David Nirenberg, Department of History, The Johns Hopkins University

In 1391, Christian rioters attacked Jews in town after town across the lands we now call Spain. Thousands of Jews were killed, many thousands more converted to Christianity. Their conversion, long a dream of Spanish Christians, had been equally long despaired of, and its miraculous nature was abundantly clear. In the city of Valencia, for example, so many Jews sought baptism that the clergy feared running out of chrism. But the priests returned from supper to find vessels that they had left empty now overflowing, so that they could resume their work. "Consider for yourself," the town council of Valencia wrote the king, "whether these things can have a natural cause. We believe that they cannot, but can only be the work of the Almighty."

Miraculous they may have been, but it is only in deference to later events that historians have graced 1391 with any attention. Those later events are notorious. By 1449 some Christians considered the conversions a great disaster, one that threatened the spiritual health of the entire Christian community. The converts and their descendents were now seen as insincere Christians, as clandestine Jews, or even as hybrid monsters, neither Jew nor Christian. They had converted merely to gain power over Christians. Their secret desire was to degrade, even poison, Christian men and to have sex with Christian women: daughters, wives, even nuns. Some went so far as to see this insincerity as a product of nature. Baptism could not alter the fact that the converts’ blood was corrupted by millennia of mixture and debasement, indelibly saturated with a hatred of everything Christian. Hence purity of blood laws were needed to bar the descendents of converts from any position of power or privilege, and "natural Christians" were encouraged not to intermarry with them. There were many who disagreed. But even among the more moderate, many thought that secret judaizing was extensive and dangerous. The danger justified, for example, the establishment of institutions (such as the Inquisition) to identify, reform, or extirpate those at risk, and eventually the expulsion of the Jews in 1492.

Beneath the setting sun of Iberian Jewry these later events cast a long backward shadow. Historians of medieval Iberia have therefore tended, like students of so many other "failed emancipations" (such as that of Jews in Enlightenment Europe or African-Americans in the United States after the Civil War), to take continuities of hatred for granted. In their writings new discriminations arise with refurbished plumage out of the ashes of the old, rendered immortal either by the unchanging character of the persecutor (the anti-Semite remains at heart an anti-Semite) or of the persecuted (the convert remains at heart a Jew).

I do not propose to confront the full force of that historiography here, but only to chip away at its foundations with a series of blunt questions. First, how did the generation of Christians that came of age in 1391 and the quarter century following imagine the consequences of the massacres and conversions they had wrought? Why, as it turns out, were they so unconcerned with convert religiosity, and so concerned about sex with Jews? Were their sexual concerns the same as those of their ancestors and descendents? If not, what can such differences teach us about, specifically, the emergence of Old Christian enmity toward converts, and more generally, about the function of sexual boundaries in systems of discrimination and classification?

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What is most striking about the generation of 1391 is its relative disinterest in Converso orthodoxy and orthopraxis, the very issues that would come to characterize the later period. Certainly inquisitors and royal officials were interested in patrolling the boundaries of faith. Their attempts (like much else) are best documented in the Crown of Aragon. In Morvedre, for example, royal officials entered the Jewish quarter during Passover, 1393, and fined the (few) converts they found there participating in "Jewish Easter" with their relatives. By and large, however, throughout the reigns of Joan I (1387-1396) and his brother Martí (1396-1410) officials were much more interested in preventing converts from emigrating to Muslim North Africa in order to return openly to Judaism. (The issue here seems to have been as much the fact that the converts took their wealth with them, as it was their apostasy.) In other words, officials did seek to prevent apostasy, but they defined apostasy quite narrowly, and did not equate "judaizing" with it. To the extent that there was concern about judaizing in this early period, it tended to be projected upon the Jews themselves, and not upon the converts. The Jew Jacob Façan, for example, was accused of encouraging his converso son to emigrate to North Africa, and of delivering matzah to converts in Sogorb. The converts who allegedly received the matzah, on the other hand, were not charged.

Christian authorities did worry that converts might linger in their old spiritual and liturgical sensibilities. In 1400 King Martí decreed that converso observance of the Jewish Sabbath or of any Jewish holiday would be punishable by a fine of 100 sous, and he encouraged the inquisitors in their search for such practices. But, despite their potential profitability, such worries were voiced remarkably rarely. This is in striking contrast with the litany of complaints about converso judaizing that would arise in the 1450s, especially when we consider the fact that in the 1390s the thousands of converts who had entered Christianity by force and without catechism almost certainly had little sense of how to practice their new religion.

The mass conversions of 1391 did provoke an important Christian "identity crisis," one that would sharply constrict the space available for religious diversity in the Peninsula. But this was a very different crisis from the later ones that would transform Iberia into a land of inquisitors and pure blood statutes. The concern of Christians in the years after 1391 was not that religious identity was unchanging, but rather the opposite, that the disappearance of the Jews and the emergence of the conversos would undermine the distinctive value and meaning of Christian identity. Correspondingly, their attention was not focused on the religious practices of the converts or on establishing differences between old Christian and new, but on reinforcing the still more fundamental boundary between Christian and Jew.

