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To Live Like a Moor: Christian Perceptions of Muslim Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain
What do clothing, bathing, or dining habits reveal about one's personal religious beliefs? Nothing, of course, unless such outward bodily concerns are perceived to hold some sort of spiritual significance. Such was the case in the multireligious world of medieval Spain, where the ways in which one dressed, washed, and fed the body were seen as potential indicators of religious affiliation. True faith might be a matter of the soul, but faith identity could also literally be worn on the sleeve or reinforced through performance of the most intimate functions of daily life.
The significance of these practices changed over time in the eyes of Christian warriors, priests, and common citizens who came to dominate all corners of the Iberian peninsula by the end of the fifteenth century. Certain "Moorish" fashions occasionally crossed over religious lines, while visits to a local bathhouse and indulgence in a wide range of exotic foods were frequently enjoyed by Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike. Yet at the end of the Middle Ages, attitudes hardened. With the fall of Granada, and the eventual forced baptism of all Spain's remaining Muslims, any perceived retention of traditional "Moorish" lifestyles might take on a sinister overtone of disloyalty and resistance. Distinctive clothing choices, hygienic practices, and culinary tastes could now lead to charges of secret allegiance to Islam. Repressive legislation, inquisitions, and ultimately mass deportations followed.
To Live Like a Moor traces the many shifts in Christian perceptions of Islam-associated ways of life which took place across the centuries between early Reconquista efforts of the eleventh century and the final expulsions of Spain's converted yet poorly assimilated Morisco population in the seventeenth. Using a wealth of social, legal, literary, and religious documentation in this, her last book, Olivia Remie Constable revealed the complexities and contradictions underlying a historically notorious transition from pluralism to intolerance.
The significance of these practices changed over time in the eyes of Christian warriors, priests, and common citizens who came to dominate all corners of the Iberian peninsula by the end of the fifteenth century. Certain "Moorish" fashions occasionally crossed over religious lines, while visits to a local bathhouse and indulgence in a wide range of exotic foods were frequently enjoyed by Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike. Yet at the end of the Middle Ages, attitudes hardened. With the fall of Granada, and the eventual forced baptism of all Spain's remaining Muslims, any perceived retention of traditional "Moorish" lifestyles might take on a sinister overtone of disloyalty and resistance. Distinctive clothing choices, hygienic practices, and culinary tastes could now lead to charges of secret allegiance to Islam. Repressive legislation, inquisitions, and ultimately mass deportations followed.
To Live Like a Moor traces the many shifts in Christian perceptions of Islam-associated ways of life which took place across the centuries between early Reconquista efforts of the eleventh century and the final expulsions of Spain's converted yet poorly assimilated Morisco population in the seventeenth. Using a wealth of social, legal, literary, and religious documentation in this, her last book, Olivia Remie Constable revealed the complexities and contradictions underlying a historically notorious transition from pluralism to intolerance.
248 pages, Hardcover
Published February 2, 2018
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April 14, 2025Medieval Mediterranean scholarship suffered a true loss when cancer took the life of historian Olivia Remie Constable in 2016, at the age of just fifty-two. In her posthumous publication, To Live Like a Moor: Christian Perceptions of Muslim Identity, she provided it one last gift. This book contains a nuanced chronology of how such perceptions developed from the twelfth century to the beginning of the seventeenth with the permanent expulsion of all Moriscos from Spain. Despite Constable’s humble protest against a presentist reading, it also provides insight into modern conceptions of the religious “other.”
The book is organized into four chapters: “Being a Muslim in Christian Spain,” “Clothing and Appearance,” “Bathing and Hygiene,” and “Food and Foodways.” Constable planned to include an additional chapter regarding language and poetics, but she could not complete it before her death. These chapters nevertheless contain a rich, if at times overwhelming trove of information.
The book’s clear structure is therefore appreciated, and Constable further aids comprehension by unifying the chapters along an analytical reference point. The Morisco Núñez Francisco Muley’s 1567 memorandum claims that the “Muslim” practices outlawed for Moriscos by the Granadian edict of the same year are actually secular. Constable chooses to organize Chapter 1 around this memorandum and uses it as a natural vehicle to explain the historical context of Muslim identity in Iberia. Analysis is consistently brought back to the memorandum throughout the subsequent three chapters, addressing the veracity and context of its claims as they relate to each chapter’s topic. The selection of the memorandum to provide this analytical continuity is particularly well chosen. In describing the state of Moriscos just four decades before their expulsion, it grants a conceptual (though somewhat teleological) endpoint to ground the over five-century-long chronologies that Constable weaves through each chapter.
