In this learned and detailed study, Antonio Urquízar-Herrera charts early modern Christian Spanish responses to Morisco buildings, and particularly to three iconic structures: the mosque of Córdoba, the Alhambra in Granada, and the Giralda, the former minaret, in Seville. The book traces what might be described as the conversion of buildings themselves, an architectural reconquista wrought not only via actual changes to the built environment, but the description and conceptualization of the structures across time. Urquízar-Herrera’s title—“admiration and awe”—describes only one register of the complex reaction to these monuments, which he carefully traces across several centuries of historiography. The author explains that he uses the term Morisco to describe the buildings because that is how his sources refer to them, yet his terminology may be confusing to scholars in the US, for whom Morisco is now very specifically associated with the Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity over the course of the sixteenth century and their descendants.
Urquízar-Herrera defines three stages of response to the architectural hybridity of the built environment: a triumphalist incorporation as buildings were claimed for the Christian victors in the immediate aftermath of conquest, a classicizing move that assigned monuments an earlier existence as pre-Islamic structures, and, finally, a religious appropriation that sought to confirm the “genealogical precedence of Christianity” (127) on Iberian soil. He traces these stages through an impressive number of both local and national historiographies, focusing on Ambrosio de Morales’s Antigüedades de las ciudades de España (1575), Rodrigo Caro’s Antigüedades y principado de la ilustríssima ciudad de Sevilla (1634), and Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza’s two volumes on Granada: the Antigüedades y excelencias (1608) and the Historia eclesiástica (1638). A final section charts the impact of these constructions by analyzing a wide range of reactions, textual and otherwise.
As Urquízar-Herrera points out, early modern Christian historiographers went beyond simply celebrating the return to the moment immediately before the 711 invasion. Instead, they strove to present the “restoration” of Christianity as “a natural feature of the Spanish nation” (130) by imagining that it had preceded Islam in Spain and could be reconstructed from material remains. The stakes were high: “The earlier Christianity could be said to have arrived in the Peninsula, the more inconsequent the Islamic parenthesis became” (130). Antiquities, and particularly the built traces of Al-Andalus, became a central ground on which this conceptual battle was fought, as they both enabled and complicated the historiographical project, providing whatever shards of evidence could be mustered. Notable buildings were populated with saints and martyrs so as to capture their prestige for Christianity while minimizing the presence of Islam, in the attempt to “sidestep the memory of Islam as a feature of national identity” (6).
Urquízar-Herrera’s study expands on important recent work by Mercedes García-Arenal, Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, A. Katie Harris, Katrina Olds, and others to show how closely connected the study of antiquity was to the pressing negotiation of Islam, as present threat and unavoidable part of Iberian history. His focus on the historiography of buildings, while important and fruitful, revisits very slippery questions that this study will not put to rest. When are buildings Islamic, and when are they Iberian? What does hybridity mean, in the context of such contested appropriation? How can contemporary architectural history, after post-structuralism, both note the interestedness of earlier classifications based on style, and yet rely on similar categories? None of these larger questions detract from the value of Urquízar-Herrera’s study, even if they might have been addressed more fully. Although he convincingly explains how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spaniards used notions of stylistic difference to support their ideological interventions, he nonetheless echoes their exclusivist frameworks when he refers repeatedly to “Islamic” architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or “modern Islamic decorations or architectural features” (16, 149). In what way can these be Islamic, rather than Iberian, once Islam is proscribed?
Despite these theoretical caveats, this is a useful study and one that will be of interest to students of early modern Iberia across the fields. From our own vexed political moment in the US, it is instructive to recall just how powerful—and entirely constructed—are arguments for restoration to a moment of previous glory or plenitude. Urquízar-Herrera’s book shows how effectively those arguments were applied to the great momuments of Andalusi building in Spain, in a concerted attempt to repurpose them for exclusionary nation-building.