Listen, for example, to King Joan I of Aragon in 1393. Writing to a number of his most important cities, he informed them that it had become impossible for "natural Christians", i.e., not the converts, to tell who was a convert to Christianity and who was still a Jew. Henceforth converts were to be forbidden to live, dine, or have conversation with Jews. The Jews were to be made to wear more conspicuous badges and Jewish hats, so "that they appear to be Jews." The king ended the letter with his most emphatic point: "And we order and desire that if any of these said Jews are found with a Christian woman in a suspicious place, in order to have carnal copulation with her, let them both be burned without mercy." Similar admonitions would be continuously repeated in the decade that followed.

It is a symptom of the sway later events hold over our imagination that we have not been struck by the highly specific contours of the concern such letters express. They focus, not so much on the beliefs or religious identity of the converts, but on the physical and social proximity of Jew to Christian, a proximity that threatens the very process of religious identification and classification. Moreover, the perils of that proximity are not expressed in terms of sincerity of belief or confessional allegiance, but in terms of dangerous social and sexual intimacy. Again unlike the later period, the solution proposed here has little to do with the policing of converso orthodoxy. What is advocated is a prophylactic heightening, through marking and segregation, of the physical distance between Christian and Jew.

One of the most systematic and influential exponents of this logic was St. Vincent Ferrer. St. Vincent was the most important evangelist of the day, and the impresario of the massive effort undertaken by papacy and monarchy in the early fifteenth century to convert the Jews of the Peninsula. His sermons were heard by hundreds of thousands, Christian and infidel alike, and thousands of Jews converted at his exhortation. A large number of the sermons survive, primarily from the most dramatically successful period of his mission, that is, from 1411-1416. Their abundance and their influence make them a most informative source for understanding the particulars of the processes we are studying, and so shall be frequently cited below. But at their most general, the terms in which the saint articulated his position do not differ substantially from those expressed in the letters of king Joan of Aragon cited above, and written some twenty years earlier.

Like Kings Joan and Martí, St. Vincent was clearly concerned that the converts were not being properly educated as Christians. In 1413, for example, he exhorted the city of Valencia to force the dispersal of the many conversos whose homes were clustered in the old Jewish quarter. In a letter announcing their agreement, the town councilors explained his reasoning.

Once resettled in neighborhoods of "natural Christians and ancient," they would have before them many more examples of the proper way to live a Christian life.

But such an explicit focus on the religiosity of the converts was as rare in St. Vincent’s sermons as it was elsewhere during this period. (Perhaps in this case it owed something to the fact that Jews were no longer permitted to live in the city of Valencia, so that there was no way to heighten the difference between Christian and Jew through their segregation.) Much more often he stressed, not the integration of the convert, but the segregation of the Jew, and this in explicitly sexual terms. Of course St. Vincent was very much concerned with sexual offenses of any kind, and he was convinced that sexual appetites were becoming increasingly deviant in his day. Nowadays, he complained, Christian men "want to taste everything: Muslims and Jews, animals, men with men; there is no limit...." But he was especially concerned about what he perceived to be an explosion of sex between Christians and Jews. The situation was so grave, he suggested to a Castilian audience in 1412, "that many are thought to be the children of Jews but are really Christian, and vice-versa."

The theme became a favorite, but repetition did not dull its edge. In 1415 he told a Zaragozan audience that "many Christian men believe their wife’s children to be their own, when they are actually by Muslim and Jewish [fathers]." If the citizens did not put a stop to such interfaith adultery, he warned, God would do so through plague. His sermon provoked a sexual panic. Christian patrols searched the streets, on the lookout for predatory Jews or Muslims in search of Christian women. One Muslim was seized, found with "iron tools for … forcing open doors" in order to obtain Christian women for Muslim men. Another was arrested after witnesses claimed to have seen him fleeing a Christian woman’s room by the flat rooftops one night. So many charges were brought that the responsible judicial official was accused of fomenting a riot against the Muslims and the Jews (it is thanks to his exculpatory letter to the king that we know of these events).

According to St. Vincent, the problem was one of ambiguous identities. Jews and Muslims were living among Christians, dressing like Christians, even adopting Christian names, so that "by their appearance they are taken and reputed by many to be Christians." The solution he advocated was one of heightened marking and segregation. So powerful was his reasoning that, as we shall see, it convinced the Pope, the kings of Castile and of Aragon, and innumerable town councils and municipal officers, to attempt what may be the most extensive efforts at segregation before the modern era.

Why did St. Vincent and his contemporaries express their sense of crisis so determinedly in sexual terms (rather than, say, in terms of orthodoxy and orthopraxis)? Modern commentators have tended to ignore this question, assuming either that the language of crisis and of sex was merely a pretext for discriminatory pressure intended to further evangelization, or that, if there was a real crisis, converso judaizing was its cause. Medieval people did not ask it either, for to them the answer was obvious: sex was the problem because Jews (and Muslims) were having more of it with Christians. But in fact all the surviving evidence suggests that, despite their claims, the new anxieties were not the result of any increase in the amount of sexual contact between, for example, Christians and Jews (not to mention animals). Of the thousands of documents concerning Jews that I have seen from the period 1391-1415, only a handful concern such intercourse (a much lower number than for the two decades preceding the massacres). The most significant case involved a convert who put his wife to work as a prostitute in the Jewish brothel of Zaragoza. This not only violated the law and dishonored God, declared the king, but it was also against nature, for even brute animals seek to protect their mates from the sexual advances of others. An interesting story, this, but clearly not the stimulus for interfaith sexual panic.

