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A contribution to: Reframing Exoticism in European Literature

Edited by Claudia Dellacasa and Hannah McIntyre

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 14

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  Early modern Spanish literature set before the fall of Granada (1492) that features characters from medieval al-Andalus has thus far been considered to be either idealized and thus ‘maurophile’ or exoticist and thus ‘maurophobe’. This article instead proposes a reconsideration of the true extent of ‘exoticism’ in early modern medievalist literature by offering a new reading of three of Lope de Vega’s comedias that feature Andalusi characters. El cordobés valeroso, Pedro Carbonero (1603), El bastardo Mudarra (1612) and El remedio en la desdicha (1620) all depict religio-cultural identity as contingent and move beyond aristocratic maurophilia in portraying broad panoramas of Andalusi society. These history plays subvert extant politicized readings of early modern literature featuring Muslim characters, in their ambivalence and scepticism towards the capacity of religio-cultural identity to define self and other, precisely because of the reality of Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages.

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