Spiller Elizabeth. Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance
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e conversion of the reader 129
that Catholics may have hoped for; it was certainly one that Protestants
feared.
47
Here, I would like to consider this idea by looking briefly at a notable
literary encounter between one of the prominent Hugenot military lead-
ers, François de La Noue (1531–91), and the chief translator of the English
editions of the Amadis cycle, Anthony Munday (1560–1633). Munday,
who also published under the pseudonym Lazarus Pyott, was the primary
source for the importation of romances into England in the sixteenth cen-
tury. Although a number of influential English romance writers read and
worked directly from the Herberay translations, Munday’s translations
were both popular and influential during this period. Having first writ-
ten an original romance, entitled Zelato (1580), Munday then undertook
translations of the first five books of the Amadis cycle (1590, 1595, 1598,
1618), as well as Palmerin of England (1595, 1602), Palmerin d’Oliva (1596),
and the first and second books of Primaleon of Greece (1595, 1596).
In his preface to Palmerin of England (1596), Munday includes a dedi-
cation to Frances Young in which he defends romances and romance
readers. is defense is notable because it responded to complaints that
La Noue made in his influential Discours politiques et militaires (1587).
Munday was clearly familiar with La Noue’s work and had translated La
Noue’s e Declaration of the Lord de la Noue, upon his taking armes for
the just defence of the townes of Sedan and Jametz (1589).
La Noue’s Discours was primarily a military and political treatise, but
as part of his attention to the proper training of soldiers, La Noue also cri-
tiqued what he saw as the dangers that could be caused by reading Amadis
and other romances. His arguments contain an explicit statement of the
humoral theory that underwrote sixteenth-century accounts of reading.
La Noue’s arguments give a clear indication of how romance as a genre
became a trope for the dangers of reading as a whole. La Noue includes
reading among the non-naturals that could alter the body’s humoral bal-
ance and thus regards different kinds of books as food, physic, or poison.
For La Noue, the Amadis romances, in particular, seemed to be a form of
“sustenance,” but one that engendered only “evil humours that distem-
pered the soules” of those that read them.
48
Readers of Amadis became
gluttons: “their teeth watered, so desirous were they even to taste of some
small morsel” of these books. Even those who were able initially to resist
reading these volumes, ultimately, “having once tasted of them, made
them their continuall foode” (48). Romances had the sticky sweetness
of sugar. Sugar was understood to be “subtle” because it tempered foods
and preserved medicines, but in romances those same qualities became
Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance130
poisonous, “so subtil and penetrative, that to eschue harme thereby, we
must first use very good preservatives” (48). Romances are, for La Noue,
“bad drugs” (53) that inject themselves into the minds and onto the bodies
of readers: “for having once redd them, they cannot afterward so cleanse
themselves, but still there will remayne some spottes to staine their con-
versations” (52).
La Noue’s damning sense that to read Amadis was to swallow poison
was not shared by Munday. In his preface to Palmerin of England, Munday
begins by telling a story of the illness of King Alfonsus of Naples. Sick and
having tried every possible type of medicine prescribed by his doctors, the
king ultimately “determined with himself to take no more medicines.”
49
Telling his physicians to “feast me no more with Galene and Hippocrates”
(A3
v
), the king instead turns to historical fictions. When he heard these
stories read, “he conceived such wonderfull pleasure, as nature gathered
strength by it, and chased away the frowardnesse of his disease” (A3
r
).
While in its original form, as I suggested in the Introduction, this story
was primarily about the therapeutic difference between reading/seeing
stories and having them read aloud/hearing them, Munday instead takes
the conclusion that reading historical fictions and romances, such as his
Palmerin of England, may change the humoral balance of those who enjoy
them and they can thus become a kind of medicine: “to read Histories,
which in the judgment of the wise are esteemed as healthful to the mind,
as Physick is accounted holsom for the bodie” (A3
v
). In this preface,
Munday reverses the arguments that Amyot and others made about the
dangerous consequences of the strong responses that many readers had to
romance. Whereas romance was often charged with inciting the passions
and thus upsetting the humoral balance of readers, Munday suggests that
that quality is precisely what makes romances a form of physic. Romances
may surpass medicine precisely because “the sodain inwarde conceit of
delight … may sooner breake and qualifie the extremitie of a painful dis-
ease, than the long and laborsom applying of Physicall recipes” (A3
v
).
