Moors Dressed as Moors: Clothing, Social Distinction and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia

Description

In early modern Iberia, Moorish clothing was not merely a cultural remnant from the Islamic period, but an artefact that conditioned discourses of nobility and social preeminence. In Moors Dressed as Moors, Javier Irigoyen-García draws on a wide range of sources: archival, legal, literary, and visual documents, as well as tailoring books, equestrian treatises, and festival books to reveal the currency of Moorish clothing in early modern Iberian society. Irigoyen-García’s insightful and nuanced analyses of Moorish clothing production and circulation shows that as well as being a sign of status and a marker of nobility, it also served to codify social tensions by deploying apparent Islamophobic discourses. Such luxurious value of clothing also sheds light on how sartorial legislation against the Moriscos was not only a form of cultural repression, but also a way to preclude their full integration into Iberian society. Moors Dressed as Moors challenges the traditional interpretations of the value of Moorish clothing in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain and how it articulated the relationships between Christians and Moriscos. Cover Copyright page Contents Acknowledgments Illustrations Introduction: “Moors Dressed as Moors” Part One: “Morisma nueva de Christianos”: Iberian Christian Moorish Clothing 1 Moors at Court 2 Moorish Clothing and Nobility 3 Unlawful Moorishness 4 Lope’s Moors: Self-Fashioning and Resentment Part Two: Moorishness in the Eye of the Beholder: Moriscos as Dressed Bodies 5 Policing Moriscos in Sixteenth-Century Granada 6 Searching for the Iberian Moorish Morisco 7 Moriscos Performing as Moors 8 Moriscos as Theatrical Bodies Conclusions Notes Works Cited Index