Abstract
Reviewed by: James S. Amelang, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Fuenteovejuna is a small town in southern Spain, not far from Córdoba. A play by Lope de Vega converted it into a symbol known throughout the world of resolute action on the part of villagers whose desire for justice outweighed their respect for the letter of the law. Some 150 miles to the northeast, in the part of La Mancha known as the Campo de Calatrava, lies Villarrubia de los Ojos. It is not a household name; indeed, most Spaniards today probably have not heard of it. That a less dramatic, but equally successful type of collective mobilization took place there during the same decade Lope wrote his play is even less well known. But its tale has now found its teller.
In the early seventeenth century Villarrubia was a relatively prosperous settlement of 3,000–4,000 inhabitants. Approximately 40 per cent of them were moriscos, that is, descendants of Muslims who had converted to Christianity by 1502, when, following centuries of religious co-existence, Islam was banned in the kingdom of Castile. A century later, various factors combined to lead King Philip III to decree the expulsion of virtually all such ‘New Christians’ from the various territories of the Hispanic Monarchy. A royal edict of 22 March 1611 ordered Villarrubia’s moriscos to leave Spain via the royal highway that took them through Madrid to the French border at Irún. How the town’s population – both Old and New Christians – connived to ignore, then resist, and finally neutralize this attempt at ‘ethnic cleansing’ – a strong but appropriate term – is the theme of this engaging and important study by the literary scholar Trevor Dadson.
The keyword here is assimilation. Long before the expulsion came around, Villarrubia’s morisco population was thoroughly integrated into the dominant rhythms of local economic, social and religious life. Dadson’s exhaustive exploration of the documentary record from this town and its neighbours reveals New Christians holding municipal offices, belonging to devotional confraternities, and occupying positions of trust and responsibility in the broader community. Such deep embeddedness contrasted sharply with conditions in regions such as Valencia and Granada, where most moriscos tended to live in fairly isolated rural communities, which made it easier for them to maintain not only a separate identity but also greater allegiance to the faith of their ancestors. Thus it comes as less of a surprise that when the expulsion orders reached Villarrubia, New Christians there found crucial sources of support from a wide range of allies. These included members of the local clergy, lower-level officials, and the town’s seigneurial lord, the count of Salinas, who had much to lose from their departure. These sympathetic and resourceful individuals, along with neighbours from all walks of life, provided crucial assistance to the moriscos’ tactic of incessant obstruction and evasion of the royal edicts. Thanks to such broad-based efforts, Villarrubia’s minority population survived this existential threat relatively unscathed.
Dadson does not hesitate to draw broader conclusions from the singular historical experience of this small place in La Mancha. He is most forceful when debunking the official propaganda that accompanied and justified the expulsion, and on which later historians have relied too heavily, even in accounts that present it in a critical light. (I count myself among the admonished; for the record, Dadson is right.) He is also skilful at highlighting the contradictions and tacit admissions of failure and mistakes in official correspondence and other state papers. Finally, he keeps an eye open for cases elsewhere marked by the same combination of factors that made coexistence between Old and New Christians possible in Villarrubia. That said, the author’s enthusiasm might lead an uncautious reader to assume that what happened there may have represented more of a norm that it did. In the end one has the impression that Villarrubia and, say, Valencia represented the opposite ends of a spectrum of possibilities, and that it is high time that the hitherto hidden history of the former had its due.
This book has its origins in a very large tome (1,326 pages!) published in 2006. Its size and shape are quite different, however, as it brings together a series of short articles written while the author was undertaking his extensive archival research. Despite the occasional repetition, it summarizes with enviable clarity the main findings of the Spanish original for an English-language audience. The most forceful message that such readers will carry away – that ‘early modern Spain was a more varied and tolerant society than one might think’ (241) – is a fitting corrective to standard views of a complex, contradictory past that is too heavily burdened with facile and monolithic stereotypes.