La Noue, more thoroughly than Sidney or Spenser perhaps, rejected
romances outright and did so because he was troubled not just by their
content, but by the forms of reading that these books seemed to pro-
mote. He believed that the act of reading, rather than just what was read,
was likely to harm the souls and even bodies of Protestant readers. For
Munday, by contrast, romances become a curative, a form of physic,
able to cure diseases, both mental and physical. Munday’s insistence that
romances are worthwhile because they provoke passions that could trans-
form the minds and restore the bodies of readers informs his translations
e conversion of the reader 131
of Amadis and other romances into English. e differing opinions of
Munday and La Noue turn on more than just differing assessments of
the moral and physical consequences to reading. La Noue must reject
Montalvo’s Amadis in large part because he rejects Montalvo’s conver-
sionary narrative and the transformative model of identity and reading
that this narrative implies. Montalvo, as we have seen, saw identity as
transformative. He embraced the idea that faith and practice, not belief,
conferred identity. As a result, he adopted conversion as both a religious
practice and a narrative possibility. Montalvo’s commitment to faith and
conversion will imply very different reading practices to Cervantes, who
returns us to reading and conversion in Counter-Reformation Spain.
e century and a quarter that separates the publications of Tirant
lo Blanc and the second part of Don Quixote saw almost unimagin-
able historical developments. Written in the aftermath of the Fall of
Constantinople, the first of the Iberian romances were part of a culture
that experienced increasing domestic conflict over the status of New
Christians, conflict that gave way to the orders for the expulsion of the
Jews in 1492. e conquest of Granada, several months earlier that year,
was not the end to this kind of conflict; the 1565 morisco rebellion led
eventually to the expulsion of the moriscos in 1609. is period was one
of intense attention to questions about faith, identity, and genealogy. e
developments that led from the expulsions of 1492 to those of 1609 coin-
cide with an important transition in the practices of the Inquisition in
Spain. Barbara Root argues that at the beginning of this period religious
orthodoxy largely centered on questions of belief. Over the course of the
sixteenth century, however, the Inquisition turned its attention away from
proofs of belief to matters of ethnic custom and then to genealogy itself.
50
Commitment to a new “national” identity produced a situation in which
“religious orthodoxy in Spain came to be defined in terms of genealogy or
blood”: once the “proof of faith” was “genealogy,” then “orthodoxy, her-
esy, dissimulation were all collapsed onto the physical body, into the eth-
nicity that could not be changed by any action or belief.”
51
Barbara Fuchs
likewise comments on how this shift created a new culture in Counter-
Reformation Spain. Increased emphasis on defining faith through birth
and blood produced a world that demanded that identity reveal itself in
some visible manner, “as though past religious or ethnic affiliations really
did equal a manifest physical difference,” and that became “obsessed with
identifying difference through outward signs.”
52
Although this attention to visual identity may have been a largely
new feature of the culture of the period, it was importantly not new
Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance132
to romance. e sustained emphasis on the legibility of identity that is
at the heart of romances such as Amadis has a deep affinity with the
culture that, as Fuchs puts it, had an “obsession with transparency and
genealogy.” It should not be surprising that this historical period, char-
acterized by such intense cultural interest in questions of visible iden-
tity and invisible faith, is framed by the romances of conversion. e
period begins with Tirant lo Blanc (1490) and the Labors of Esplandián
(1510); it ends with the publication of Don Quixote, Parts 1 and 2 (1605,
1615). Yet, despite these affinities, the shift from genealogy to conversion
that we have seen in romances such as Amadis, Esplandián, and Tirant
lo Blanc runs directly counter to the inverse movement from faith to
genealogy that dominates the larger culture of sixteenth-century Spain.
It is in Quixote that we will see both the conclusion of this history of
romances of conversion and also, perhaps more importantly, the conse-
quences of romance’s movement away from the new culture of race that
defined Counter-Reformation Spain.
