‘Carajicomedia’: Parody and Satire in Early Modern Spain, Frank A. Dominguez (original) (raw)
Related papers
2020
This book investigates the interactions between Muslims and Christians in the late medieval and early modern period from the perspective of sexual and gender transgressions. The first part analyses normative discourses and literary texts in the Arabic, Turkish Ottoman and Spanish worlds, highlighting continuities and fractures. The second part explores concrete interactions between Muslim and Christians, reconstructed through the study of criminal sources from the archives of the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions. The essays collected here reveal to what extent reflecting on sexual and gender non-conformity constitutes a vantage point for reconstructing the cross-cultural interactions between Christianity and Islam in the Mediterranean world. On the one hand, proscribed sexual behaviours and gendered performances opened the possibility for connections in semi-clandestine networks of sociability that would have been inconceivable in other settings. On the other, cross-religious sexual and emotional exchanges sometimes favoured processes of religious hybridisation or the development of skeptic attitudes towards institutionalised faiths.
Zoraida and Carcayona. Female Christian and Muslim Converts in Early Modern Spanish Literature
Entangled Religions, 2024
Studies on the representation of Muslim women in early modern Spanish literature are not numerous, and aspects of their religious identities and conversions are usually less examined. This paper focuses on the role of female Muslim characters in texts written between the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Spain. In these works the female protagonists convert to a new faith: One to Islam, the other to Christianity. In doing so, they cut ties with the fatherly figure in order to follow the new religion. My research attempts to answer two questions: What does the paternal house represent in regards to the faith that the daughters are rejecting? What role does Islam play in the different approach to female characters' faith? In order to carry out my study, I analyze two texts: The first one is La leyenda de la doncella Carcayona (Legend of the Damsel Carcayçiyona) (Aragon, c. 1587), where the protagonist, Carcayçiyona, abandons paganism for Islam; the second is Miguel de Cervantes's "Historia del cautivo" ("The Captive's Tale"), a novella inserted in his famous Don Quixote, Part I (Madrid, 1605), where Zoraida, the daughter of a wealthy and powerful Algerian Muslim, converts from Islam to Christianity. By setting parallels among the female protagonists' religious conversion and focusing on their voluntary estrangement from their fathers, I argue that in both texts, fathers represent the rejected faith while daughters are depicted as the carriers of the newly adopted religion, be it Islam or Christianity. More importantly, since in both cases women are formerly or newly converted Muslims, and the texts are produced in a Christian-ruled nation, this paper underscores the complexities of the encounters between Islam and Christianity in a Mediterranean setting.
Studying the Near and Middle East at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1935-2018, 2018
The eventful twelfth century was, in many ways, a veritable paradox. On the one hand, it saw a sudden surge in academic works and universities in Western and Southern Europe that sought to bridge the worlds previously thought entirely incommensurable and usher in an age of scholasticism that would eventually lead to the fourteenth- to seventeenth-century Renaissance. For this reason, it has been a staple of mediaevalist scholarship for quite some time now to describe those thorough-going changes as the ‘renaissance of the twelfth century’. On the other hand, the same century also reads as a striking catalogue of most violent acts and disasters: from the rise of inquisition and merciless Christian infighting, over the first expulsions of Jews and the intensification of the Reconquista on Muslim Spain to the blood and gore of the Second, Third and German Crusades. Might it not be more appropriate, then, to characterise this period as an age of profound crisis, in which the true contours of a ‘persecuting society’ were drawn This paper seeks to make a modest contribution to that debate, by guiding the audience’s attention to a tell-tale aspect of high mediaeval life—that of sexual and gender diversity—and by expanding the view over the twelfth century so as to include the affairs in the Great Seljuk Empire (1037–1194), a vast Turko-Persianate Sunnī Muslim state that originated in Anatolia but quickly came to rule over much of the then Islamicate world. The paper considers, in particular, an unlikely rise of neo-Roman European civil law and Seljuk proto-civil legality and its formidable effect on two paradigmatic twelfth-century intellectual debates on the legal and theological standing of ‘sodomy’ (peccatum sodomiticum, liwāṭ): one in amongst prominent Benedictines and the other between the leading Ḥanafī scholars. It is argued that these debates, led in the distinct spirit of concordia discors (discordant harmony) or ikhtilāf (permissible scholarly disagreement), are indispensable for our understanding of legal and social aspects of sexual and gender diversity in the twelfth century and, in turn, the way in which certain rapturous pluralities were continued and ruptured—concomitantly.
Indecent Theology: Sex and Female Heresy in Counter-Reformation Spain
Renaissance Quarterly, 2020
In 1636, the Spanish Inquisition tried María de la Cruz for heresy and having made a pact with the devil. Examination of her trial in light of information about sexual misconduct on the part of Catholic clerics, however, reveals that what drove María to the emotional and behavioral extremes that her accusers described was neither heresy nor the devil the authorities had in mind. Theologians who evaluated her case and also met with María discerned what those who only read the accusations against her were unable to know: María's devils were human men taking advantage of a poor, illiterate woman for sex.
Journal of Medieval History, 2008
This essay introduces a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History on the topic of ‘Conversing with the minority: relations among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Women in the High Middle Ages’. Despite the fact that both interfaith relations and women’s history are now well established subdisciplines within the field of medieval studies, the question of how medieval women themselves established cross-sectarian relations has rarely been explored. Documenting women’s history is almost always problematic because of limited source materials, but this essay suggests that much can be learned by looking at areas where Christian, Jewish, and Muslim women shared certain facets of their lives: either by reason of social relations tied to religion and ethnicity (moneylending being a common bond between Jewish and Christian women, slavery between Christian women and Muslims) or by reason of events that connected them due to their shared sex and gender (childbirth, caring for the dead, even cosmetics). By actively looking for ‘spaces’ where women would be found, we can begin to hear the dialogues that passed among women across religious lines. Included here is a critique of my own earlier account of the trial of Jacoba Felicie, a female medical practitioner in Paris who was tried for illegal practice in 1322. I point out that the cluster of Jewish and Christian women (including a convert) and men involved in her case gives an example both of "hidden" interactions and our own blindness as historians to them.