The century-long expulsion of Moriscos—Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity—reached its final stage in 1609 when the Spanish Crown began deporting the remaining communities in the Iberian Peninsula through a series of edicts that lasted until 1614. Between these successive waves of migration, Moriscos formed literary networks across the Mediterranean that reflected a diversity of class, religious background, educational pedigrees, and language. My dissertation, “Narrating Faith Across the Straits: Morisco Manuals of Faith in Tunis and the Early Modern Mediterranean,” focuses on the large Morisco community that settled in Tunisia during the seventeenth century and the religious treatises that circulated among them. Written in Spanish by a religious and intellectual Morisco elite, these didactic texts were intended to provide their exiled community with spiritual guidance on Islamic practices and belief.
This dissertation demonstrates that the study of Morisco literature unearths a Mediterranean milieu that is obfuscated by scholarly distinctions that are stubbornly attached to ideas of national, civilizational, and religious difference. I argue that Moriscos creatively engaged with works from the North African Islamic tradition while strategically adapting literary forms and tropes rooted in Christian Europe to forge a narrative ethics reflecting their diaspora experience in the Mediterranean. I offer new insights into the figurative/creative/literary strategies that Morisco authors used to guide their readers through acts of reading and ritual practice. Bringing together methodological frameworks from comparative literature and religious studies, I demonstrate how these narrative strategies bring questions of pedagogy and ethics into dialogue with theorizations of literature and aesthetics. Through my study of Morisco literature, “Narrating Faith” generates new categories of analysis and criticism that challenge the very category of the “literary” to imagine more inclusive models of world literature.
Degree
PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)
Keywords
Moriscos; Early Modern History; Spain; North Africa; Tunisia; Mediterranean Studies ; World Literature
Language
English
Rights
All rights reserved by the author (no additional license for public reuse)
Abraham, Susan. "Narrating Faith Across the Straits: Morisco Manuals of Faith in Tunis and the Early Modern Mediterranean". University of Virginia, Spanish - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, PHD (Doctor of Philosophy), 2025-12-16, https://doi.org/10.18130/b5z4-fq76.
