Limpieza De Sangre Research Articles

Conceiving of Purity: The Literary Immaculism of María de Zayas's Desengaños Amorosos

ABSTRACT: The Virgin Mary is a central figure in María de Zayas's Desengaños amorosos (1647) but has not yet been analyzed through the lens of the Immaculate Conception, in spite of Zayas's own immaculist leanings. Indeed, despite its extraordinary and unique popularity in early modern Spain, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception has received little scholarly attention outside of theological considerations. Recent scholarship has begun to suggest its broader social implications, including its connection to the contemporary discourse of blood purity. The Desengaños articulate and explore this intersection by pairing the intervention of the Immaculate Virgin with anxieties over women's role in maintaining genealogical purity. In this article, I analyze the third, eighth, and ninth tales of the collection, as well as the frame narrative, to argue that Zayas proposes Mary's immaculacy as a counterweight to the perception of women's indelible impurity in the context of limpieza de sangre . Through immaculist language and imagery, and drawing on the early modern obsession with honor, Zayas reimagines a disordered society that viewed women as fallen and corruptible by proposing a uniquely feminine source of genealogical purity.

Thomas Hobbes in Racist Context

Abstract Is it anachronistic to talk about racism in Hobbes? After all, racism is usually seen as biological: the disliked group must have innate characteristics which are inherited biologically. This is mostly said to be a modern idea. Yet biological racism can be found in medieval and early modern times, as with the Spanish doctrine of limpieza de sangre (cleanliness/purity of blood). Racism, including biological racism, was much more common in Hobbes’s England than we might think, including in texts he may have read; the language of race was hardly uncommon either. Moreover, someone can be called a racist whether or not their dislike of a group is based on characteristics of a group that are inherited biologically, I argue. Whether Hobbes was a racist remains open to debate; this paper offers evidence both for and against that proposition. But we should not reject the question of Hobbes’s racism as anachronistic.

Creating Conversos: The Carvajal-Santa María Family in Early Modern Spain by Roger Louis Martínez-Dávila

Reviewed by: Creating Conversos: The Carvajal-Santa María Family in Early Modern Spain by Roger Louis Martínez-Dávila John F. Schwaller Creating Conversos: The Carvajal-Santa María Family in Early Modern Spain. By Roger Louis Martínez-Dávila. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2018. Pp. xix, 351. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-268-10321-7.) With implications in the New World, the Carvajal-Santa María family of early modern Spain ranks as one of the most resilient and in many ways emblematic of the period. The book begins in the early sixteenth century as the family is on the verge of grasping the papacy, in spite of their deep converso roots, with partial origins in the person of Solomon ha-Levi, a leading rabbi in Burgos who became the bishop of that city as Pablo de Santa María in 1415. Martínez-Dávila traces the emergence of a converso family and its dispersal throughout Castille, notably to the western city of Plasencia. There the conversos began a series of marriages and alliances with the Old Christian family of the Carvajals to emerge as leaders in both the political and ecclesiastical hierarchies. From there the family would expand to prominence on the Iberian Peninsula and eventually to the colonial outposts of Mexico and Bolivia. This fascinating tale is written in nine chapters, tracing the family from its origins to his success and expansion to the empire. The first two chapters trace the beginnings of the clan in Burgos and its eventual spread to other communities but focusing especially on Plasencia. The turbulence of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries created the necessary precondition for the blurring of ethnic lines and the ability of some individuals to gain prominence in spite of their ethno-religious background, creating what Martínez-Dávila calls the New Noble houses. While the Old Christian knights (caballeros) had political power, and with it a degree of economic power as well, the Church through its collection of the tithe clearly had access to much of the economic sphere. In the third chapter, Martínez-Dávila explores the wake of the anti-Jewish riots at the end of the fourteenth century. Focused on larger cities, small places like Plascencia emerged largely unscathed. At the same time the Trastámara dynasty began to reward other important New Noble houses, which provided unexpected opportunities in Plascencia. In Plascencia, in Chapter Four, we read of the growing success of the Santa María-Carvajal alliance. On the Jewish side, the family had been royal treasurers, and rabbis; while on the Old Christian side they had been important local caballeros. Combined, they came to dominate the cathedral chapter of the city and create a different kind of local environment for conversos and moriscos. By the fifteenth century two patterns emerged. Some of the New Noble houses pursued virulently anti-Semitic policies, hiding their own origins and joining [End Page 197] in anti-Jewish campaigns. The Plascencia-based Carvajal house continued to encourage a more open society of multi-ethnic populations. Castille, as a whole, turned to a more exclusionary policy with the promulgation of limpieza de sangre requirements for an increasingly large number of offices. This, in turn, required these New Noble houses to emphasize their Old Christian roots and downplay, if not hide, their converso origins. In Chapter Six, Martínez-Dávila explores the methods whereby the Santa María-Carvajal house imbued themselves with all of the hallmarks of Christian piety creating ecclesiastical foundations and other good works to burnish their reputation, while reaching the highest level of Catholic hierarchy with the appointment of Juan de Carvajal as a cardinal. As Spain entered the sixteenth century, the house had come to control the very highest levels of politics, the Church, and the local economy. They had successfully blurred their converso origins, emphasized the Old Christian mantle of the Carvajal clan, and weathered the storm of additional anti-converso and morisco politics with the fall of Granada and the triumph of Castilian Christianity. As the overseas empire became an important feature of the Spanish political and economic world...

