Content area
Full Text
The Moorish novel El Abencerraje takes place in a chronologically indeterminate and stylishly romanticized period of the fifteenth century, during the Christian Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, and is set along the border between Christian territory and the Nasrid kingdom of Granada.1 Within this context, the short novel articulates a meticulously stratified system of contractual exchanges in which the aristocracy's symbolic economy of honor functions in explicit counterpoint to the warrior economy of cross-border raids and ransoms, the erotic economy of love, and, most particularly, to the mercantile economy of the commercial class. These economic divisions do not serve to differentiate Christian and Muslim societies, however. Rather, they transect both cultural spaces, transcending ethnic and religious distinctions and reinforcing a shared aristocratic identity that ultimately supplants both financial greed and violence. While this hierarchy of value exists in all three versions of El Abencerraje, it is particularly developed in the most fully realized iteration of the text, which was included in Antonio de Villegas's Inventario published in Medina del Campo in 1565.2 Although Villegas's role in producing this textual variant remains unclear, the place of publication is potentially significant. In the mid-sixteenth century, Medina del Campo was the site of the most important merchant fair in Castile and the hub of financial activity in the Peninsula. Increasingly globalized commercial and currency exchange markets provided unprecedented opportunities of enrichment to those merchants in a position to profitably exploit them.3 As Henri Lapeyre points out, this phenomenon was widely commented upon in the period: "La literatura de la epoca esta llena de alusiones a este torbellino de los negocios, que maravilla y escandaliza a la vez a los contemporaneos" (94). This economic context, therefore, may have been determinative of some of the distinctive aspects of the Inventario version of the text, which comprehensively contrasts the financial disinterestedness of its noble Christian protagonist, Rodrigo de Narvaez, with the avaricious figure of the "cobdicioso mercader" (164; original emphasis). From this perspective, the Inventario variant of El Abencerraje appears to be less a plea for interfaith tolerance or ethnic understanding, as many critics have argued, than an implicitly didactic instrument for inculcating aristocratic values within a socially mobile nouveau riche merchant class with pretensions to join the ranks of the...