Moors Dressed as Moors: Clothing, Social Distinction and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia

by Javier Irigoyen-Garcia

In early modern Iberia, Moorish clothing was not merely a cultural remnant from the Islamic period, but an artefact that conditioned discourses of nobility and social preeminence. In Moors Dressed as Moors , Javier Irigoyen-García draws on a wide range of archival, legal, literary, and visual documents, as well as tailoring books, equestrian treatises, and festival books to reveal the currency of Moorish clothing in early modern Iberian society. Irigoyen-García’s insightful and nuanced analyses of Moorish clothing production and circulation shows that as well as being a sign of status and a marker of nobility, it also served to codify social tensions by deploying apparent Islamophobic discourses. Such luxurious value of clothing also sheds light on how sartorial legislation against the Moriscos was not only a form of cultural repression, but also a way to preclude their full integration into Iberian society. Moors Dressed as Moors challenges the traditional interpretations of the value of Moorish clothing in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain and how it articulated the relationships between Christians and Moriscos.

360 pages, Hardcover

Published April 5, 2017

Reviews

[Darian Burns · Rating 3 out of 5]

Javier Irigoyen-García, in his book Moors Dressed as Moors: Clothing, Social Distinction, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia, challenges past historical academic understandings of Morrish clothing. He does this by tracing the changing and developing ideas of what exactly is meant by “Moors dresses as Moors.” How was Moorish sartorial understood over time in the Iberian peninsula? How did Christians understand it? What sartorial edicts or laws, and how were they enforced? What was their purpose? Garcia looks at Morrish dress from the vantage point of religion, economics, ethnicity, commerce, and whatever other contextual angle he can find to fully flesh out how Moorish dress was used and seen during its time. Part of his hypothesis is that much of the past scholarship on Moorish dress centered primarily, if not only, around an exclusively narrow understanding centering around religion and ethnicity. Garcia’s thesis is that Moorish clothing served as a signifier of status and a marker of aristocracy.
Garcia uses the title of the book “moors dressing as Moors,” which comes from a soldier’s report of the Christmas Eve 1569 Granadian rebellion that was driven by a series of sartorial decrease by Phillip the second, as a spring board into call into question the past historiographic understandings of the issue. He does this by asking questions surrounding the soldier’s usage of the phrase “Moors dressed as Moors.” According to Garcia, Moro refers to a different meaning each time the phrase is used. It is used within a religious context, which is how scholars have historically looked at the word and by which they have built their thesis. However, a second use of the work refers to sartorial dressing practices and appearances.
It is this second use that most interests Garcia and by which he challenges past understandings of the words used.
Another way of understanding Garcia’s purpose is that he seeks to question the role of Moorish clothing within early Iberian society. He challenges past assumptions regarding the relationship between clothing and ethnicity. Furthermore, he critically evaluates Iberian sartorial traditions, both iconographic and historical, which he also presents. To do this, the author conducted considerable archival research and examined numerous sources. He uses decrees and edits, such as Phillip the Second’s 1567 banning of several Morisco cultural practices that he prohibited, including using Arabic speech, wearing Morisco clothing, and using traditional bathhouses. He points to different government records, such as Cartagena invoices, to make his point that although Pedro de Deza and Phillip the Second’s prohibitions were often unenforced, monarchs were firmly committed to “uproot “Morisco customs.” Likewise, as part of his analysis of social tensions surrounding the distribution and display of Moorish clothing, he uses ballads and other literary works.
The most substantial contribution Moors Dressing as Moors provides is a roadmap for one way to do historical work and challenge historiographic orthodoxies on specific periods, questions, events, areas of historical study, and potential theses. First, do not always assume that a historiographical consensus on an area of study is the only possibility. Question everything and look for new ways of seeing. Second, look for weaknesses in past historiographical approaches. Does the accepted consensus focus solely on one aspect of study or one way of understanding events? Have you exhausted your contextualization of the matter? Are their new ways and perspectives of seeing? Third, look for unturned stones when it comes to sources. Have past writings used many of the same primary sources? Can new primary sources be found? Fourth, are their academics who have not fallen into the central vein of accepted conclusions, and if they are, what are their findings, and how did they arrive at them? Fifth, just because there is a historiographical consensus does not mean it is wrong, but it also does not mean it is written.

[Josh McBride · Rating 4 out of 5]

First book for grad school! Read for a historiography section. Excellent argument and unique methodology. It's a foundational piece, so I'd love to see how scholarship develops after, but overall the writing was clear and accessible.