The Arts of Encounter: Christians, Muslims, and the Power of Images in Early Modern Spain by Catherine Infante (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Arts of Encounter: Christians, Muslims, and the Power of Images in Early Modern Spain by Catherine Infante
• Lisette Balabarca-Fataccioli

Catherine Infante. The Arts of Encounter: Christians, Muslims, and the Power of Images in Early Modern Spain. U OF TORONTO P, 2022. 264 PP.

IN THIS EXHAUSTIVE STUDY, Catherine Infante explores a topic sometimes overlooked in studies about the relationship between Christians and Muslims in early modern Spain. Following on the steps of Felipe Pereda's book on image worship among religious minorities in his Images of Discord: Poetics and Politics of the Sacred Image in Fifteenth-Century Spain (trans. by Consuelo Lopez-Morillas, Harvey Miller Publishers, 2019), Infante draws on portrayals of religious icons in fictional narratives, poetry, theater, and nonfictional sources such as historical chronicles, religious treatises, Inquisition cases, travel accounts, and testimonies of Christian captives. She bases her analysis on sources written in Spanish, Arabic, and Aljamiado. The book also highlights paintings and engravings, as well as relics and effigies that accompanied depictions of Christians and Muslims' encounters. Drawing on W. J. T. Mitchell's concept of "vernacular visuality," she explores how daily-life encounters with devotional images and objects shaped the ways in which Christians understood both Moriscos and Muslims, and vice versa. One of the ultimate goals of The Arts of Encounter is to shed light on visual images as they expressed the intricacies of interreligious connections and the fluidity of religious identities.

Infante's most sustained focus throughout is Christian iconography, especially images of the Crucifixion, the Virgin Mary, and Christ. She studies their role in literary works by writers like Lope de Vega and Miguel de Cervantes, as well as in chronicles written by the apologists of the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 or in texts that depict Mediterranean sites of contact where devotional icons worked as mediators in the context of warfare resulting from Christian–Muslim rivalries. The first three chapters focus on Moriscos and their conflictive relationship with Old Christians in Spain during the years before and immediately after their expulsion. The final three chapters consider the confrontations between Christian and Muslims in the Mediterranean, mainly in North Africa.

Chapter 1, "Moriscos between Cross and Crescent," opens with the decree of expulsion of Moriscos, exploring how the apologists of the edict justified the [End Page 427] drastic measure by centering their claims on Moriscos' desecration of Christian icons, specifically the cross. Such works by Jaime Bleda, Marcos de Guadalajara y Xavier, Pedro Aznar Cardona, and Damián Fonseca are highlighted here. This chapter emphasizes the analysis of the cross, construed by Church and Crown authorities as the symbol of Muslims' defeat and the response to the crescent moon, interpreted by Christians as a Muslim symbol but used by some Moriscos as a talisman, which in their view had to be replaced by the Christian crucifix. Opposing the apologists' propagandistic texts, the chapter proposes Cervantes's Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda as an alternate example of how early modern Spanish writers understood the Moriscos' relationship to Christian religious icons. Here, Infante emphasizes the role of the novel's Morisca character Rafala, whose actions challenge the intolerant apologists' view of Moriscos in seventeenth-century Spain. Additionally, she matches the literary images of Moriscos with visual representations, such as their depictions in Francisco Heylán's engravings in Justino Antolínez de Burgos's Historia eclesiástica de Granada and Pere Oromig's depiction of the embarkation of expelled Moriscos at the Valencian waterfront.

Chapter 2, "Text against Image in Moriscos' Literary Culture," centers on visual religious culture from a Morisco perspective, drawing on Morisco writings in Spanish, Arabic, and Aljamiado. If the previous chapter emphasized the cross and the crescent from the Christians' point of view, this one delves into Moriscos' attitudes against idols; that is, the Catholic devotional images Moriscos were forced to venerate and their preference for the Arabic script as a form of resistance against the imposition of such images by officials from the Church or the Inquisition. A key focus here is, in consequence, the power of Morisco texts over Christian images, as the chapter centers first on a discussion among Moriscos regarding the...