Moors Dressed as Moors

"Moors Dressed as Moors is a fascinating study that will resonate with students and scholars of Hispanic and Iberian studies. The author's exhaustive and detailed analysis of archival material, previously unknown to scholars, illuminates the economic and social dimensions of sartorial production and commerce in Moorish clothing as a desirable cultural artifact." -- Cory Reed, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Texas, Austin "The overall scope of research undertaken by Javier Irigoyen-Garc a is ambitious and the results impressive. Moors Dressed as Moors is an important and fundamental contribution to the field. Irigoyen-Garc a's work corrects several consolidated readings in Iberian scholarship and adds a new and important perspective to the reading of several literary texts. This book is an excellent example of the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach that manages a diversity of disciplinary methods such as philology, history, literary and cultural studies." -- Luis F. Avil s, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, University of California, Irvine

In Moors Dressed as Moors, Javier Irigoyen-Garcia draws on a wide range of sources to reveal the currency of Moorish clothing in early modern Iberian society.

In early modern Iberia, Moorish clothing was not merely a cultural remnant from the Islamic period, but an artefact that conditioned discourses of nobility and social preeminence.

In Moors Dressed as Moors, Javier Irigoyen-García draws on a wide range of sources: archival, legal, literary, and visual documents, as well as tailoring books, equestrian treatises, and festival books to reveal the currency of Moorish clothing in early modern Iberian society. Irigoyen-García’s insightful and nuanced analyses of Moorish clothing production and circulation shows that as well as being a sign of status and a marker of nobility, it also served to codify social tensions by deploying apparent Islamophobic discourses. Such luxurious value of clothing also sheds light on how sartorial legislation against the Moriscos was not only a form of cultural repression, but also a way to preclude their full integration into Iberian society. Moors Dressed as Moors challenges the traditional interpretations of the value of Moorish clothing in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain and how it articulated the relationships between Christians and Moriscos.