Document Type
Article
Peer Reviewed
1
Abstract
This article explores how the conversion of Muslim women was perceived as being spurred by Mary’s love, as evidenced in Castilian Marian miracle collections, popular literature, church iconography, and missional policy. I argue that, in the context of the Castilian colonization of Muslim Iberia, Muslim women’s conversion was stimulated and imagined differently from their male counterparts. Through the analysis of post-thirteenth-century Castilian Marian miracle tales and devotional iconography, my research interrogates the role of Marian devotion in the construction of a model of religious conversion that specifically sought to convert women and children and identified Muslim women as the means to facilitate the conversion of native Muslim communities. Similarly, through the study of Castilian historical chronicles, European travel literature, inquisitorial and ecclesiastic texts, this paper reveals how changes in social attitudes regarding the reproduction and biological transmission of religious beliefs favored the emergence of negative images of Moriscas. In these sources, Moriscas’ unassimilability, “virility,” and dangerous sexuality, stemming from their perceived role as breeders of crypto-Islam, preservers of
Andalusian tradition, and agents of social contamination, were expressed through their opposition to Mary. Finally, I explore how, in response, some examples of popular literature, such as Cervantes’s works, alongside the Morisco forgery, the Lead Books of Granada, and the imaginary promoted by the proponents of the Immaculate Conception, presented Moriscos as Mary’s protegees and Moriscas as normatively Mary-like figures. By reimagining the relationship between the Virgin and Moriscos, these productions subverted the biological logic of the “purity of blood” ideology, resorting to Mary to create alternative genealogies that legitimized the Christian identity of the Iberian Arabic population and the role of ethnolinguistic diversity in the construction of Iberian Christianity since biblical times.
Acknowledgements
This article is part of the Special Issue, titled, “Intersections of Gender and Genres in Medieval Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.” Research for this article was conducted within the framework of the research project, “Writing Religious, Transcultural, and Gender Identities and Alterities in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean,” financed by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Universidades, the Agencia Estatal de Investigación y la Unión Europa, ref. no. PGC2018-093472-B-C32 (2019-2022).
This paper forms part of the research project “Under the Guidance of Mary: ‘Moriscos’ and ‘Indios’ against the Expansion of the Spanish Empire and the Politics of Marian Devotion” [UGM], developed at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2022 Research and Innovation program through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 101104357.
Keywords
religious conversion and gender, Mudejar women, Castilian Moriscos, Virgen Mary in Islam, Castilian Marian devotions, Marian miracle collections
Recommended Citation
Valdés Sánchez, Amanda "Mary’s Granddaughters: Marian Conversion, Gender, and the Reproduction of Religious Belief in Medieval and Early Modern Castile." Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 61, No. 2 (2026)