So the question remains, why sex? In other words, why did the mass conversions trigger such heightened anxiety about interfaith intercourse? And what role did this sharpened concern about sexual boundaries play in the "naturalization" of religious identity? These are complex questions, made all the more difficult by the fact that they are pregnant with anachronism. We moderns take for granted that sexual boundaries are the site at which nature and culture meet to produce "race." What mystery or contingency can there be for us in these scandals of an earlier age? But let us approach our subjects with a studied innocence, in the hope that we might yet be surprised by the past.

As a first step toward the requisite naïveté we must, like any adolescent, forget our world-weary certainty that sex is about biological reproduction, in order to ask without embarrassment just what it was about sex that made it so "good to think with" for medieval people struggling to make sense of their communities. And we must remain very much alive to the myriad ways in which social space and social life can be eroticized, in order to recognize the peculiar topographies of sexual opportunity and danger in pre-modern communities very different from our own. These, in effect, are the tasks of the two sections that follow.

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Medieval Christians had a number of well-known corporal metaphors to hand through which they might imagine themselves as a sexual community. One of these was the image of society as a human (generally male) body, of which St. Paul’s "body of Christ" (I Corinthians 12) and John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (or later Hobbes’ Leviathan) provide famous examples. At times, the image sustained an undifferentiated view of the Christian community. At others, it was used to reconcile the existence of socio-economic diversity within a society unified at the level of spirit. As St. Vincent put it:

However it was used, this corporatist image was seldom sexualized for the purpose delineating religious difference. Perhaps this is because the logic of the imagery (organic diversity as a functional aspect of vitality) militated against the automatic exclusion of groups like Jews and Muslims that played recognizable roles in the social order. Or perhaps it is simply because this particular corporatist imagination was entirely self-contained, lacking an "other" body capable of producing sexual danger. Paul Ricoeur.]

A second and far more widespread corporal image for the Christian community was that of Ecclesia, that is, the Church personified as a woman. On the face of it this image, so thoroughly disseminated in Christian thought and art, should have provided a strong foundation for a discourse of anxiety about interfaith sex, and this for two reasons. First, unlike the more political corporatism described above, the non-Christian was firmly excluded from Ecclesia. In fact a long tradition of artistic and textual production presented Ecclesia as the mirror image, the positive pole, to Synagoga as the personification of Judaism. Second, Ecclesia had long been understood in sexualized terms as the bride of Christ. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians [5.25-33], for example, urged every Christian to care for his wife’s body, and to guard her purity, just as Jesus guarded his own wife Ecclesia. It was an analogy well suited to sustaining the vast interpretive edifice necessary for the linking of collective religious anxieties to the sexual body of the individual.

It is all the more striking, then, that the many medieval Iberian texts concerning sex between Christian and non-Christian rarely invoked these famous corporatist metaphors. Instead they took as their point of departure very different, and much less studied, analogies that treated the patriarchal family, and not the body, as the foundational metaphor for Christian community. King Alfonso the Wise of Castile put it this way:

Every Christian woman, wed or unwed, is the bride of Christ through baptism. Few metaphors could be more over-determined in the Middle Ages, but we might begin with some of the more obvious implications. God had a sexual interest in all Christian women. As His wives, their bodies represented the extension of His authority and community. Again as His wives, they represented the point at which His honor as Father and husband was at risk. Because of this, women’s bodies could become the site of fears concerning God’s honor and that of His Church.

Christian women were not just God’s wives. They were also His daughters. Imagine, St. Vincent exhorted Christians in a sermon against prostitution, that the king had a daughter. Even if she consents with pleasure to have sex with you, do you not betray the king in lying with her? Would you not deserve to be drawn and quartered? The king is Jesus Christ: are prostitutes not His daughters? "Yes, surely, for he has engendered them in baptism, just as he has engendered you and all other [Christians]."

God’s "engendering" of the Christian family was of course central to the metaphor, and it too was understood in explicitly sexual terms. "…Jesus every day impregnates the Church, and the womb is the baptismal font, and he sends there his semen from heaven." It is therefore the obligation of every Christian woman to honor father and mother, Jesus Christ and Holy Mother Church. It is also their spousal duty to honor Him as husband. "If a king takes the daughter of a poor laborer as wife, and she leaves him and goes off with the ‘rapaços’, she would be considered a great whore."

In all of these analogies the emphasis is on a sexualized God. Occasionally this sexuality is gendered feminine. Much more often, however, God is a paterfamilias, whether as husband or as father, with rights over His "family." The violation of those rights diminishes His honor, and constitutes an insult both to Him and to his "household," that is, to the entire Christian community. Of course God’s rights and His honor extend far beyond the sexual, and St. Vincent, like many other medieval preachers, talked frequently of the obligation to honor God in every action. Judging from the space allotted to it in his sermons, however, sex played as large a role in the divine economy of honor as it did in the human one.

These metaphors of marriage and reproduction defined the Christian community in a number of related ways. They represent the Christian community as a family of brothers and sisters tied to God through overlapping bonds of marriage and paternity. The limits of the community are marked by strict endogamy. Muslims and Jews are not God’s children, since they have not undergone God’s engendering baptism. They are explicitly excluded from the kin group, and should therefore (as Alfonso put it) have no sexual contact with it, lest such contact establish a kinship in the flesh that dishonored the more vital kinship in the spirit (see below, p. xx).

