects of the argument, such as the emphasis on locality and the geographical influence of the Theologia Indorum. This is a fascinating, detailed, and insightful work that will be of particular interest to a scholarly audience, as it deepens our knowledge of understudied highland Maya writings and the early evangelization process in Guatemala.

Listening to Black Voices, or Listening to Juana Esperanza de San Alberto's Listening

Abstract: The roundtable "Listening for Black Voices: A Conversation on Musicology Today" for the colloquium devoted to "Recovering Black Performance in Early Modern Iberia" invites a reflection on silence and listening, especially when attending to the life of New Spain's only known Black nun, Juana Esperanza de San Alberto (?–1679).

Reading Against the Grain, Readings of Substitution: Catholic Books as Inspiration for Judaism in Early Modern Iberia

Reading Against the Grain, Readings of Substitution: Catholic Books as Inspiration for Judaism in Early Modern Iberia

Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World: Narratives of Fear and Hatred by François Soyer (review)

Reviewed by: Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World: Narratives of Fear and Hatred by François Soyer Claude B. Stuczynski François Soyer. Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World: Narratives of Fear and Hatred. Leiden: Brill, 2019. xvi + 315 pp. doi:10.1017/S036400942100026X Among the many myths spurred by the Covid-19 emergency is the false claim that Jews caused this pandemic to secretly dominate the world.1 Soyer's book confirms how often conspiracy theories entail a perception of Jews—whether openly professing or "hidden," through religious conversion or assimilation—as quintessential conspirators. Karl Popper has argued that conspiracy myths have proliferated since the French Revolution mostly because they offer simple nonreligious answers to complex realities in a secularized world. François Soyer's focus on earlier historical stages shows that conspiracy myths are indeed compatible with a belief in Divine Providence and with theodicy. In cases loaded with theological connotations, such as traditional anti-Jewish hatred, conspiracy myths reveal a dualistic perception of the world, understood as the arena of cosmological strife between the followers of light, good, and/or God and the agents of darkness, evil, and/or Satan. No wonder that Norman R. C. Cohn, a pioneering historian of anti-Jewish conspiracy myths in modern times, also studied the imprint of Christian eschatology and apocalyptic thought on medieval and early modern violence, and the origins of Europe's scapegoating obsessions, which led to witch-hunting.2 Soyer's book thus helps us understand Popper's explanation against the grain: less as an example of Weberian secularization as disenchantment of the world, and rather as a profane appropriation of the religious and the sacred. This implicitly political-theological perspective unifies those scholars who explicitly question the accuracy of the once-consensual periodization of premodern anti-Judaism, understood as theologically grounded, and of modern antisemitism, perceived as equivalent to pseudoscientific and nonreligious racism. [End Page 464] Perhaps Soyer's main contribution to the history of anti-Judaism in the West is precisely its focus. Late medieval and early modern Iberian anticonverso attitudes have already been treated by eminent historians such as Cecil Roth, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, and David Nirenberg, who identified astonishing analogies with later forms of racism and antisemitism.3 Soyer's contribution to this scholarship is twofold. First, he integrates early modern Iberian conspiracy myths with the better-known "purity of blood" exclusionary laws; second, he convincingly demonstrates that some of those old Iberian stories nurtured later Western myths. Oddly, the author makes no reference to Francisco de Quevedo's satiric episode The Monopantos' Island (La isla de los Monopantos), originally aimed against Count-Duke of Olivares's purported proconverso policies, as one of the probable indirect sources of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, via Hermann Goedsche's Biarritz (1868).4 According to Soyer, Jews and conversos were simply a means, and not the aim, in Quevedo's satirical fiction, which is why there is no single reference to The Monopantos' Island in later early modern Iberian antisemitic literature (82–83). At the same time, Soyer is fully aware of Quevedo's influence during Olivares's times; he identifies Quevedo's circulation of the belief in a converso and Jewish anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish conspiracy plan in a passage from his earlier pamphlet, Execración de los judíos (1633). In this vitriolic leaflet, Quevedo explicitly invoked "the correspondence between the Jews of Spain and the Jews of Constantinople" to denounce Portuguese conversos as a dangerous fifth column in Iberia, although he expressed doubts regarding the authenticity of that epistolary exchange, as if anticipating sympathetic future readers of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.5 In chapter 2 (54–92) and in the epilogue (275–81), Soyer painstakingly probes the origins of these forged letters, which were initially used by Archbishop of Toledo Juan Martínez Silíceo (1477–1547) to support anticonverso exclusionary laws of "purity of blood." Soyer thus sheds light on the way these letters framed anticonverso conspiracy myths in early modern Iberia, and most surprisingly, on the fact that this spurious correspondence (along with a French variant) was still echoed in...

