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Seth Kimmel, Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain. U of Chicago P, 2015. 239 pp.
Combining analytical perspectives of intellectual history and comparative literature, Seth Kimmel casts new light on the pastoral strategies and scholarly practices that theologians, church leaders, and crown officials mobilized to remove the "danger" of heresy they associated with New Christians. While the book heeds issues related to conversos and Amerindians, the foremost attention centers on the scholarly and pastoral debates that focused on peninsular Spain's native Hispano-Muslim minority (Moriscos) required to convert to Christianity from circa 1502. As Kimmel states up front, his aim is not to provide another social history of religious minorities in early modern Spain, though his chapters and notes attest to an appropriate engagement with recent and classic studies in this field. Parables of Coercion offers a wideranging exploration of how the struggle to eliminate Islam and its traces from Iberia mobilized intellectuals within the Spanish Monarchy to reconceive the boundaries and scholarly practices of such disciplines as history writing, canon law, and theology. Analysis in the six chapters thus delves into the textual practices of prelates, preachers, inquisitors, theologians, classicists, Hebraists, and court councilors as well as recent converts seeking some modus vivendi within the Spanish Monarchy.
Chapter 1, "Legible Conversions," examines how Augustinian notions of coercion became the dominant paradigm for ritual efficacy and its enforcement after a brief interlude in the late 1490s where advocates of voluntary conversions and gradual assimilation set policy. Suggesting new lines of inquiry in realms of study mapped out by scholars as formidable as Julio Caro Baroja, Bernard Vincent, and Mercedes García Arenal, Kimmel ponders a seeming paradox: the very inquisitors who focused scrutiny on Moriscos alleged to be practicing taquiyya (dissimulation) practiced their own concealment, using lies to root out suspected heretics (29-30). Chapter 2 ("Glossing Faith") considers the implications of the crown policy of coercion in the context of Spain's global imperial expansion. Assaying how the debates about and struggle for Morisco assimilation shaped academic debates about the nature of language, the discussion here shows how Francisco de Vitoria and other Salamanca theologians "glossed" or theorized the Catholic faith to speak to an increasingly global evangelization project. Along the way,...