The analogy of sexual honor had an additional virtue, for it described the Christian community’s claims to privilege and allegiance in the same terms that individual Christians used to describe the claims of their own families. In this sense, the analogy served to bridge the gap between the individual and the collective. In sociological terms (I am adapting Georg Simmel) the discourse of honor functioned to stabilize "the cohesion, standing, regularity, and furtherance of the life processes" of a social group, and to isolate it from other groups or classes. It did so by appealing to the individual’s "conviction that the maintenance of his honor constitutes his most intrinsic, most profound and most personal self-interest." This is what made honor, according to Simmel, "one of the most marvelous, instinctively developed expediencies for the maintenance of group existence."

There were a number of other ways in which the theology of Christian sexual honor reinforced the Christian community’s sense of a coherent and cohesive identity. One of these was as object of collective punishment. Within the economy of honor in which God and medieval Christians functioned, insult required vengeance. A late fourteenth century altar painting (retable) from Santa María de Sixena reminded worshippers that this vengeance could be aimed at the individual transgressor. It depicted a woman kneeling at communion, her throat gushing blood where the Eucharist had slit it. In the neighboring panel we see the reason for the wafer’s aggression: the communicant had just taken leave of her Muslim lover.

Much more often, however, punishment was aimed, not merely at the sinner, but at the totality of the collective that was dishonored and corrupted by the sin. The instruments of God’s discipline were plague, famine, civil war, and other horrors. Hence municipal governments had to worry, as did that of Valencia in 1335, about the public health implications of sins taking place within their jurisdiction, "for which sins, so enormous and grave… our lord God … gives great whippings, even canings."

Again, St. Vincent was a systematic exponent of this logic. In a number of his sermons he listed six particularly dishonorable sins that provoke God’s punishing anger: (1) reliance on witches and fortune-tellers; 2) blasphemy; (3) ignoring God’s feasts (Sundays and holidays); (4) failing to bring gamblers, usurers, and other thieves of God’s goods to justice. The fifth sin (and the one that often received the most space) was negligence in the repression of prostitution. If the populace wished to avoid divine punishment it must locate any brothel outside the town. It must allow no concubines or public women in its midst, for if even just one man should have a concubine, "it is something very dangerous for the community." Had not St. Paul explained that on account of one concubine alone, an entire "city was corrupted, and suffered great plagues"? "Do you not know that a little leaven corrupts the entire dough?" (I Cor. 5) "Therefore, eject the prostitute into the street, for on her account so many plagues have come upon you." Finally, the sixth point: segregate Jews and Muslims, and have nothing to do with them. Do not even light their fires, for it was in just such a seemingly innocent transaction that "a young Christian girl was raped by a Jew." Proper attention to these six issues, according to Vincent, would guarantee the health of the city, and allow its inhabitants to say "In habitacione sancta coram ipso ministravi."

It is not so much the content of this catalogue of vice that concerns us here, as the images that were called upon in this and other sermons in order to express the dangers that sexual sins posed to the community. A little yeast in a large mass of dough; one sick sheep infecting the flock; a spoiled apple rotting the entire bin; all these analogies supported models of corruption and contagion that raised the consequences of individual sin to the level of the community. In this sense, anxieties about sexual honor helped to define the Christian community as a collective with "natural" boundaries whose integrity needed to be maintained if disease was to be avoided. Here too, then, the language of sexual honor worked "to express both the exclusive nature of the allegiance and the confused social experience," though now in ways more reminiscent of Durkheim and Mary Douglas than of Weber and Simmel.

There were doubtless any number of other ways the Christian community used sex to help define and identify itself as a collective, and to heighten the barriers of honor with which the collective surrounded itself. We will return to a few of these below. But now that we have described two of the most relevant, it is time to shift our focus to the specific vanities and vulnerabilities of that collective. Where did Christian society imagine itself sexually most at risk? And how did it seek to defend itself from the sexual dangers with which it saw itself beset? We need to take, in other words, our second step toward naiveté.

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Moral reformers like St. Vincent seldom ranked systematically the sins they preached against, though they did fear some adulteries more than others. For example, because priests touched Christ’s Eucharistic body in the mass, the clerical concubines who bodies corrupted those hands dishonored Christ doubly: "You, woman, who grant your body to a cleric…. Commit a greater sin by lying just once with him than if you granted it to all the other men in Aragon in specie." And of course forms of sexual activity that might normally be tolerated could be perceived as dangerous at specific times, such as during plagues or Lent. But the type of sexual sin that elicited by far the most sustained and extensive concern, and that was considered to be the greatest "dishonor to God and to the Catholic faith," is the one that concerns us here: intercourse between Christ’s kin and His enemies, that is, between Christians and Muslims or Jews.

It was largely (but not exclusively) to prevent such intercourse that throughout the Middle Ages Christian theologians (as well as Muslim jurists and Jewish rabbis) emphasized the importance of maintaining sexual boundaries between the three religious groups. These boundaries might be said to constitute the "skin" of the sexualized body social. But it is important to remember that, unlike skin, these boundaries did not have a fixed location, meaning, or function in society. Rather, they were dynamic, displaceable, and highly responsive to the changing needs of the societies that produced them.