This grand temporal scope is one of the book’s greatest attributes. Constable is known for tackling large timeframes, with her first book, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain spanning an impressive six centuries. This allows her to do justice to similarly large questions. To understand how Christian perceptions of Muslim identity developed, the more context the better. It is Constable’s “willingness to embrace time spans of a length that make most historians blanch” (p. ix), as historian David Nirenberg writes in the forward, that ensures the relevance of her work on the question.
It is furthermore Constable’s willingness and ability to engage with varied primary sources that ensures the strength of this work. Engaging with archaeological findings, papal decrees, bathhouse ledgers, cookbooks, and more, she demonstrates that all evidence can and should be engaged with. While such sources often contradict or appear irrelevant, it is her commitment to building a complex evidence base that is another of To Live Like a Moor’s greatest attributes.
This complexity is made viable through a commitment to moderate, balanced interpretation. Constable utilizes an underlying intersectional framework with an overlying case-by-case approach of political theology and secular liberalist pragmatism. She writes in conclusion of Chapter 1, that the book is “about identity and the structures that support our understandings of identity… [and] includes religion as one among many factors” (p. 14); in Chapter 2, she writes that “while rulers… may have wished—on some level—to rule over entirely Christian kingdoms, they were also well aware… of the economic and structural advantages to maintaining their subject non-Christian populations” (p. 27). In the pursuit of logical interpretation, she is also willing to push against trends in contemporary scholarship. “Even though medieval sources persistently tagged certain styles as “Christian” or “Muslim” (and this tendency has been mirrored by modern scholars),” she writes, “the realities of day-to-day appearance were surely more complex (p. 44).
The scope and complexity, as well as novelty of To Live Like a Moor makes it of natural value to medieval historians. Perceptions of the religious “other” in such quotidian aspects as Constable explores have not been so examined elsewhere in the field of medieval Iberian Christian-Muslim relations. In fact, they have not been so examined elsewhere in medieval studies as a whole.
Yet this book is not only of interest to medieval historians. Firstly, as a trade publication, Constable makes sure to explain academic terms and historical context which would be unnecessary for scholars (e.g., Moriscos). But secondly, the insights one may gain from reading surpass the scope of medieval Iberian studies, and even medieval studies in general. Constable’s sensibility for moderate, context-based analysis leads her to argue against presentism. “Lines differentiating religion and custom are still often unclear today,” she writes “but apparent parallels between past and present can be misleading” (p. 11). The undoubted truth of this statement does not preclude the possibility for genuine parallels, however. By exploring the intricacies of Christian perceptions of and (mis)conceptions about Muslim identity in the medieval Iberian context, Constable describes a phenomenon that is ubiquitous to inter-faith interaction. While she is correct that direct parallels between medieval Iberia and modernity can be misleading, by examining one case of this phenomenon in-depth, she provides a framework to approach understanding this phenomenon in other contexts.
A critique one may level at To Live Like a Moor is its modesty. As a trade publication, it holds none of the immersive action or bold historical claims as, for instance, Brian Catlos’ Infidel kings and unholy warriors. But Constable did not intend to write such a book, nor should she have. It would have been a historiographical blunder and a historical disservice to mire the evidence in entertaining speculation. The value of this book lies in its immense chronological scope, and this is only made supportable by historiographical prudence.
To Live Like a Moor is Olivia Remie Constable’s last gift to medieval Mediterranean scholarship, and it is a worthy one. Readers at all levels (academic and otherwise) have something to gain from it. At the very least, they will appreciate the care that goes into writing such an unassuming yet rich history.
The book is organized into four chapters: “Being a Muslim in Christian Spain,” “Clothing and Appearance,” “Bathing and Hygiene,” and “Food and Foodways.” Constable planned to include an additional chapter regarding language and poetics, but she could not complete it before her death. These chapters nevertheless contain a rich, if at times overwhelming trove of information.