‘Ol’ Man River’ at the Front: Paul Robeson, Music, and Blackness in Republican Spain

Several scholars have discussed the impact of the Spanish Civil War on the Black singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson, including his brief 1938 tour of Republican Spain. Yet none has considered the tour in musical terms, nor taken into account Spanish reaction. Drawing on coverage in the Republican press, along with recent work on vocality and identity, I argue that the tour challenged prior notions of blackness in Spain. Spanish journalists addressed Robeson’s singing from the standpoint of the ‘suspect whiteness of Spain’ (to borrow Fra-Molinero’s apt description) while Robeson himself linked blackness and flamenco and reformulated the ‘sorrow song,’ as W. E. B. Du Bois called the spiritual. I also analyse Robeson’s performances of ‘Ol’ Man River’ from the musical Show Boat in terms of Republic ideology. In sum, Robeson challenged Franco’s vision of ‘blood purity’ (limpieza de sangre) while calling for racial justice worldwide.

A Metatheatrical Reading of Baroque and Neobaroque Texts: Entremés del retablo de las maravillas (1615) and De donde son los cantantes (1967)

This article examines the diachronic use of metatheater in Cervantes’s Entremés del retablo de las maravillas (1615) and “La Dolores Rondón,” the second tale in Severo Sarduy’s novel, De donde son los cantantes (1967). Both works are structured as a play-with-in-a-play, including the internal theatrical pieces and the external debates, where the authors problematize literary language/representation in their respective times. This article further explores the organizational differences between metatheatrical Baroque and Neobaroque texts. In the Entremés, two charlatans trick a group of villagers fearful of the “limpieza de sangre” into seeing marvelous scenes. This Baroque play suggests the omnipresence of the Spanish Empire, while criticizing the trendy performance of comedia nueva in Cervantes’s time. “La Dolores Rondón,” by comparison, fails to deliver a coherent piece of theater. Following the tradition of the Cuban “choteo,” the characters humorously demonstrate that all “realities” are fictional and that the text progresses without the guidance of chronological or poetic order. Sarduy’s Neobaroque narrative seeks to break away from authoritative literary discourse and to repudiate the logocentrism embedded in Latin American epistemology.

El estatuto de limpieza de sangre y sus repercusiones en Vitoria en tiempos de Felipe II

A partir de 1572, Vitoria vivió a su manera la que en toda Castilla constituyó la etapa culminante del proceso de encastamiento social, de culto a la limpieza de sangre. Su situación geográfica y su aduana, la abrían al mundo europeo, haciéndola vulnerable a las ideas, entre ellas a las de la desafección religiosa. Las autoridades eclesiásticas y civiles se vieron involucradas al unísono en un cierto estado de prevención. La defensa del estatuto de limpieza de sangre se extendió por la ciudad, pretendiéndose como obligatorio tanto para los cargos religiosos como los municipales, coincidiendo además con un notable esfuerzo en la preparación de un clero autóctono y con una importante actividad fundacional, imbuida de un fuerte espíritu tridentino que, no obstante, dejó fuera a la Compañía de Jesús. El rechazo a los jesuitas debe entenderse en el contexto de la autarquía religiosa y el discurso del poder local entonces en desarrollo. En cierto modo, sus prédicas ponían en peligro las bases que pretendían justificar la existencia de la elite político-social en auge, que buscaba en el estatuto no sólo un aval de limpieza sino también de nobleza. Por ello, todo lo acontecido en la pequeña ciudad de Vitoria en los años finales del siglo XVI en materia religiosa no ha de medirse sólo en términos de fe sino, ante todo, en términos de poder.

Invisible Concealment of Invisibility Crypto-Judaism as a Theological Paradigm of Racial Anti-Semitism

The motif of secret, crypto-Judaism has a history that reaches further back into the theological tradition. It no doubt structurally arises from or closely related to the epistemo-political challenges posed by the unworldliness and absolutely inner being of faith, which in the political or inter-subjective dimension immediately raises the question of evidence. The question of evidence, i.e., for the invisible faith, becomes acute in the case of conversion, where the basic premise is the initial absence of faith. Paradoxically, conversion is consequently the establishment of the convert’s fundamental faithlessness, of her originally non-Christian element, which the convert, in the very same act of conversion, claims no longer exists. It is easy to see the conceptual constellation that would present the convert as structural deception. At the Iberian threshold of modernity, in the face of mass Jewish conversion and assimilation, this paradox appeared in the image of the “new Christians”, the marranos, structurally suspected to be crypto-Jews, to the effect that the ultimate evidence of faith was a certificate of limpieza de sangre, “purity of blood”. This paper will follow the historian Yosef HayimYerushalmi in tracing the conceptual link between the Inquisition’s notion of crypto-Jews and the racialized figure of the Jew in modern anti-Semitism.