It should not be a surprise that the culmination of this history of
responses by readers to the Iberian romances of conversion comes in
Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605). Whatever one may say about Quixote’s
reading skills, Cervantes is unquestionably the great interpretive reader
of romance: Tirant lo Blanc, Amadis, e Labours of Esplandián, Amadis
of Greece, and Orlando Furioso fill the shelves of Quixote’s library; they
provide the text to his adventures. It is not just, as Cervantes proclaims in
his “Prologue,” that “all of it is an invective against books of chivalry.”
53
Rather, the narratives of conversion that drove Martorell’s and Montalvo’s
fictions constitute a central and largely overlooked part of Cervantes’
response to chivalric romance. Insofar as Cervantes brings Quixote as a
reader into the text of his fiction, his novel is both a last instance and a
theorization of how readers respond to the questions about faith, geneal-
ogy, and ethnicity posed by the romances that dominated sixteenth-
century Europe. As we have seen, Ariosto and Herberay recognize that
narratives about conversion, which necessarily involve the introduction
of racial difference, challenge romance’s commitment to visible identity.
Cervantes instead embraces those consequences.
Carlos Fuentes has described Quixote as “a knight of the faith” in the
sense that he believes in what others cannot see; Miguel de Unamuno
has likewise seen Quixote as the founder of “the Spanish religion,”
Quixotism.
54
I will suggest, though, that Don Quixote sees the world dif-
ferently, not so much or simply as a knight of faith, but as one who is also
a converso. To be a converso is in some ways always to put into question
e conversion of the reader 133
the nature of the relationship between appearance and reality. After the
expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain, there are no longer Jews,
Muslims, and Christians; there are only more or less real, more or less
authentic, more or less accepted, Christians. is period in the history of
conversion introduces the possibility of hidden differences, qualities and
beliefs that cannot be seen.
It is out of this possibility, as we have seen, that the assimilation of
Jewish conversos into Christianity produced racialism. More than just a
recognition of the impact of conversos and moriscos on the culture of early
modern Spain, this difference is also one of genre and its possibilities.
Earlier romances carefully place their converts on the edges of the narra-
tive world, but Cervantes arguably tells his whole story from this perspec-
tive, and it is ultimately this perspective that splits appearance apart from
reality and that makes windmills into giants and sheep into armies. is
loss of the visible truth that defined romance in turn fractures the genre
itself and fundamentally changes the act of reading that it implies. is
argument engages a dominant biographical reading of Cervantes but does
so through the literary context provided by the conversion narratives that
appear in the romances that Quixote, and with him Cervantes, had been
reading.
From a biographical perspective, there has long been the argument
that Cervantes was himself a New Christian. e central role that New
Christians played in the remarkable literature of the period is almost
impossible to overestimate. e case for Cervantes being among the
New Christian writers, an argument put forward by Américo Castro,
among others, has not been definitively provable but is widely accepted
as likely.
55
Michael McGaha summarizes the available evidence that
points to Cervantes’ descent from Jewish ancestry: the Cervantes name
is included in the relator Fernán Díaz de Toledo’s 1449 list of families
with converso origins;
56
his father and his family worked in professions
and businesses historically dominated first by Jews and later by conversos;
Cervantes himself was denied appointments and promotions in ways that
are perhaps otherwise hard to explain.
57
ere is much to be said about
how Cervantes’ own status as a probable converso inflects and structures
the fiction of Don Quixote: such impulses appear in the pervasive sense
of alienation and dispossession from everywhere except the realms of the
mind, the mocking and yet anxious depictions of the officers of the Holy
Brotherhood, and the dismissals of lineage and idealizing of virtue, as well
as in the ambiguous reflections on the shocking contemporary expulsion
of the moriscos in Part 2.
Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance134
My discussion here, though, will focus not on Cervantes as a possible
converso but on his imagining of Don Quixote as one. Alonso Quixano,
an impoverished noble who has no claim to present himself as an Old
Christian but who was “once called the Good” (935),
58
is perhaps a con-
verso; the metafictional character Don Quixote is certainly one. More
than just the righting of wrongs and the defense of maidens, what Quixote
takes from the pages of chivalric romance is also his own idiosyncratic
but powerful understanding of Montalvo’s argument that true chivalry
must itself be transformed into a means of religious conversion and a
weapon against the infidel. is experience is one that he understands
primarily through and in his acts of reading, of both texts and the world.
Montalvo’s Esplandián was in part about the religious conversion of indi-
vidual pagans and infidels; perhaps almost as importantly, it made a call
for the conversion, the transformation through religious faith, of the old
order of Christian chivalry and, with it, of chivalric romance as a genre. It
is in this spirit, as a heeding of this call, that Quixote wants to revive and
convert chivalry into contemporary practice and meaning. Writing Part 1
at what turns out, by the time of the publication of Part 2, to have been
the last possible moment for a romance of conversion, Cervantes offers his
readers through the conversion of Quixano into Quixote the final chapter
in the Spanish romances of chivalric conversion that began with Tirant
and Esplandián.
Cervantes initially frames his engagement with Montalvo’s arguments
about conversion in the famous Inquisition of the Books in Chapter 6. In
this scene, the barber, the priest, and the housekeeper undertake a pub-
lic trial to examine the books in Quixote’s library and determine which
“deserve to be burned just as if they had belonged to heretics” (44).
59
e
first set of books that the barber picks up is a collected edition of Amadis,
Books 1–4, the format in which that romance was first published. Amadis
is immediately identified by the priest as having been the first chivalric
romance published in Spanish; as this text is the originator of all sub-
sequent romances, he regards it as “the proponent of the doctrine of so
harmful a sect” (46).
60
Unexpectedly, however, Amadis is not burned.
Instead, it is Esplandián, “the legitimate son,” that goes into the flames and
starts the fires in which all of the other sons and grandsons of Amadis, the
subsequent volumes in the cycle, are also burned: “let it be the beginning
of the pile that will fuel the fire we shall set” (46).
61
Within Montalvo’s
fiction, the character Esplandián may or may not have been the legit-
imate son to Amadis, a question that depends on historically evolving
attitudes toward the validity of clandestine marriage. Cervantes, though,
e conversion of the reader 135
emphasizes the question of descent as being at the heart of the relation-
ship between the two books and at the heart of the judgment being ren-
dered by the priest.
What distinguished Esplandián from Amadis is not a change in religion
but rather a change in the understanding of chivalry as an expression of
faith and an instrument of conversion. Esplandián is the more obviously
Christian, the less potentially heretical, of the two volumes. Yet, the argu-
ments that Montalvo puts forward about conversion, while in keeping
with and expressing the policies of late fifteenth-century church doc-
trine, run counter to the assumptions and practices that emerged in the
Inquisition over the course of the sixteenth century. With several limited
exceptions, the Inquisition did not place secular romances on the Index
of Prohibited Books.
62
Neither Amadis nor Esplandián were books that
the Inquisition identified as harmful or suspect. As this episode may sug-
gest, though, the Inquisition was in certain ways harmful to romance in
the sense that it ran counter to the ideals and aspirations expressed by
romances. e burning of Esplandián is in part a burning of the story
about the possibilities of conversion that Montalvo had told and that the
Inquisition had in essence ended by denying the validity of the conver-
sions of Jews and Muslims. At the same time, though, Cervantes’ insist-
ence on the “descent” of Esplandián underlines how the Inquisition is, as
Netanyahu argues, about who you are rather than what you believe, about
searching out those of the wrong descent rather than simply those of the
wrong faith. e more obviously religious Esplandián is burnt while the
more secular Amadis is not. Esplandián is burnt as a “legitimate son” in
Cervantes’ sly fictional recognition that no matter how much faith one
has, descent may be enough to consign one to the flames.
