Beyond Muslim and Christian: The Moriscos’ Marian Scriptures

Early modern Spaniards, whether Old Christians or Moriscos, often used the Virgin Mary as a figure through which to define a fixed boundary between Islam and Christianity. Yet a set of sacred scriptures created by some Moriscos in late sixteenth-century Granada went against this trend by presenting her as the patron saint of those New Christians who were proud of their Muslim ancestry. These Moriscos fashioned their category-defying Virgin in documents still famed as the most audacious, ingenious, and scandalous of all the myriad forgeries produced by history-mad and falsification-prone early modern Spaniards: the Lead Books of Granada.