To Sin No More: Franciscans and Conversion in the Hispanic World, 1683–1830 by David Rex Galindo

Reviewed by: To Sin No More: Franciscans and Conversion in the Hispanic World, 1683–1830 by David Rex Galindo Thomas M. Cohen To Sin No More: Franciscans and Conversion in the Hispanic World, 1683–1830. By David Rex Galindo. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Oceanside, CA: The Academy of American Franciscan History. 2018. Pp. xvii, 330. $65.00. ISBN 978-1-5036-0-3264.) During the last thirty years, historians, anthropologists, theologians, and scholars in other disciplines have greatly expanded our knowledge of Franciscan missions in the Iberian world. Their studies analyze not only the well-known frontier missions in the Americas and Asia but also the so-called "popular missions" that Franciscans conducted in cities and rural areas of Europe, often in preparation for their work in the overseas empire. In To Sin No More, David Rex Galindo draws on this new scholarship (his introduction provides an excellent survey of the literature), on classic studies of the Franciscan order, and, most importantly, on deep archival work on three continents in order to analyze the theory and practice of the Franciscan missionary enterprise. He argues that this enterprise "contributed to [the] globalization of the Catholic Church and shaped early modern Catholicism" (p. 289). Rex Galindo focuses on the twenty-nine Franciscan Colleges for the Propagation of the Faith in Spain and America. The most famous of these institutions was the Colegio de la Santa Cruz in Querétaro, Mexico, from which generations of missionaries, including the recently canonized Junípero Serra, set off for missions throughout the Americas. Rex Galindo argues that the colleges "invigorated the Franciscan evangelical ministry through missionary instruction and a renovated commitment to pastoral work among both Catholic and non-Christian flocks in Spain and in its American territories and peripheries" (p. 9). The continuity between missionary work in Europe and the Americas is a major theme of the book. The Franciscan missionary enterprise predated that of the Society of Jesus, and the two orders were sometimes at odds. Following the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish empire in 1767, the Franciscans and other orders took over the Jesuit missions, reviving and expanding the scope of the Franciscans' work, especially in the Americas. Building on Francisco Morales's pioneering prosopographical studies of Franciscans in colonial Mexico, Rex Galindo provides an overview of the qualities of the ideal missionary. In addition to the requisite moral and physical qualities, the Franciscans, like other religious orders of the day, sought candidates who could demonstrate their purity of blood (limpieza de sangre). Whenever possible, the Franciscans excluded men who had Muslim, Jewish, native American, or African ancestors. Like Maria Elena Martinez, whose Genealogical Fictions (2008) studies the importation of limpieza statutes to colonial Mexico, Rex Galindo argues that peninsular-born Spaniards were associated with purity of blood and thus received preferential treatment in admission to the Franciscan order (p. 83). Although no collection of documents comparable to the Jesuit Indipitae (petitions to be sent to overseas missions) exists in the Franciscan archives, Rex Galindo succeeds in reconstructing the motives that led young men to petition to be [End Page 563] assigned to the missions. In general, candidates were more concerned with attaining their own salvation than with converting non-Catholics or with achieving martyrdom (p. 104). Missionaries in America faced language barriers that were difficult to overcome, in part because of the diversity of native languages. Franciscans became adept at recruiting native converts to preach to indigenous peoples. Yet this strategy provoked controversy within the Franciscan community, and native collaborators encountered strict limits on the scope of their pastoral work: "most Franciscans were hesitant to recruit native people to the colegios or seminaries . . . and only in special cases did visionary religious foresee the formation of a Franciscan native clergy" (p. 162). Rex Galindo provides a vivid account of life in the propaganda fide colleges, which "took their study programs to new levels of proficiency and commitment. . . . A stringent daily timetable included time for mental prayer, hours of study, classes, dedication to community material needs, and practical preparation for the evangelical ministry" (p. 119). Members of the colleges participated in daily meetings (conferencias) on moral theology. Rex Galindo analyzes in...

Agustín Salucio’s Rehabilitation of the converso and the Revisionist Debate over Racial and Religious Discrimination in Early Seventeenth-Century Spain

At the beginning of the seventeenth century an unprecedented debate took place within Spanish society on the continued validity of the test of limpieza de sangre—a discriminatory code that prevented those of non-Christian ancestry from gaining access to social and professional honours. The instigator of the debate was the Dominican friar, Agustín Salucio, who in his Discurso acerca de los estatutos de limpieza de sangre (1599) advocated a fundamental relaxation of the purity of blood statutes and the rehabilitation of the converso. In doing so, he overturned the deep-rooted prejudices that had been held towards converted Jews for generations, endorsed in the procedures of the Inquisition itself, and mounted an audacious challenge to the operation of racial and religious exclusion in society. Salucio’s paper prompted numerous responses penned by parliamentary deputies, government ministers, inquisitors, political theorists and fellow theologians that generated a radical review of the whole value system of early modern Spain, based on faith and lineage. This essay will engage in a close study of this far-reaching revisionist discourse that shook the orthodox foundations of the body politic and shaped the wider reform agenda of the monarchy.

