‘He Seems Like a Morisco to Me, / Even in the Way He Talks’: Articulating morisco Difference in Lope de Vega and Cervantes

ABSTRACT

Between 1609 and 1614, after over a century of forced conversions, cultural oppression and inquisitorial persecution, Spain expelled its morisco subjects. Despite being baptised Christians, the descendants of Spain's Muslim population had been deemed incapable of sincerely following the Christian faith and assimilating into society due to their inherent Islamic beliefs. Building upon Deborah Root's argument that the moriscos were collectively persecuted for their perceived cultural and genealogical ‘deviance’, which were both interpreted as evidence of the New Christians' alleged heresy, this argument contends that the characterisation of the moriscos through these lenses of difference constitutes an early form of race‐making. The casting of the moriscos as a distinct nation and race throughout the early modern period represented a racialisation of the moriscos ' suspected religion that presented the moriscos ' cultural differences—particularly their clothing and language—and Muslim ancestry as fixed and irrevocable markers of difference, and thereby proof of their collective Otherness and inability to sincerely convert to Christianity. This study looks at how these two rhetorics of race‐making were incorporated into Spanish literary characterisations of the moriscos . Focusing on works by Félix Lope de Vega and Miguel de Cervantes, I highlight how both authors depend on these rhetorics in the construction of their fictive morisco characters. Looking at Lope's characterisation of ‘false’ moriscos onstage alongside the ‘true’ Christian figures encountered within Cervantes's prose works, I will reveal that, while both authors are complicit in perpetuating these rhetorics of difference, there are instances in which they destabilise the ‘fixed’ image of the morisco as a racialised religious Other.