It is against this frame of the burning of the romances as heretics that
Cervantes effects Don Quixote’s transformation into a chivalric knight. A
case can perhaps be made that we should understand Alonso Quixano as
being of converso descent. Sancho repeatedly assures us that he is an Old
Christian, but we have no such assurances about the man who becomes
Don Quixote. His name may be Quexada (19), or Quixada (23), Quijana
(42), or Quixano, the Good (935). He insists that he comes from a “known
lineage, with proprietary rights to an ancestral home, and entitlement to
a payment of five hundred sueldos” (160),
63
but Sancho’s Teresa questions
his nobility (“I certainly don’t know who gave him a Don, because his
parents and grandparents never had one,” 488).
64
He is of a “more than
moderately dark” complexion (669).
65
He mistakes and kills sheep as
armies of infidels, but he recognizes pigs as pigs and will not fight, kill, or
Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance136
presumably eat them (128, 904). He is a member of a class that, unlike the
peasant classes that comprised largely “Old Christians” like Sancho, saw
high rates of intermarriage.
Despite such intimations, Cervantes nonetheless does not give us a story
about a New Christian. If there is such a story here it is effaced and dis-
placed by what Cervantes presents as the more significant conversion: that
of someone who identifies himself as just an ordinary gentleman (894)
into a Christian knight of chivalry. Cervantes presents the transformation
that defines his fiction as a conversion (he takes a new name to reflect his
new identity [23]; he cleans the rusty armor of his great-grandfathers [22];
he has himself knighted by the script of the straw purchase order book
[34]). is transformation is, like Esplandián’s, imagined as a conversion
of the practice and identity of chivarly itself, for “in him errant chivalry
would be reborn” (55).
66
Quixote accepts chivalry as both a religion and
an act of faith; contravening it becomes for him a heresy (508, 428).
Just as Don Quixote is converted by his faith in the truth of romance,
so Don Quixote as a text is subject to a similar conversion. At the start,
Cervantes makes it clear that this text is not his, or ours: he is only the
“stepfather,” and we are neither “his kin nor his friend” (3).
67
Whereas
other writers disingenuously dismiss their creations as illegitimate off-
spring, Cervantes insists that neither he nor we are related to his text: this
book is descended from another race and lineage. Cervantes here intro-
duces the language of baptism as a way to suggest that one can create new
and generically specific identities for one’s literary progeny: the narrator’s
friend thus suggests that he might write his own laudatory sonnets, for
“then you can baptize them with any name you want, attributing them to
Prester John of the Indies or to the Emperor of Trebizond” (5).
68
e text that we are reading becomes itself a kind of recently converted
New Christian through Cervantes’ typically allusive account of Cid
Hamete and the morisco translator. Beginning in Chapter 9, Cervantes
presents his text as a translation of an Arabic history that he found among
some notebooks and old papers that a boy was selling to a silk merchant
(67). Cervantes imagines for us a series of transformations: from one lan-
guage and one religion to another, from Arab historian to morisco trans-
lator to Spanish fiction writer. At the same time, though, other possible
conversions shadow this act of transformation and translation. e Alcaná
market was in the old Jewish quarter of Toledo. Before the riots, massa-
cres, and forced conversions of 1391, and, again, 1412–18, this was the heart
of perhaps the largest and most vibrant Jewish community in late medi-
eval Europe. Even earlier, during the convivencia, Toledo was home to the
e conversion of the reader 137
most renowned school of translators in the world, a school that was dis-
tinguished in relying on precisely the model of oral, collaborative transla-
tion (written Arabic was verbally translated into the romance vernacular
by a Moor, while a second translator, either Jewish or Christian usually,
would then retranslate that verbal text, again aloud, so that it could be
transcribed back into Latin) that Cervantes depicts being effected by Cid
Hamete, the morisco translator, and himself as a transcriber into Spanish.
Under the Christian Alsonfo VI, Toledo became the repository that
housed many of the books dispersed from the renowned Arabic libraries
of Cordoba.
69
By 1605, the Jews and the Moors are long gone. ey have
been converted, as have their places of work and worship.
Cervantes, though, remembers the history of these earlier conversions
and integrates them into his fiction. When he comments that it would not
have been hard to find a translator not just of Arabic but of “an older and
better language” (67), he suggests that everything in this place, and in
this text, has a whole history of conversions behind it: behind every mor-
isco is a Moor, behind every Christian perhaps a Jew.