Nobles judeoconversos: los oscuros orígenes del linaje Córdoba-Ronquillo

La historiografía tradicionalmente ha estudiado al converso desde la perspectiva inquisitorial, centrando su atención en las terribles persecuciones sufridas por el grupo. Así, la herejía judaica ha oscurecido una realidad mucho más importante, la que demuestra que el cristiano nuevo logró integrarse en aquella sociedad a pesar de la Inquisición, la limpieza de sangre y, en general, la cruel persecución social e institucional a la que fue sometido. Linajes como los Córdoba-Ronquillo ejemplifican a la perfección esta tendencia, pues su asimilación no solo fue total, sino que además algunos de sus miembros lograron ascender socialmente a pesar de las enormes trabas impuestas por un sistema puramente discriminatorio.

“Disfruto disfrutar”: Corporeality, Cross-Dressing, and Jouissance in Carmen Boullosa’s Duerme

“Disfruto disfrutar”: Corporeality, Cross-Dressing, and Jouissance in Carmen Boullosa’s Duerme Sara A. Potter The wounded, defiant body of M. de Fleurcy/Claire Fleurcy/Clara Flor is the center of gravity in Carmen Boullosa’s 1994 novel Duerme. The novel’s opening chapter focuses on the narrator-protagonist’s physical sensations: she cannot speak or move but can perceive what is going on around her, so that the reader is introduced to her through emotions and corporeal sensations: cold, pain, amusement, fear. Claire’s body is later drained of blood and filled with pure water from ancient streams by an indigenous woman, which grants her eternal life. This water also traps her, since she will fall into an eternal, ageless sleep if she ever leaves the Valley of Mexico. Despite these difficulties, Claire finds ways of extracting pleasure from all of the identities she occupies throughout the course of the novel, ranging across genders, nationalities, and ethnicities, vitally living out each identity (Pirott-Quintero 1). In this article, I argue that Claire’s insistence on being born to and for physical pleasure serves to interrogate the gendered, racial, and social identities that she occupies over the course of the novel. Through her cross-dressing protagonist, Boullosa establishes a profound questioning of the intensely hierarchical social castes created by New Spain’s obsession with social status via dress and limpieza de sangre during the earlier years of the Viceroyalty (1521–1821). To keep this interrogative pleasure at the forefront of my analysis, I propose a reading of Duerme as a Barthesian text of bliss and of pleasure, a text of pleasure (plaisir) that “comes from culture and does not break with it” that is also a text of bliss (jouissance) which “imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts . . . unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relationship with language” (14). While Barthes did not write his text with the colonial era or Mexico in mind, Boullosa’s textual play [End Page 25] between Barthesian pleasure and bliss serves her well in her re-imagining of the Conquest in a way that is both playful and deadly serious, with a protagonist whose cross-dressing upsets and blurs boundaries of gender, ethnicity, and nationality, along with cultural assumptions of identity. Examinations of these elements during this time period also require the consideration of the historical significance of cross-dressing for a character such as Claire, as well as the implications of Boullosa’s employment of blood, water, and purity in a society consumed by uncomfortably mutable notions of limpieza de sangre.1 Duerme is part of a series of postcolonial2 novels that Boullosa published in the 1990s, among them Llanto. Novelas imposibles (1992), Duerme (1994), and Cielos de la tierra (1997). As part of his work on contemporary readings of the colonial period in Mexico, Oswaldo Estrada observes that these novels “confront unresolved identity conflicts of the colonial era and the postcolonial present, at the same time that they openly blur the lines between history and fiction as part of a self-conscious process” (“(Re)constructions” 132). Duerme in particular addresses these unresolved conflicts through its fragmented narrative structure, through Claire’s ever-shifting identities, and through its unresolved ending. Claire comes to the New World as a male pirate; upon arrival, she is captured and forced to change places with Count de Urquiza, who has been sentenced to death. When her biological sex is discovered, an indigenous woman saves her life, but she does not consider it to be an act of mercy, telling Claire: “Usted que no eres (sic) ni hombre ni mujer, que no eres nahua ni español ni mestizo, ni Conde ni Encomendado, no mereces la muerte” (Boullosa 28, my emphasis). She then cuts open Claire’s left breast, replacing the blood in her veins with the pure waters of Anáhuac in what Boullosa has referred to as “a baptism in reverse” (Kroll 13). She survives the hanging and escapes being buried alive by engaging in a series of cross-dressing performances that alternatively allow and require her to inhabit...

