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Much recent scholarship is devoted to crypto-Judaism and its reverberations in the early modern period. One of the twelve texts that comprises Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares, "La española inglesa" (1610) tells the story of Isabel, a young girl taken captive during the sack of Cádiz and brought to live with her English captor's family. Instead of discussing crypto-Judaism directly, Cervantes composes a story about crypto-Catholicism in Protestant England enabling an exploration of religious plurality and hybrid identity. Removed from the borders of Iberia, Cervantes is able to relate secret-practice and identity. In fact, he uses Isabel to put a Spanishspeaking Catholic audience into a position where they empathize with Iberian New Christians or conversos. Cervantes uses the geographical distance that England provides in order to explore and undermine the fiction of religious homogeneity promulgated by the Catholic reconquest.1 It is a story of dissimulation and unpacks the condition and practice of hybrid identity in the early modern period. Playing with boundaries and borders, in "La española inglesa," Cervantes turns notions of confessional identity on their head.
This text is unique because few works in the early modern period affirm a converso identity and emphasize the constructive way it shapes society.2 In accord with Manual da Costa Fontes, the text can be read as converso because the protagonist comes from Southern Spain and from a family of merchants. According to Julio Caro Baroja, the merchant trade was a professional activity directly linked to conversos in Iberian society dating back to medieval times (9). Similarly, the secret practices of Catholicism in England in the text mimic crypto-Jewish observance in Iberia. Worship and religious practice took place within the private space of the home and among a close network of family and friends as public worship was prohibited. Whereas Cervantes could not directly compose a text about conversos in Iberia, a contemporary reader could interpret secret Catholic identity as a metaphor for a particular converso identity of the protagonist. Rather than celebrating a monolithic religious identity, there is an understanding that religious identity is fluid and hybrid.
Furthermore, I re-imagine this novella as part of the Sephardic Diaspora. I employ the inclusive definition of Sephardic as proposed by scholars such as Jonathan Israel in Diaspora within a Diaspora. In...