Before “Purity of Blood”. Elements and Metaphors in the 1449-1450 Converso Debate

Abstract

This study pays careful attention to the ways in which Latin and Castilian terms for ’blood’ and ’flesh’ are employed in the converso debate centered on the anti-converso uprising at Toledo in 1449. It considers how those terms are used —or not used— to conceive of human relationship to one another and to Christ as well as how they convey moral and spiritual status in terms related to purity and impurity. This microscopic look at a particular moment in Castile will enrich telescopic studies that aim for synthesis across disciplinary, chronological, and geographic boundaries. In the more immediate term, this essay demonstrates that, although Iberian historiography has tended to frame the exclusion of conversos from religious and civic life in terms of blood criteria, purity of blood was not a central category in the converso debate of 1449-1450. Rather, the dominant concerns whose relationship to blood and flesh, purity and impurity, faith and heresy, class, king, and country was at stake were honor and lineage itself.

Keywords

• conversos
• blood
• flesh
• purity
• honor
• lineage