Enric Porqueres i Gené , Individu, personne et parenté en Europe , Paris, Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2015, 294 p.

Enric Porqueres i Gene, Individu, personne et parente en Europe [Individual, person and kinship in Europe], Paris, Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 2015, 294 p.This chronologically organized set of studies by Enric Porqueres I Gene ranges over a wide variety of fields and approaches. Its coherence lies in power and resonance of research problem that runs through various chapters. From patristics to bioethics, from practices of Xuetes of Majorca (descendants of converted Jews, a group Porqueres has studied in depth) to Basque nationalism, this is a fascinating peregrination. We are readily convinced of validity of his overarching thesis: structuralist rigidities on hand and on other common understanding that contemporary societies are characterized by do not mean that we are through with anthropology of kinship - question now is how kinship should be understood today - let alone with kinship itself.Jack Goody, often cited here, warned against evolutionist, ethnocentric interpretations of changes in areas of family, conjugality and fertility. Understanding individualization process - a variant of the civilizing process - as a shift from absolute predominance of collective organization and logic to autonomous individual understood to be constitutive of modernity (and definitively nuclear family), prelude to a postmodern subject with absolute control over his destiny and accountable to himself alone, is simplistic. According to Porqueres, we need to surrender those broad historical categories, along with materialist reductionist concepts such as Bourdieu's marriage strategy, to concentrate on a finer-grained dialectic involving tension between two ideologies. Porqueres explains that Saint Paul (whose thinking was manipulated by Church Fathers, hostile to Roman and Jewish notions of marriage) constructed a figure of human individual as detached from community memberships by baptism, which brought him instead into universal community of believers. The cornerstone of Christian earthly city was love, a value supposedly brought to fore and transmitted to society as a whole by affection-based founded on shared sexual affinity. In response to this model, studied by French historians from Flandrin to Burguiere, a type of vertical, lineage-centred thinking developed in Middle Ages which instead emphasized ties, understood to guarantee stability and perpetuation of families, inter-family balances and, ultimately, existing hierarchies and social order. This second type of logic implies meticulous collective control over marital unions.While Pauline schema, associated with una caro doctrine (man and woman become one flesh through sexual union), constitutes foundation of Western, exogamous and cognatic kinship and a significant part of legal-social order of European states (access to citizenship, naturalization conditions, etc.), it was in continual conflict with approach, which received increasing support from temporal powers. And in early modern period genealogical reasoning and blood rhetoric came to fore, as attested by limpieza de sangre statutes (a person whose was tainted by Jewish ancestors, for example, had to be segregated from others), resulting in emergence of racial exclusion policies, Napoleon's Civil Code, and development of ethnic nationalisms. From fixation on ties came an intense preoccupation with reproductive sexuality and its future effects - we know how this kind of thinking impacted fields of medicine, biology, eugenics. Porqueres draws on social history to demonstrate power that kinship thinking had in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, extensively citing major (though not flawless, as Francois-Joseph Ruggiu has shown) research studies of David Sabean, Simon Teuscher and Gerard Delille: before various discourses (including genetics) discredited consanguinity, between first cousins was on rise. …

“Everyone Breeds in His Own Image”: Staging theAethiopicaacross the Channel

“Everyone Breeds in His Own Image”: Staging the<i>Aethiopica</i>across the Channel

Blood, Purity, and Pleasure in Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta

This article contends that bloodlines stand as one of the most fundamental yet overlooked aspects of Leopoldo Alas’s seminal work La Regenta. In fact, the narrative begins and ends with the tarnished lineage of Ana Ozores who, over the course of the narrative, wrestles with the conflicting status of her stained origin on the one hand, and her chaste, virtuous temperament on the other. Recovering the discourse of blood, I argue, proves crucial to understanding this conflict. In so doing, this article challenges the conventional periodization that equates blood with the early modern period and sexuality with the modern. Through a critical engagement with Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, this article posits blood as the starting point for what I call the “chastity bind,” whereby the ideological underpinnings of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) thwarts the modern sexual economy that privileges chastity over origin.

Notaries of Color in Colonial Panama: Limpieza de Sangre,Legislation, and Imperial Practices in the Administration of the Spanish Empire

On July 20, 1740, King Philip V of Spain was given paperwork regarding a dispute over the adjudication of a notarial office in Panama City and, as usual, he was expected to make a decision. The king also had in hand recommendations from the Cámara of the Consejo de Indias. The king would have handled the case in a relatively straightforward manner, but for one fact—the two notaries involved in the public bid were of African descent.