Book Review: Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia by Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessel

Book Review: <i>Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia</i> by Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessel

Urban Development and Muslim Minorities in the Middle Ages: the Path to Invisibility

The long existence of a Muslim population under Christian rule (Mudejars) in the kingdoms of medieval and early modern Iberia gave way to the development of a number of boundaries between religious and social groups. Urban boundaries, both physical and socio-religious, were continuously redefined. Residence in towns in the Iberian kingdoms could vary from contiguous housing to separate neighbourhoods based within real or imagined boundaries. Mudejars in Castile had the possibility of building new mosques, thus breaking canon and local laws, whereas in Aragon, Jewish communities paid for their right to rebuild synagogues continuously. Invisibility was a very important tool to marginalize groups that were perceived as a possible threat, so the only requirement for mosques and synagogues was not to be set apart from surrounding houses. On the other hand, restrictions on minority visibility in Christian spaces included the inauguration of previously inexistent secluded neighbourhoods in northern Castilian towns. The geographical setting of the closed quarters established after the Castilian Cortes of 1480 contributed to the invisibility of the religious minorities, resulting in the long run in their exclusion from urban life.

Rhino Horns and Scraps of Unicorn: The Sense of Touch and the Consumption of Rhino Horns in Early Modern Iberia

In early modern Iberia, rhino horns were widely consumed by high-ranking persons. Rhino horns were often confused with the horns of the legendary unicorn, which were said to be able to transform poison into water with their touch. Consumption of rhino horns is often explained either by their ascribed prophylactic properties or by their use as the symbolic representation items for social manifestation. These motivations have long been identified, but they still continue to puzzle us. In this paper, I argue that a structural belief in the power of touch to transform matter from one stage to another played a central role in early-modern Iberia’s consumption of rhino horns. The belief in the transformative power of touch was the framework that can explain the development of a diverse set of motivations that fed the market and circulation of rhino horns in early modern Iberia. The socially-constructed perception that touching certain objects could bring transformation sustained the consumption of horns, because it was shared by most agents involved: consumers, apothecaries, physicians, scholars, and so on. Ultimately, this paper contributes to a more complex approach to analysing the consumption of luxurious goods in general. By opening up its scope, this paper shows how understanding consumption dynamics should include social practices, spiritual beliefs, medical knowledge or symbolic representations.

Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia ed. by Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Alexandra Guerson and Dana Wessell Lightfoot

