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In “Chapter Six,” Lee proposes that the maurophilic trend in literature, which romanticized the Moor before he became a Morisco, may be interpreted as evidence that Old Christians were more at ease in situations where the assigned inferior subjects carried visible signs of difference. In her readings of Historia del Abencerraje y la hermosa Jarifa, Morisco ballads, the first part of Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El Tuzaní de la Alpujarra, she finds that Spaniards may have been attracted to the figure of the noble Moor because he embodied the exemplary defeated enemy. The Moor’s conspicuous exoticism made him desirable and ultimately domesticable by the Christian Knights. Lee further explores the Old Christian attraction to the exotic Christianized subject in Cervantes’ tale of the Moriscos Ricote and Ana Félix in the second part of Don Quijote de la Mancha (1615).

This chapter considers the construction of Spanish identity, both within and outside Spain, in relation to “maurophilia” or the cultural fascination with the Moors in early modern Europe. It explains that “maurophilia” became so persistent that a hidden “Orient within” continuously reveals itself in multiple identifications of Spanish with specifically Moorish dress and cultural fashions. This chapter argues that it was the persistence of Moorishness within Spanish self-identity that enabled Northern Europe to denigrate Spain as the black other of its northern European self.

This chapter focuses on Muslim monsters in the Americas, beginning with the early monsters cited in colonial records at the time of European contact. These monsters were at times identified as Moors, especially by Spanish explorers, part of what scholars have described as “Maurophilia.” Monsters associated with the Barbary Coast figured importantly in the early American colonial imagination about Muslims, identifying Muslim monsters once again with African monsters. These characters and others were influenced by Orientalism and the monsters of Gothic fiction, which informed the fictive characters that populated Hollywood cinema in the twentieth century, such as the mummy, the vampire, and the zombie. Filmic characters constitute the bulk of this chapter, from the early Hollywood “Easterns” to later films that exhibit an Orientalist aesthetic, Eastern settings, and Muslim characters.

This introductory chapter opens with the case study of the amendments that the historian Ambrosio de Morales introduced in the manuscript version of his core book Las Antigüedades de las ciudades de España (1575) before sending it to print. The changes in the description of Córdoba Mosque reveal the conflictive status of Islamic architecture in the Spanish historical writing of the time. Upon this example the subject of Admiration and Awe is introduced through three angles: the connection of the topic of the interpretation of Islamic monuments to sixteenth and seventeenth historiographical building of Spanish national identity; a review of recent academic literature on the subject as well as on its possible connection to postcolonial theory; and a survey in the early modern historiographical distinction among medieval Islamic buildings and contemporary uses of Islamic architecture.