There’s No Cure for That: Melezina and Mimetic Transference in Fuenteovejuna

At the wedding celebration for Laurencia and Frondoso in Fuenteovejuna , Barrildo and Mengo have a brief exchange (vv. 1491-500) in which the word melezina (enema) appears in three guises: it is a cure (“aunque es cosa saludable”), a prank (“haríalo por reír”) and a form of rough treatment (“llena de tinta y de chinas”). Analysis of the origin and usage of melezina and its sociolinguistic features points to the proposition that it resonated as an archaic and Jewish word which, in turn, suggests that Fuenteovejuna might enact mimetic transference between Jew and peasant, a position I stake out based on existing scholarship on Spain’s “Jewish problem” in relation to the comedia . Taking her cues from Américo Castro’s and others’ provocative comments on the relationship between limpieza de sangre and honor, Melveena McKendrick postulates that a process of mimetic transference was underway that involved caballeros ’ honor, women’s purity, and society’s obsession with limpieza de sangre . She characterizes it as a type of psychopathology, according to which one disease masks another; playwrights who could not write about blood purity addressed sexual pureness and male honor instead. More recently, Andrew Herskovits explores the transpositions of honor and limpieza de sangre , and Jew and woman, and the possibility that a positive image of the Jew emerges when plays draw parallels between a converso , on the one hand, and a female victim of the honor code on the other. Empathy explains them both. That is, what concern one elicits, the spectator or reader reassigns to the other (117-25). The notion of transference involving peasant and Jew may be operative in Fuenteovejuna . But in this instance, humor, not empathy, is behind the parallel. An analysis of melezina opens up the concept of mimetic transference to admit the figure of the peasant and the role of humor.

Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity by Miriam Eliav-Feldon (review)

Reviewed by: Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity by Miriam Eliav-Feldon Mark S. Dawson Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; hardback; pp. viii, 292; R.R.P. US$92.00, £60.00; ISBN 9780230547063. This study examines the phenomenon of assumed identity, of passing for somebody one was not, in early modern Europe. It seeks to explain why [End Page 205] people perpetrated such frauds and how the powerful improvised technologies of authentication. Imposture flourished, or doubts about social authenticity were abnormally high in this period, for several reasons. However, the root cause, Miriam Eliav-Feldon contends (in Chapter 2, disproportionately the longest), was religious strife, compounded by serial failures in authentication; those who had claimed or been judged to be of one community were eventually found to belong to another confession or class, prompting further waves of anxiety that all were not as they seemed. The conversion of Jews and Muslims in Spain, Catholics in Protestant territories, and Europeans in the Moorish Mediterranean, triggered religious dissimulation and panic about fifth columns and raised questions concerning the nature of faith and the reliability of knowledge based on sensory perception. Paradoxically, the wars of religion within and without Christendom, between the later fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, lent plausibility to impostures and otherwise help explain the credulity of contemporaries who took the bait. For example, in the early 1520s, David Reuveni presented himself as the princely emissary for several Tribes of Israel. Both Portuguese and Venetian authorities welcomed him because of the implications for their continuing – yet at times apocalyptic – struggle against Suleiman I. Similarly with the pretence of those alleging they came from the realm of Prester John to aid Western Christendom in its time of need. Layers of deception piled one on top of the other, and this circumstance seems to be the justification for discussing other sorts of impostor: sturdy beggars, false saints, witches, and gypsies (Chapters 4–5). Thus indigents could themselves pretend to be the victims of Ottoman tyranny. Witches masqueraded as proper Christians and mystics were exposed as servants of Satan. And there are suggestions that the Roma presented themselves as pilgrims before they became vagrant. Fatal assumptions were made about their true origin and character: assumptions the Roma may occasionally have owned but which were otherwise foisted on them and appropriated by false gypsies, serving only to tarnish further their reputation. The official response (Chapters 6–8) was varied. Some sought to cure the epidemic with a regime of corporal punishment. Prevention, or at least faltering attempts at it, relied upon policing the appearance of the well-to-do courtesy of sumptuary legislation and watching for bodies marked by earlier run-ins with the law. As more people were thought to be dressing above their station in the context of urban anonymity, or otherwise disguising past stigmas, attempts were made to use bureaucracy rather than bodies to prove identities. Veritable (and verifiable) paper trails were gradually established with central registers, licences and passports, health certificates, and university testimonials. [End Page 206] Citing examples from across Europe, Eliav-Feldon draws extensively on scholarship in several languages. Notwithstanding its ambitious scope and the evidentiary challenges, some will find this collation not quite to their taste. The Introduction avers that this is not a study of identity. However, this seems at odds with establishing imposters’ motives, or arguments for the growing prominence of lineage, and with it the emergence of a racialist mentality. Despite the importance of Spanish edicts concerning blood purity (limpieza de sangre), more than one reference to heraldry’s semiotics (p. 182) would strengthen the case that European elites were preoccupied with who was who. Likewise, consideration of transvestitism, as part of a deliberate fraud, probably requires acknowledgement of ambiguous premodern understandings of sexual difference per se. Notwithstanding some case studies, the book tantalises with terse references to the historiography. Particularly when it comes to the proving of identity, and unmasking impostors, mention is made of archives bearing final witness, but direct quotation from these materials is sparing. This abridges the very processes of identification, of identifying as someone or being identified as somebody else. Some...