Reviewed by: Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia ed. by Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Alexandra Guerson and Dana Wessell Lightfoot Tatevik Gyulamiryan Armstrong-Partida, Michelle, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessell Lightfoot, editors. Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. U of Nebraska P, 2020. Pp. 288. ISBN 978-1-49620-511-7. Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia edited by Michelle Armstrong- Partida, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessell Lightfoot is a compilation of twelve essays looking into the communities of early modern Iberia with a focus on women and their roles. The essays connect to each other through a common thread—women in their respective communities— while also presenting various social, cultural, and political contexts ranging from financial support systems to violence against women to minoritized women’s lives in early modern Iberia. The contributors have carried out notable archival research, and they relate their findings about early modern Iberian women in such an inviting, engrossing way that the reader cannot help but be transported into the era and context due to the vivid pictures of various communities painted by the contributors of the volume. Before presenting the contributors’ pieces, the editors of the collection write in their Introduction, Contextualizing Women, Agency, and Communities in Premodern Iberia, of how they see “similarities and differences across the medieval and early modern period of women influencing, navigating, and managing their roles within their communities, including testing the bonds and limitations of the community within which they operated” (1–2). The volume is consequently divided into three parts, and each part invites readers to explore a different aspect of female agency in the early modern Iberian reality. The first part, Community Networks and Economic Agency, begins with Sarah Ifft Decker’s essay “Credit and Connections: Jewish Women between Communities in Vic, 1250–1350.” The author follows the transactions of a woman named Reina to tell the story of Jewish women creditors who lent money to the people of and around Vic. Natalie Oeltjen researches the lives of several conversas and their families from Mallorca, tracing the fiscal and royal mandates that further complicated converso lives beginning in 1391. Her essay “Challenges Facing Mallorcan Conversas after 1391” is a very intriguing read regarding the systemic oppression that conversos and conversas withstood in all parts of Iberia. Grace Coolidge, in “Death and Gender in Late [End Page 297] Sixteenth-century Toledo,” analyzes the wills of a single woman, a married woman, and a widowed woman, showing how inheritance, rights to dowry, or financial control worked among women in sixteenth-century Toledo. Part 2, Challenging Communal Ties, is a compilation of essays that relate the experience of women who withstood physical violence at the hands of men in their community. The first essay in this section is “Women, Injurious Words, and Clerical Violence in Fourteenth-century Catalunya” by Michelle Armstrong-Partida. The author recounts various instances of clerical beating of women and how such beatings were viewed by women and men of the neighborhood, based on the court reports that Armstrong-Partida consulted. Following this essay is Mark Meyerson’s “Women, Violence, and Community in Late Medieval Valencia,” in which the author discusses the roles of women in violent incidents. What remains unclear to me is the author’s frame of argument—whether Meyerson contends that women incited violent contests of honor, or that women fell victim to violent acts at the hands of men who were following the social construct of “honor” of the time. Next, Alexandra Guerson and Dana Wessell Lightfoot’s “Mixed Marriages and Community Identity in Fifteenth-century Girona” invites the reader into the world of mixed marriages, opening with the 1420 order for men to abandon their spouses of Jewish heritage (132). This interesting essay precedes the concluding essay of this part, Stephanie M. Cavanaugh’s “In Defense of Community: Morisca Women in Sixteenth-century Valladolid,” in which the author illustrates how morisca women came together in “collective legal defense of their community, properties, and shared neighborhood in Valladolid” (152). Part 3, Institutional Relationships and Creating Communities, commences with Mireia Comas Via’s essay titled “Looking for a Way to Survive: Community and Institutional...

Talisman, Amulet, and Intention in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia

This study examines amulets and talismans in medieval and early modern Iberia. I argue that the terms amulet and talisman can be used to examine how, on the one hand, some Iberian magic texts are considered magic or magical based on a belief that the objects themselves have intentions, and on the other, that magic texts possess a magic effect as a result of the intentions that a human user attributes to them. While a provisional distinction between amulets and talismans can be made using the criterion of intention, this study ultimately argues that intention is simply a means by which we might understand the complexity of the functioning of magic texts and objects, rather than a means to classify them in any sort of definitive way. To examine function in the realm of magic texts, I examine three motifs of intention, illustrating each one with examples from Christian and Islamic Iberian contexts: the acquisition and uses of knowledge; reading and other forms of communication; and metonymy and interpretation. I draw on magic texts depicted in medieval Iberian literature, magic compilations confiscated by the Spanish Inquisition that contained magic and could themselves be used as amulets, and Morisco recipes that aim to cure a variety of ailments and to solve problems.