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“LA PATRIA CONSUMIDA”: BLOOD, NATION, AND EUCHARIST IN CERVANTES'S NUMANCIA

2012; Routledge; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14636204.2012.742349

1469-9818

Rachel L. Burk,

Latin American history and culture

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The play was first published as part of Cervantes's 1615 collection, Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos nunca representados (Madrid). Willard King suggests a date of 1581–1582 for the work's composition when the author was in Lisbon at Felipe II's court, just after the annexation of Portugal. Other critics like Malveena McKendrick offer a somewhat later date of composition, but none later than 1587. A fuller discussion of the difficulty in dating the play may be found in Jean Canavaggio. 2. Quotations throughout from Robert Marrast, ed., second edition, Numancia (1990). 3. For the place of Spanish blood purity statutes in the history of race, see Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein's Race, Nation, Class (1991). A recent contribution to limpieza studies that considers blood purity within a larger European revision of the Christian community is Gil Anidjar's “Lines of Blood” (2005). The most comprehensive historical study of blood purity law remains Albert Sicroff's Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre (1979) although other historians have made lucid contributions in more general works, in particular Henry Kamen's chapter “Racialism and its Critics” in The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (1999). My doctoral dissertation “Limpieza de sangre and Other Discourses of Blood” (2010), which includes an earlier version of my reading of Numancia, addresses works that marshal other symbolisms of blood to dispute emerging racial categories based on blood purity. An excellent introduction to the relationship between blood purity, the Inquisition, and the body can be found in Georgina Dopico Black's Perfect Wives, Other Women (2001), particularly the Preface and Chapter 1. Deborah Root's “Speaking Christian” (1988) treats the evolving relationship between nobleza de sangre and pureza de sangre in the sixteenth century. For a treatment of the development of the Spanish-American sistema de castas from Spanish blood purity, see María Elena Martínez's Genealogical Fictions (2008) and Lúcia Costigan's Through the Cracks in the Wall (2010). 4. External physical characteristics like skin color were not considered essential indicators of race as they would be in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Barbara Fuchs asserts, “[r]eligion and phenotype by no means coincided [in early modern Spain]; there were, for example, Moors of all colors, including blondes” (“Mirror” 10). 5. Albert Sicroff and Henry Kamen detail the movement against blood purity with Cartagena as point of departure. In a recent study, James Amelang traces different trajectories for morisco and converso communities throughout Iberia, including the resistance of Granadan Old Christians to laws that would discriminate against the majority of their fellow granadinos. 6. See Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce and Alfredo Hermenegildo. 7. See Santiago Gómez Santacruz, Rudolph Schevill and Adolfo Bonilla, George Shivers, David Lupher, and Aaron Kahn for a full discussion of historical sources on the siege of Numantia and Cervantes's possible sources. 8. I do not mean to suggest that Spain of this period was a modern nation-state as it lacked institutional, linguistic, legal, and monetary unity between the former kingdoms it subsumed. However, echoing historians who trace an imaginative nationalism preceding the nation such as John Armstrong, I contend that Numancia encouraged Iberians to conceive of Spain as a quasi-mythical community in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an important step toward the development of national identity. 9. See Simerka, Discourses of Empire (2003), for an extended consideration of the play's relationship to epic. 10. Juan de Mariana affirms the same in his Historia general de España (1592, 1605). 11. The place of blood rites in Numancia suggests a meta-theatrical relationship to literary history. The play's depiction of sacrament-like rites harkens backs to the Greek roots of drama and its medieval history in the Church. Early Greek drama tragedy included a ritual sacrifice to Dionysus accompanied by a song. The Middle Ages, unfamiliar with classical tragedy, viewed the form as pertaining to the greatest tragedy of all time (i.e., the Passion and death of Christ), often the basis of mystery plays, which would form the basis of Renaissance theater. 12. See Whitby and Armas for additional readings of the Eucharistic language in Marando's death. 13. From one perspective this is a deeply conservative gesture, an attempt to maintain the Church community in its premodern form as spiritual kinship.