Radical Presence / The Shadows Took Shape

In Pretending to Be Rock (1993), an 11-minute video documentation of a two-hour performance action, artist Sherman Fleming, partially nude. is positioned on his hands and knees below a makeshift candelabrum. A pool of hot wax accumulates on Fleming's back, and an unnamed female collaborator in a brown unitard and harness hangs from ceiling as water steadily runs over her from head to toe. Herr. Fleming's back becomes a site of trauma, and scene a channeled expression of horrors of chattel slavery. But just as Fleming's male body registers scarring and wounding effects of bondage. it also bears weight of wax and. more importantly, representation--that is, expectations of blackness and masculinity. As camera pans, audience members look on in twe, recalling spectacles--arranged and spontaneous--that served as subjects of lynching photography. Fleming's performance activates tensions between body and American imaginary, and sets tone for Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporariy Art, a group exhibition curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver that originated at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2012. As first comprehensive survey of performance art by artists, Radical Presence chronicles work by thirty-six artists from 1960s to present. Presented in two parts, Part I was on view at NYU's Grey Art Gallery in fall 2013 and Part II is on view at Studio Museum in Harlem to March 2014. As Fleming's Pretending suggests. body as political tool and social signifier, exercises in endurance, and place of documentation within performance art practice all figure prominently in exhibition. Radical Presence asks, 'What is 'black' about performance art? while also calling into question if and how one performs blackness. As Cassel Oliver notes in her exhibition catalog essay, black visual artists have embraced expectations of blackness and performance to make something dim plays on existential nature of a historical spectacle [of chattel slavery]. (1) But rather than reinforcing a reductive link between cultural production and protest--black political speech as primarily didactic. for example works in Radical Presence break open easy elisions that seek to forestall expressive qualities of visual work. Along with Pretending, both Palm Cobs Superman 51 (1977) and Shaun El C. Leonardo's El Conquistador vs. The Invisible Man (2004-07) interrogate how male body manifests within United States and diasporic contexts. In Superman 51, Colo, a contemporary of David Hammons, Pope.L, and Lorraine O'Grady to name just a few who are also featured in Radical Presence), drags fifty-one wooden sticks inscribed with names of each US state with addition of Puerto Rico (Cob's birthplace) behind him as he runs down a deserted West Side Highway in Manhattan. The action, performed several times in response to rejection of Gerald Ford's 1976 proposal to grant statehood to Puerto Rico, not only reveals how US nationhood is constructed but also who and what comprises US (black) body politic. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Similarly, El Conquistador vs. The Invisible Man, performed thirty years after Superman 51, shows Leonardo, who is of Dominican and Guatemalan heritage, repeatedly battling metaphor of Du Boisian double consciousness; his fictional foe is at once present and absent, visible yet invisible. What's more, Leonardo stages his wrestling match through yet another spectacular arena in which racialization occurs: sports. And according to Cassel Oliver, Leonardo's attempts to conquer his unseen opponent echo the atrocities of Dominican Republic's version of limpieza de sangre (literally, cleanliness of blood) in its efforts to erase and eradicate vestiges of blackness among its own people. (2) Together, Colo and Leonardo represent generational approaches to blackness and maleness through a critique of what constitutes the nation. …

Production of plasma-derived medicinal products: ethical implications for blood donation and donors.

It is not only useless, but probably also tactless to remind a meeting of haematology experts of the importance of blood. But its relevance is such that a reminder is nonetheless useful. Two definitions of blood significantly reveal a glaring contrast: blood “est synonyme de vie, de force, de sante, de noblesse, de descendance”, while at the same time blood “represente la maladie, la mort e la guerre, les maladies hereditaires, l'etranger et la haine raciste”1. Another of the numerous examples of this contrast is to be found in the laws relating to “limpieza de sangre” enacted in Spain between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and so well described by David Biale, Professor of Jewish history, in “Blood and belief: the circulation of a symbol between Jews and Christians”2. Even when it is not directly paid for, a complex global network of trade in biological material ensures that the donation of blood involves the movement of large sums of money, albeit not for profit. Some authors have likened this material to a sort of “corporeal currency”. Roberto Esposito, for example, coined the expression “immunitary paradigm” in which immunity has become the basis of a “bioeconomic flow, circulation and exchange”3. It is also worth recalling that the words “immunitas” and “communitas”, while having profoundly different meanings, nonetheless share a common etymological root, “munus”, meaning both “gift” and “obligation”. “Communitas” means sharing, reciprocity, while “immunitas”, whether used in biomedical or in legal contexts, means closure, a resistance to reciprocity, protection against sharing. For the purposes of the present considerations, both can refer to the notion of “gift relationship” coined by Richard Titmuss4. The donation of umbilical cord blood is a demonstration of altruism that could perhaps restore some kind of harmony between the two concepts5. In the specific case of plasma-derived products, on the 12th April, 2012, the Italian Ministry for Health enacted four new decrees regarding: the processing of plasma collected in Italy; the import and export of human blood and blood-derived products; the marketing of products derived from human plasma, and the presentation and assessment of applications for registration as centres or companies authorised to enter into agreements with local governments for the processing of plasma6–9. As with many bioethical issues, it is helpful to address the question using a triangular approach. The first -and perhaps most important- side of the triangle is represented by technical-scientific data. “Bad science, bad ethics”: the first requisite for ethics is a sound scientific base. The second side of the triangle is represented by the values at stake; and the third side by the ethical evaluation that springs from the first two. The first consideration will be omitted here: it is not the bioethicist’s job to illustrate the technical-scientific aspects of blood to an audience of experienced haematologists. Instead, I shall consider the second and third sides of the triangle.