At some level, ancient and medieval legislators, whether Christian or Jew, were well aware of this. One striking passage from the Babylonian Talmud wrestles with the fact that the biblical passage upon which Jewish restrictions on intermarriage were based applied explicitly only to intermarriage with people from seven tribes that had ceased to exist shortly after the conquest by the Israelites of the Holy Land, more than a thousand years before:

The Talmudic passage is remarkable in a number of ways. First, it treats the evolution of sexual boundaries in historical time. Second, and equally important, it shows a full awareness that the sexual boundary is endlessly displaceable, that it can be extended to all kinds of non-sexual interaction. The passage even articulates the logic by which such movement occurs. Because sex and marriage can be positioned along a continuum of social and cultural relations and types of exchange, prohibitions on sex and marriage can be moved along that continuum as well: private association may lead to sex, hence association is forbidden. The same rabbinic discussion relates other prohibitions to the sexual one, for example when it says:

The medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides put it more bluntly when he wrote that the ancient rabbis had established prohibitions on exchange and social interaction between Jews and non-Jews as a "precaution, lest such [social] intercourse should lead to intermarriage." The logic is strikingly similar to that of a formulation famous in anthropology:

Medieval Christians read little Talmud and less anthropology, but they would have recognized this logic very much as their own. They, too, shared the sense that seemingly innocent forms of exchange might lead to the effacement of difference, and thereby to more dangerous exchanges. The canon lawyer Johannes Teutonicus made the point quite wittily when asked: why are Christians allowed to talk to Jews but forbidden to eat with them? The reply: talking is one thing, but eating? Who knows what can happen between courses.... And they, too, used anxiety about the integrity of sexual boundaries to underwrite any number of practices of discrimination and identification. When, for example, the "Jewish badge" was imposed at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the distinction was justified as necessary in order that easy identification might prevent sexual intercourse across religious lines. The same logic was repeated later in the century by King Alfonso the Wise of Castile, and is frequent in Iberian legislation:

In short many medieval Christians believed, as so many other societies have done, that the transition from "other" to "self" (in this case from infidel and alien to Christian and kin) would culminate in sexual union. Because of this, the entire process of identification and integration could be most powerfully represented in terms of the sexual act. At the level of the spirit, the process had been most bluntly described by St. Paul:

At the level of the flesh, medicine lent authority to canon law. Sperm was blood, whipped up to a steaming white froth in the veins of the male, then mixed with the cooler blood of the female in the womb. This process established between a woman and all her sexual partners a bond of consanguinity similar to that with a blood relation or a god-parent. Physiologically, in other words, sex threatened to admit the non-Christian partner into the circle of Christian kin.

This is why medieval Christian anxieties about identification and, ultimately, about the integrity of the self, so often expressed themselves in sexual terms. It is also why, for Christian, Jew, and Muslim alike, the question was always where to draw the line to best interrupt this continuum. No matter where these boundaries were drawn, they were sexual in the sense that they justified themselves as safeguards against sexual danger. But they could be constructed in all kinds of places, and the place chosen could have a tremendous effect on inter-group relations. If, as in the Talmudic example, any and all association were thought to lead to sex, then total segregation was necessary; if only wine drinking were dangerous, then anxiety could focus there.

So where, in the century before 1391, did Christians fear that their religion was sexually most at risk? Anxiety over the integrity of sexual boundaries can alight in many different places: on children, wives, slaves, widows, even (as in the case of the Spanish Civil War) nuns…. The particular form the anxiety takes depends not so much on the quantitative reality of sexual interaction (anxieties need not correspond to the real), but on far more complicated cultural logics whose outcomes can be quite surprising.

For example, the previous section described how the metaphor of marriage facilitated the convergence of familial and communal honor upon female sexuality in the theological and social imagination of medieval Christians. Given this convergence, we might expect a good deal of concern about the possibility that married or marriageable women might engage in interfaith adultery. In fact, such concern is almost entirely absent from the archival or the literary record. In the few court cases involving such accusations that I have found, the charges end up being dismissed. Acquittal is the theme, as well, in Alfonso the Wise’s Cantigas de Santa María, where the Virgin intervenes to save a young wife falsely accused by her mother-in-law of intercourse with her Muslim slave: a rare literary example of such concern in a culture where, it should be remembered, the presence of male Muslim slaves in Christian households was common.

Those few texts that do focus on the desire of married Christian women for non-Christians tend to do so playfully. An Aragonese chronicle, for example, tells a tale about one "Count Don Rodrigo, a man of great virtue and strength." [29v] The count was engaged in a border skirmish with a Muslim king who, before turning his horse to flee, dropped his trousers and showed the count his penis: "What do you think of this," he boasted, and disappeared. Remembering the incident at the dinner table, the count began to laugh, and revealed to his wife the reason for his good humor. She conceived a desire for the Muslim, and had her secretary write to him. The king sent her a drug that would make her seem dead for eight days, then came in the night, opened her tomb, and carried her to his city. After some time news of this resurrection reached the count, who dressed himself up as a beggar and went to the Muslim city. His travails there were many, including being locked in a chest by his wife, who had intercourse upon it with the King before presenting it to him as a post-coital present. In the end the count prevailed, however, burning the king "and the countess, who was now a Mooress." (31v). The narrative concludes with the text of certain prayers the count had found useful in his tribulations, and now urged the reader to remember. The only explicitly didactic note in this highly literary trickster tale is not, then, a moral about the dangers of miscegenation, but instruction on the efficacy of prayer.

