Download PDF | Urquízar Herrera, Antonio - Admiration and awe _ Morisco buildings and identity negotiations in early modern Spanish historiography-Oxford University Press (2017).
289 Pages
Preface
The Islamic Stones of Spain, Today Interest in this book today essentially derives from its aim of recovering interpretations of Spain’s Islamic monuments that have been pushed aside by the cultural and ideological power of the modern Orientalist myth. Awareness of those early modern discourses is significant because they did not vanish overnight, but merely became superficially less visible. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were common currency in parallel with other complementary or even contradictory narratives. Eventually, their very ability to integrate guaranteed their survival, however out of focus they might be. The same ideas are still active today.
They re-emerge now and again, reconstituting the readings of Islamic architecture that arose in the wake of the taking of Granada, once the conquest and conversion stories had been told, Aljama mosques had begun to be called cathedrals (iglesias mayores), and the possibility of their being pre-Islamic foundations had started to be entertained.1 The endurance of these old Christianizing and antiquarian arguments is probably a consequence of the parallel survival of the agenda that gave birth to them almost 500 years ago.
For the past few decades, Córdoba Mosque has been an ideological micro-battlefield where popular perception of Spain’s multicultural Islamic past and the Christian essentialism of the bishops and clergy responsible for the building cross swords. Consciously or otherwise, the latter have echoed, word for word, the Christian appropriation arguments created in the Early Modern Period.2 The cathedral chapter, for instance, has fostered academic research into the primitive Visigothic church that may or may not have stood on the site of the mosque.3 In the meantime, tourist information on the monument issued by the Church today refers to the Islamic construction as an interruption in the temple’s Christian nature and history.
This attempt to interfere with visitors’ interpretation of the building, when most of them are precisely seeking encounters with the Islamic past, is usually unsuccessful and many find it preposterous. It can be understood as an example of the staying power of sixteenth-century thinking. Seville’s Giralda, formerly the minaret of the Aljama Mosque and today the cathedral’s belfry, enjoys an iconic power that goes well beyond its original Islamic identity. This is a consequence of several centuries of narrative emphasis on the metonymic identification of the tower with its patron saints as the visible embodiment of the city. While the Christian genii loci incarnate the presumed eternal spirit of a city dominated by Catholic liturgy, the Islamic builders are but a small part of a mythical discourse in which the issue under debate is not religion. Since the nineteenth century, Seville’s romantic exoticism has never been essentially or exclusively Islamic.4
Lastly, in Granada, the sixteenth-century debate on the model of interconfessional religious coexistence is today livelier than ever. Washington Irving’s legacy seems to have obliterated all possibility of escaping the city’s natural identification with Islam. Even as it benefits from this image, however, local identity has never abandoned the Christianization discourse. Granada holds its controversial celebration of the Christian conquest year after year, and the myth of the Sacromonte Lead Books still thrives in the twenty-first century because some of the population believes that both narratives are necessary to counter the dazzling power of Granada’s Islamic heritage.5 These strategies were designed many years ago because, like other buildings of al-Andalus, the Alhambra was an icon that made it impossible to ignore the nation’s hybrid past. Generally speaking, Spain’s Islamic legacy is more alive today than ever as a cultural and tourist commodity for international consumption. It is also at the heart of the multiculturality debate that arose in the wake of September 11, 2001. This background feeds, to this day, the need for ideological negotiation through the monuments that embody our remembrance of the past.
NOTES ON ORIGINAL SOURCES
The rule of thumb I have followed with regard to sources used in researching this book has been to access the original texts in their first editions and in the language in which they were written. In the few cases where it was possible, as in Ambrosio de Morales’ Las antigüedades de las ciudades de España and Rodrigo Caro’s Antigüedades y principado de la ilustríssima ciudad de Sevilla, both manuscript and printed text were consulted. In the case of works that had several reprints in the author’s lifetime, the second or third edition has been quoted, as a general rule, as these tend to be the most complete and widely read versions.
This is the case, for example, of the histories of Spain written by Esteban de Garibay and Juan de Mariana, where the edition quoted has been checked against the first (shown in the footnotes as ‘quoted from’, followed by the publication year). Similarly, in the case of medieval manuscripts given to the press in the sixteenth century, these printed versions have been chosen because they were the most widely read in the Early Modern Period. For example, the quotes from Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada’s De Rebus Hispaniae (Historia Gothica) are from the Latin edition printed in 1545, although, on account of their impact on historiography, certain fragments of this work have been taken from the medieval Castilian translation by Gonzalo de Hinojosa subsequently annotated by Jerónimo Zurita.
With regard to manuscripts that did not go to press until recently, both versions have usually been consulted. Quotations refer, where possible, to the manuscript, as in Luis de Peraza’s history of Seville. In a dozen secondary cases, such as Francisco de la Cueva’s Relación de la guerra de Tremecén, the most recent edition has been used (shown in the footnotes as ‘ed.’ followed by the date). Among the core texts, only the Pablo de Céspedes manuscripts kept in Granada Cathedral were unavailable for consultation due to archive accessibility issues; in this case the modern editions were used instead. Fortunately, the edition by Jesús Rubio Lapaz and Fernando Moreno Cuadro replicates the amendments, crossings-out, and drawings of the original text.
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