Desirable Moors and Moriscos in literary texts
Desirable Moors and Moriscos in literary texts
In “Chapter Six,” Lee proposes that the maurophilic trend in literature, which romanticized the Moor before he became a Morisco, may be interpreted as evidence that Old Christians were more at ease in situations where the assigned inferior subjects carried visible signs of difference. In her readings of Historia del Abencerraje y la hermosa Jarifa, Morisco ballads, the first part of Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El Tuzaní de la Alpujarra, she finds that Spaniards may have been attracted to the figure of the noble Moor because he embodied the exemplary defeated enemy. The Moor’s conspicuous exoticism made him desirable and ultimately domesticable by the Christian Knights. Lee further explores the Old Christian attraction to the exotic Christianized subject in Cervantes’ tale of the Moriscos Ricote and Ana Félix in the second part of Don Quijote de la Mancha (1615).
Keywords: Don Quijote de la Mancha, Cervantes, Ricote, Calderón de la Barca, El Tuzaní de la Alpujarra, El Abencerraje, Maurophilia, Ginés Pérez de Hita, Guerras Civiles de Granada
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