The playful aspects of the Count’s story are typical of much of the literary material on sexual interaction, material that, not surprisingly, is often associated with frontier regions where the possibilities of such interaction were relatively high. "Mi padre era de Ronda y mi madre de Antequera," one poem begins: that is, my father is from a Christian town and my mother from a Muslim one. Romances like "Moriana y el moro Galván" remind us a bit less explicitly that the reverse could also be true. But curiously enough, the possibility of this type of sexual interaction seems to have provoked little anxiety. Even Alfonso X, the author of the law cited above forbidding Christian women from having sex with non-Christians, could be relaxed enough to write a poem about a soldadeira who fights sexual duels with a Muslim knight on the frontier. She exhausts and defeats the brave Muslim, but not before he wounds her with his "little lance" [tragazeite].

None of this is meant to suggest that Christian society approved of intercourse between Christian women of good repute and non-Christians. To the contrary, we know that such intercourse could be savagely repressed, and that, at least in theory, the accused faced death, as did the countess in the Aragonese story. The point is only that, regardless of its quantitative reality, such intercourse did not form an important focus of public concern or anchor a rhetoric of anxiety about sexual boundaries between religious communities. Another sexual boundary does, however, emerge as particularly fraught in the medieval Iberian sources, and that is the one between Christian prostitutes and non-Christian men.

It should surprise us that a discourse of honor built upon analogies of marriage and the family should focus its concerns precisely upon women who were outside the bounds of both those institutions, women whom the society itself defined as "without honor." In fact, prostitutes became the focus of discussion about sexual boundaries in all three communities. The archives are full of accusations charging Jewish and Muslim men with breaking the law against sexual intercourse with Christians, and these invariably put a prostitute at the center of the story.

This accumulation of accusation channeled anxiety about sexual frontiers onto the body of the prostitute. In essence, prostitutes became the site at which dishonor threatened the Christian community. This was a dangerous status. So far as I know, prostitutes were the only Christian women routinely burned or strangled for the crime of sexual intercourse across religious boundaries. Prostitutes themselves knew that, if accused, they faced the flames unless they could prove that the non-Christian appeared Christian. For them markers of identity became a matter of life and death. Hence the frequent emphasis on dress in such cases: were the Jews dressed as Jews? Did they carry weapons? Were the Muslims wearing their proper haircut? In this way the prostitute came to occupy, in a literal sense, the role of recognizer of difference.

The story of Alicsend de Tolba and Aytola the Sarracen is a good example of the prostitute’s role. Alicsend was a Christian prostitute who, together with one colleague, visited a shepherds’ camp in 1304. After some time, Lorenç the Shepherd ("Lorenç Pastor") went to the Muslim called Aytola the Sarracen ("Aytola Sarray") and asked him if he wouldn’t like to have intercourse with Alicsend. Aytola objected that he was a Muslim, and that he had no money, but Lorenç offered to loan Aytola the money, and "told the said moor to say that his name was Johan, to speak in ....., and to say that he was from the port." The deception ended when Alicsend "recognized that he was a moor in his member" and screamed for help. Aytola fled, and Alicsend denounced both him and Lorenç for falsity and deviousness "in dishonor of God and of the Catholic faith...." In this case it is Aytola’s expulsion from Alicsend that identifies him as alien, an "otherness" which not coincidentally is somatized and recognized in his sexual member by the prostitute in her role as detector of difference and protector of God’s honor.

This emphasis on the prostitute as incarnation of the sexual boundary between religions is perhaps the most distinctive feature of pre-1391 sexual moral economy. I have written extensively elsewhere about the social effects of constituting the sexual frontier narrowly through the prostitute, and so do not want to spend much time on it here, except to repeat the central point. Insofar as this "social system" focused responsibility for maintaining the sexual integrity of religious boundaries upon the prostitute, it construed sexual danger as narrowly as possible, and thereby freed a relatively large proportion of public and private space for interaction and exchange across religious boundaries, allowing a maximum of social interaction between Christian and non-Christian. Before 1391, in other words, the prostitute’s discipline (and the disciplining of prostitutes) sufficed to guarantee Christian confidence in the security of sexual frontiers. So long as the prostitute did her job, Christian and non-Christian could work together, gamble and drink together, even sleep in the same house, without triggering sexual panics. The post-1391 world was a very different one indeed.

* * *

The mechanics of this change should already be evident. I have proposed that the discourse of collective sexual honor functioned to stabilize "the cohesion, standing, regularity, and furtherance of the life processes" of the Christian community. We should therefore expect that heightened instability or incoherence in that identity would induce (1) a heightening of the language of sexual honor and a sharpening of the sexual boundaries through which that language inscribes itself in social life and (2) a more insistent demarcation of religious difference.

