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'Paradoxing' the Alien: The Morisco in Early Modern English Texts

Paper · 2013 · Jesús López-Peláez Casellas

Summary

The article examines how early modern English writers dealt with a hard-to-classify group of outsiders: the Moriscos, Spanish Moors who had been baptised. The author treats them as a doubly alien figure. They were foreigners as Spaniards, and within that they were suspected secret Muslims who were nominally Catholic. He calls the English response to them "paradoxing the alien," meaning that rejection and absorption operate at the same time.

The argument begins with Thomas More's 1501 letter about Catherine of Aragon's entourage. It then follows how the word "Morisco" changes across dated OED attestations and later printed texts. The theoretical frame comes from three sources:

  • Peter Platt's view of paradox as something that drives change rather than paralysis;
  • Lloyd Kermode's model of Elizabethan "alien stages";
  • the self/other dynamics described by Anthony Cohen and by Stallybrass and White.

In the portion available here, the main finding is that English usage moves from vague exotic labels toward politically informed but prejudiced references. The study matters because it challenges purely binary accounts of how English identity was formed.

Key points

  • Catherine of Aragon reached London in late October 1501. The agreed retinue was about 50 people, and Henry VII complained she brought roughly three times that number. Per the Spanish monarchs, only two attendants (both slaves) were black.
  • More's letter to John Holt mocks the Spanish escort but praises the princess. The author reads the attendants More disliked as probably olive-skinned Moriscos, possibly the first Moriscos recorded in England.
  • OED evidence shows how the word "Morisco" developed:
    • In 1531, Elyot's Gouernour uses it as a place name for north-west Africa.
    • In 1540 and 1551, travel texts use it loosely to mean "Moorish" (for gold and for customs).
    • Sutcliffe (1600) and Treswell (1605) use it with prejudice or exotic colour.
    • Atkins (~1645) mentions the 1610 expulsion by Philip III of about 90,000 Moriscos.
  • Kermode separates "aliens"/"strangers" (people from outside the realm) from "foreigners" (people from outside London without freeman rights). He also traces a shift from a first alien stage built on exclusion to a second stage where Englishness forms around an absorbed alien.
  • Paradox is traced through More (the first English use, 1533), Hamlet, and Hobbes, who defined it as an opinion not yet widely accepted.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The author tracks how one term moves from a vague adjective to a place name to a precise ethnoreligious label, using dated dictionary attestations as evidence.
  • I2. Kermode's taxonomy makes "alien" and "foreigner" depend on a reference point (the realm versus the city), and that point shifts with the reign.
  • I3. More holds opposing evaluations in one text: he scorns the retinue, praises the princess, and then calls his own praise insufficient, without reconciling these.
  • I4. The retinue's size and composition are given as conflicting claims, each tied to a party: the treaty, Henry VII, the Spanish monarchs, and More.
  • I5. The author argues that because no specific word existed, More fell back on loaded descriptions such as "Ethiopian" and "Pygmies," and that this choice of words shows his ideological framing.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Ontology entries could carry period-tagged senses, so older texts resolve "Morisco"-like words to the sense current at their date.
  • I2 (world): Relations like "foreign to" should be stored relative to an explicit anchor and time, not as fixed entity properties.
  • I3 (frames): Stance should be recorded per target and per utterance rather than merged into one polarity, which also gives the irony detector a source of mixed signals.
  • I4 (world): Numeric facts should be kept as source-attributed claims with conflicts preserved, so answers can report who asserted what.
  • I5 (frames): When a text applies an ill-fitting category label to a group, the frame layer could flag it as a likely evaluative description rather than a literal type assertion.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universidad de JaénJaén · Spain3 works · 1,661 citations

📚 Shelves 4 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Literature and Literary Theory · 340 works History · 66 works Classics · 67 works

🧭 Topics 1 English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Jesús López-Peláez Casellas. 2013. 'Paradoxing' the Alien: The Morisco in Early Modern English Texts. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 46.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20128945

@article{casellas2013paradoxing,
  title = {{'Paradoxing' the Alien: The Morisco in Early Modern English Texts}},
  author = {Jesús López-Peláez Casellas},
  journal = {Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 46},
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.26754/ojs\_misc/mj.20128945},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20128945}
}

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