70
When Cervantes,
as the narrator, finds a morisco to translate, he goes with him to the “clois-
ter of the main church, and ask[s] him to render the journals, all those
that dealt with Don Quixote into the Castilian language, without taking
away or adding anything” (67–68).
71
It is appropriately but also ironic-
ally in and through the church, itself likely a converted synagogue and a
polychronic image of the history of conversions that defined seventeenth-
century Spain, that Cervantes imagines this Arabic history becoming a
Christian fiction.
Cervantes mocks, in the ways that readers of Quixote immediately
recognize, the consequences of too great a commitment to the truth
of the chivalric histories, consequences that are expressed in the mad-
ness of reading. Importantly, though, he also plays out the implications
of the turn toward conversion that dominated the works of Montalvo,
Martorell, de Silva, and other fifteenth- and sixteenth-century romance
writers. ere are two key implications to the introduction of conversion
into these romances: in a theological register, conversion produced a con-
troversial distinction between race and faith; as a literary consequence,
this distinction created a divide between appearance and reality. Both of
these carry over into Cervantes’ imagining of Quixote. In the first case,
we have seen that Montalvo, for instance, imagined Esplandián as a fig-
ure for how faith could create new and universal Christian identities that
would, in a social sense, transcend the fact of birth and, in a literary one,
rewrite the genealogical narratives of traditional chivalric romance.
Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance138
Cervantes uses Sancho and Quixote to resituate this debate, these ideals
and their limitations, within the social and political realities of Counter-
Reformation Spain. Sancho, for instance, offers us a comic version of the
bitter truth that, by 1605, many political and religious offices were only
open to those who could document the purity of their blood. In argu-
ing that he should be given his governorship, Sancho declares, “I am an
Old Christian, and that alone is enough for me to be a count” (161),
72
as
if to suppose that one form of blood purity (Old Christian) might create
all others (membership in the nobility). He takes this claim even further
later: “though I am poor, I’m an Old Christian … and because I’m a man
I could be a pope” (411).
73
Even as Sancho is confident that being an Old
Christian is enough to underwrite even the wildest of his ambitions, Don
Quixote worries, “I do not know how it can be discovered that I am of
royal lineage, or, at the least, a second cousin to the emperor” (160).
74
Quixote’s imagination seems boundless and unchecked, but, import-
antly, it does not extend to conceiving a different lineage for himself.
e fact of his birth is perhaps the one immutable thing for Quixote.
Nonetheless, Quixote does not assume that your identity, your ability to
become who and what you want, is limited by your birth. In supposing
that you can become what you imagine (even a chivalric knight), Quixote
takes seriously Montalvo’s argument that faith is enough to transcend race
and birth. Faith is powerful enough to convert identity. It is clearly an
act of faith that drives Quixote’s confidence that he is a chivalric knight.
When his neighbor Pedro Alonso insists that he is only “an honorable
gentleman, Señor Quijana,” Don Quixote explains, “I know who I am
and I know I can be not only those I have mentioned but the Twelve
Peers of France as well, and even all the nine paragons of France” (43).
75
Quixote’s sense that belief transcends birth to transform identity is
so powerful that it extends even to others. In his own case, he suspects
that it is only his identity, not his bloodline, that can be converted by his
faith in chivalry. With Dulcinea, though, he argues that his belief in her
creates her virtue; her worth in turn produces her lineage. e travellor
Vivaldi, whom Quixote meets in Chapter 13 and who identifies himself as
being of the line of “the Cachopines of Laredo” (91), thus hears Quixote’s
description of Dulcinea and wants to know Dulcinea’s “lineage, ances-
try, and family” (91).
76
In Part 2, the Duchess returns to this question.
Sancho’s description of Dulcinea sifting wheat, she says, makes her ques-
tion Dulcinea’s nobility: “apparently, it was buckwheat, which makes me
doubt the nobility of her lineage” (673).
77
Quixote, however, resists such
jests as unworthy of Dulcinea. He rejects these and other denigrations