This expectation is not disappointed. Consider, for example, the reactions of Iberian Christians to the murderous advent of the bubonic plague in 1348, and to its remorseless return decade after decade over the centuries that followed. Plague, remember, was believed to be (among other things) the result of instability in Christian identity, an instability expressed in terms of insufficient attention to the honor of God and His privileged people. It is therefore not surprising that outbreaks of plague were often greeted with a host of moral reforms, including the heightened seclusion of prostitutes, and increased concern with the dangers of interfaith sexuality. At an extreme, Christians attempts to increase the distance between Christian and non-Christian as a means of assuaging God’s anger could lead to outbreaks of extensive violence against the Jews. Of this the massacres of Jews in 1348 are a notorious example. More commonly, Christians might demarcate what they believed to be "proper boundaries" through more stylized violence. Hence the Jews complained in 1354 that "without any reason they injure, harass, stone, and even kill the Jews living in the said kingdoms and lands, the said Christians declaring that because of the sins of the Jews there come mortalities and famines, and committing the said harms against the Jews so that the said pestilences might cease."

This logic quickly lost its violent force as the plague became familiar, another of a number of routine calamities. But the link between crisis and heightened concerns with miscegenation did not disappear. We see it, for example, during the civil war that consumed Castile in the 1360s and culminated in the murder of King Peter "the Cruel" by his half-brother Henry of Trastamara. According to the propagandists of his rivals Peter was a "cuckoo," a Jewish baby snuck into the royal cradle by the queen, who had actually given birth to a girl and feared being dismissed for failure to produce an heir. This explained his cruelty and his bad government. For complex reasons such "hybridity" stories tended to collect around nodes of violent resistance to monarchy. But the point here is a simpler one. This was a society in which complaints about disorder, the subversion of hierarchy, or the erosion of privilege, were often written in the shorthand of interfaith sex. It is in such crises of status, and not in the furtive meetings of star-crossed lovers, that we should locate the occasional outbursts of moral indignation (such as Seville’s complaint in 1371 that the law of witness made it virtually impossible to convict Jews caught in adultery with Christian women; or the plea of the cities assembled in parliament in 1385 about the proper protection of Christian women) that punctuate the century before 1391.

Despite these crises, what is most characteristic of the system is its equilibrium. Heightened fears about pollution and the coherence of the body social might momentarily sharpen attention to possible lapses in the enforcement of sexual boundaries, or result in changes like that of 1371 in Seville, that altered the laws concerning the witnessing of interfaith adultery. But such episodes did not cause Christian society to question its basic confidence in the integrity of those sexual boundaries, or to propose their dramatic reconstruction.

This confidence and equilibrium were shattered, as we saw earlier, by the mass conversions of 1391. One symptom of this change that we have already seen is the heightened place of interfaith sexuality in the preaching of reformers like St. Vincent. Another symptom is in the changed reaction of the authorities to such preaching. Before 1391 they might at most have reacted to such calls for reform by rounding up prostitutes and expelling them from town for a few weeks. By 1411, such actions were no longer enough. We have already encountered the example of Murcia, where sexual danger was used to justify the segregation of Jew from Christian. (See above, p. xx) Within six months the strategy had spread across the Peninsula. In Castile, late in 1411:

Similar actions were taken in the Crown of Aragon, where King Ferdinand I implemented measures virtually identical to those of Queen Catherine in Castile.

The architects of these measures had not lost their old anxiety about prostitutes. King Ferdinand, for example, stipulated that respectable Christian women found in the Jewish quarter would be fined. Christian prostitutes, on the other hand, would be whipped: 100 lashes, the rough equivalent in Iberian jurisprudence of the death penalty. But no matter how heavily she was whipped, the prostitute no longer sufficed as a boundary between Christian and Jew: total segregation was necessary. The ideal was to prohibit all exchange:

Note again how here the powers of corruption and plague that St. Paul attributed to the whore of Corinth are used to represent the dangers of all forms of exchange with infidels. If authorities fail in preventing such exchange, St. Vincent warned, the wrath of God would fall upon them and their cities.

In the interest of separating Christian from non-Christian, Jews (and to a lesser extent Muslims) were to be moved to segregated neighborhoods and severely restricted in their market and economic activities. The edicts were implemented to ferocious effect. Trade between Jew and Christian was forbidden, and in some towns Christians even refused to sell Jews food. Because few Jewish neighborhoods were completely segregated, entire communities found themselves evicted from their homes. Many found shelter in caves and huts, "with boys and girls dying from exposure to the cold and the snow." Writing years after these events, Abraham Zacuto called the discriminations of 1412-1416 "the greatest persecution that had ever occurred." And as in 1391, one of the consequences of this persecution was the mass conversion of tens of thousands who sought to avoid being barred from their trades and expelled from their homes.

* * *

It seems we have come full circle. We have described the heightened concerns about religious identity among the generation of Christians that witnessed 1391. We have also suggested some reasons why those concerns assumed the shape of a female body, a body vulnerable to sexual danger and therefore capable of bringing dishonor and disease to the Christian community and its Lord. Finally, we have shown how the heightening of these sexual anxieties transformed the nature of the boundaries that the Christian community believed necessary in order to maintain its integrity. Whereas before 1391 the surveillance of prostitutes seemed an adequate safeguard of the Christian community’s sexual honor, twenty years later only total segregation would suffice.

