A New (Textual) World

Once referred to as ‘las Indias de la literatura española’, aljamiado manuscripts have long existed on the margins of Spanish literature. Produced by mudejars and moriscos in the late medieval and early modern period, the extant manuscripts lay untouched for centuries until their startling discovery and subsequent publication in collected editions made them accessible to Spanish readers. This article argues that the selective inclusion and anxious exclusion of the aljamiado corpus—manifest in philology, history writing and the press—shaped Spain’s national self-definition and, by extension, its colonial aspirations in the second half of the nineteenth century

Early Modern Spanish Literature · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Sephardic Jews and Inquisition Studies