The book’s clear structure is therefore appreciated, and Constable further aids comprehension by unifying the chapters along an analytical reference point. The Morisco Núñez Francisco Muley’s 1567 memorandum claims that the “Muslim” practices outlawed for Moriscos by the Granadian edict of the same year are actually secular. Constable chooses to organize Chapter 1 around this memorandum and uses it as a natural vehicle to explain the historical context of Muslim identity in Iberia. Analysis is consistently brought back to the memorandum throughout the subsequent three chapters, addressing the veracity and context of its claims as they relate to each chapter’s topic. The selection of the memorandum to provide this analytical continuity is particularly well chosen. In describing the state of Moriscos just four decades before their expulsion, it grants a conceptual (though somewhat teleological) endpoint to ground the over five-century-long chronologies that Constable weaves through each chapter.
This grand temporal scope is one of the book’s greatest attributes. Constable is known for tackling large timeframes, with her first book, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain spanning an impressive six centuries. This allows her to do justice to similarly large questions. To understand how Christian perceptions of Muslim identity developed, the more context the better. It is Constable’s “willingness to embrace time spans of a length that make most historians blanch” (p. ix), as historian David Nirenberg writes in the forward, that ensures the relevance of her work on the question.
It is furthermore Constable’s willingness and ability to engage with varied primary sources that ensures the strength of this work. Engaging with archaeological findings, papal decrees, bathhouse ledgers, cookbooks, and more, she demonstrates that all evidence can and should be engaged with. While such sources often contradict or appear irrelevant, it is her commitment to building a complex evidence base that is another of To Live Like a Moor’s greatest attributes.
This complexity is made viable through a commitment to moderate, balanced interpretation. Constable utilizes an underlying intersectional framework with an overlying case-by-case approach of political theology and secular liberalist pragmatism. She writes in conclusion of Chapter 1, that the book is “about identity and the structures that support our understandings of identity… [and] includes religion as one among many factors” (p. 14); in Chapter 2, she writes that “while rulers… may have wished—on some level—to rule over entirely Christian kingdoms, they were also well aware… of the economic and structural advantages to maintaining their subject non-Christian populations” (p. 27). In the pursuit of logical interpretation, she is also willing to push against trends in contemporary scholarship. “Even though medieval sources persistently tagged certain styles as “Christian” or “Muslim” (and this tendency has been mirrored by modern scholars),” she writes, “the realities of day-to-day appearance were surely more complex (p. 44).
The scope and complexity, as well as novelty of To Live Like a Moor makes it of natural value to medieval historians. Perceptions of the religious “other” in such quotidian aspects as Constable explores have not been so examined elsewhere in the field of medieval Iberian Christian-Muslim relations. In fact, they have not been so examined elsewhere in medieval studies as a whole.
Yet this book is not only of interest to medieval historians. Firstly, as a trade publication, Constable makes sure to explain academic terms and historical context which would be unnecessary for scholars (e.g., Moriscos). But secondly, the insights one may gain from reading surpass the scope of medieval Iberian studies, and even medieval studies in general. Constable’s sensibility for moderate, context-based analysis leads her to argue against presentism. “Lines differentiating religion and custom are still often unclear today,” she writes “but apparent parallels between past and present can be misleading” (p. 11). The undoubted truth of this statement does not preclude the possibility for genuine parallels, however. By exploring the intricacies of Christian perceptions of and (mis)conceptions about Muslim identity in the medieval Iberian context, Constable describes a phenomenon that is ubiquitous to inter-faith interaction. While she is correct that direct parallels between medieval Iberia and modernity can be misleading, by examining one case of this phenomenon in-depth, she provides a framework to approach understanding this phenomenon in other contexts.
A critique one may level at To Live Like a Moor is its modesty. As a trade publication, it holds none of the immersive action or bold historical claims as, for instance, Brian Catlos’ Infidel kings and unholy warriors. But Constable did not intend to write such a book, nor should she have. It would have been a historiographical blunder and a historical disservice to mire the evidence in entertaining speculation. The value of this book lies in its immense chronological scope, and this is only made supportable by historiographical prudence.
To Live Like a Moor is Olivia Remie Constable’s last gift to medieval Mediterranean scholarship, and it is a worthy one. Readers at all levels (academic and otherwise) have something to gain from it. At the very least, they will appreciate the care that goes into writing such an unassuming yet rich history.
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