El Peso de La Sangre: Limpios, Mestizos Y Nobles En El Mundo Hispánico

This collection of ten essays, prefaced by an introduction coauthored by the volume’s editors, originated as a colloquium convened at El Colegio de México in 2007. In keeping with María Elena Martínez’s recent study of limpieza de sangre, the volume traces how a set of religiously grounded hierarchies established in Spain was transformed in Spanish America into more overtly racial (or proto-racial) systems of difference based increasingly on phenotype. Although the book opens with an excellent overview of late medieval and early modern Iberian history by Max S. Hering Torres and concludes with a discussion of twentieth-century formulations of mestizaje by Guillermo Zermeño, it is firmly anchored in early Latin American history with a slight emphasis on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Likewise, a few of the chapters adopt a transatlantic framework, but the volume’s overall focus is New Spain with an occasional nod to the Andes.Several overarching questions and approaches hold the collection together. While proof of purity of blood was necessary to procure a wide range of offices, honors, and appointments, the authors highlight ecclesiastical institutions (mainly the Inquisition, but also confraternities, Jesuit-run schools, and the Franciscan order). They also emphasize disparities between policy and practice. Solange Alberro reminds us how genealogical inquiries were hampered by a host of challenges that beset early modern society, including faulty family and community oral histories that rarely extended beyond three or four generations, the ease and frequency by which individuals adopted new surnames and identities, and communication difficulties. Present in Spain, these obstacles were far more detrimental in the New World, where growing racial intermixture required an institutional and social recalibration of the meaning of purity and nobility. Churchmen and jurists recognized that these flaws not only enabled candidates to conceal their ancestral stains, but the spirit of the process itself could be undermined by attempts to sully a rival’s reputation through innuendo or false accusations. The volume showcases numerous instances of probable or definitive concealment. Yet more interesting, perhaps, is Javier Sanchiz’s suggestion that a great many of those found to have converso ancestry in sixteenth-century Mexico were likely as surprised as the Inquisitors themselves.The contributors accord as much attention to the men who headed ecclesiastical institutions as they do to those they vetted. The Inquisition, we learn, responded to evolving local social and political circumstances, evidencing, in the words of Nikolaus Böttcher, a “slow but effective modernization” to safeguard its continued relevance (p. 204). While this flexibility originally entailed overlooking the Jewish ancestry of influential colonial functionaries and later shifted to a concern over racial impurities of indios, mestizos, and castas, it ultimately involved a recognition that genealogical investigations had become “a mere formality” in a society as thoroughly intermixed as late colonial New Spain (p. 215). Alexandre Coello de la Rosa and Norma Angélica Castillo Palma highlight a similar willingness among some clergy to open educational opportunities to capable candidates of plebeian and uncertain racial stock, even if such tolerance proved fleeting (in one instance prompted by the need to fill Indian parishes with bilingual priests following a wave of secularization).The volume is best at revealing the attitudes and mores of colonial society’s elite and middle sectors. Even within these groups, however, our view is somewhat circumscribed. As Sanchiz points out, scholars working with official inquiries into purity of blood confront an unfortunate filter effect in that these processes excluded those who did not bother to submit to an investigation knowing full well what authorities might uncover. Castillo Palma extends her analysis the furthest down the social hierarchy, showing how late colonial mulattoes and Indians began producing their own proofs of descent that omitted ignoble branches of the family tree, thereby contributing to an ongoing process of social whitening (a point seconded by Böttcher). Such interpretations may suggest a top-down acceptance for the meaning of race, although Bernd Hausberger’s intriguing essay on the Basques moves in a different direction. Reminiscent of David Nirenberg’s study of the dialogical process at play in the rereading of lineage among fifteenth-century Jews, Christians, and conversos, Hausberger traces how Basque identity was shaped by a creative refashioning of Castilian notions of purity and nobility. By favoring language and a biblical forefather (Noah’s grandson Tubal) over religion, the Basques claimed to be the direct descendants of the original Iberians, untainted by subsequent influxes into the peninsula. This imagined past bolstered claims of a universal nobility (hidalguía universal) that extended even to those who practiced base occupations.Scholars of race and religion will welcome this fine collection. As is often the case with anthologies, some of the essays are more ambitious and fully developed than others, but on the whole they work well together, offering intriguing points of comparison concerning the function and meaning of purity of blood and nobility across the Spanish Atlantic.