Of course my emphasis in the preceding narrative is highly selective. I have stressed, for example, sexual sensibilities, while ignoring millenarian impulses, papal politics, the spiritual inclinations of kings, and many other topics of tremendous importance in structuring Jewish-Christian relations in the period 1391-1416. But the goal of my narrative is not to provide an adequate causal explanation of the period’s events. I am not arguing, for example, that sexual concerns were the "primary reason" for the campaigns of segregation and evangelization. I seek only to demonstrate a much simpler point: St. Vincent and his contemporaries chose to express the sense that they were living through a "religious identity crisis" in sexual terms, and that their choice is meaningful. The language of sexual danger was invoked both as a symptom of identity crisis and as a potent cure for it, simultaneously and somewhat paradoxically fortifying boundaries (through, for example, segregation) and marking them as breached. I have tried, in other words, to provide an answer to the question we began with: why sex, and with what consequences? But though sex may have been both symptom and cure of the crisis, it was not its cause. Nor, as I suggested at the outset, was the cause converso judaizing, at least not if we are to believe the silence of the early fifteenth century sources on this score. So it seems we have yet to address another basic question. What precipitated this crisis of sexual anxiety?

None of the obvious answers to this question suffice. We might assume, for example, that the sexual idiom was a mere smokescreen, a rhetorical device intended only to gain the populace’s support in a program of oppression of minorities whose real purpose was to achieve their conversion. St. Vincent Ferrer and his sponsors certainly hoped and anticipated that their program of segregation would result in the conversion of many Jews and Muslims to Christianity, but though historians have focused on that motive to the exclusion of all others, contemporaries themselves rarely voiced the connection. Moreover, treating such powerful aspects of a culture’s imagination as merely strategic teaches us little about how these aspects gain their power, or how they function within the society.

Other simple explanations fail as well. We can, for example, point to no massive "crisis of purity," such as the plague of 1348 or the Castilian civil war of the 1360s, which might have triggered the post-1391 sexual anxieties. And we have already seen that, pace St. Vincent, there was probably a marked decrease, rather than an increase, in actual intercourse across religious lines after 1391.

The perception of crisis was provoked, I would suggest, not by interfaith sex, and not by the converts’ "Jewish" practices, but by a much more complex phenomenon: the mass conversion’s destabilization of an oppositional process of identification by which generations of Christians had defined themselves theologically and sociologically against Jews and Judaism.

It is well known that Christianity had since its earliest days used the Jew to represent the anti-Christian, mapping polarized dualities such as Spiritual-material, Allegorical-literal, sighted-blind, redemptive-damning, good-evil, onto the pairing Christian-Jew. As Rosemary Ruether, one of the most mordant historians of this process, described it: "It was virtually impossible for the Christian preacher or exegete to teach scripturally at all without alluding to the anti-Judaic theses. Christian scriptural teaching and preaching per se is based on a method in which anti-Judaic polemic exists as the left hand of its christological hermeneutic." Ruether was primarily concerned with the first, formative centuries of Pauline Christianity, but her observation holds true for later periods as well. Indeed, in the Middle Ages the phenomenon is so pervasive as to pass almost unperceived. Consider St. Vincent’s sermon "Sabbato," in which the creation of man (first flesh, then spirit) stands as well for the order of the Testaments: the Old materialist, symbolized by circumcision, beard, distinctions of dress and of diet; the New spiritual, symbolized by spiritual attributes. The opposition (and thousands of others like it) is so familiar, so well-worn, that we are hard pressed to recognize it as significant, let alone vital to the creation and maintenance of Christian identity.

And yet vital it was. The polarized pair Christian-Jew provided medieval theologians and their audiences a powerful hermeneutic through which to comprehend and classify their constantly changing world. Sara Lipton has elegantly demonstrated the power of this hermeneutic in France, drawing on two early thirteenth-century bibles moralisées. The designers of that work used textual commentaries and illuminations in order to relate biblical texts to the most pressing problems of the day. Phenomena perceived to be dangerous were mapped onto the negative pole of the Jewish-Christian opposition. Issues as diverse as the rise of universities, the shift from parchment to paper, the increasing emphasis on the apostolic poverty of clergy, a perceived increase in simony, reliance on lawyers: these "innovations" and many more were characterized in the moralized bibles as "Judaizing." Perhaps the most fateful (and well-known) of these characterizations were economic. Theologians reacted to what they perceived to be dangerous aspects of the new profit economy by labeling them as materialist and "Jewish." In Lipton’s words, "Moneylending… is not condemned because it is exclusively or even primarily a ‘Jewish’ activity; rather, because moneylending is condemned, it becomes in the sign system … a ‘Jewish’ activity."

I know of no studies like Lipton’s for the late medieval Iberian context, but there is plenty of evidence for the persistence of the hermeneutic. Like his thirteenth century predecessors, St. Vincent could rail against those who thirst for secular learning, who "on account of a little science (per una poqua de sciència) want to be called Rabbis." He too translated Christian spiritual dangers into Jewish idioms in order to sharpen the point for his audiences, as here, on the perils of infrequent confession:

And he too stressed the "Jewishness" of usury and avarice in order simultaneously to reinforce the carnal materialism of the Jews and to criticize Christians who lend at interest as "Judaizers":

Ruether argued that the projection of all carnality onto the Jews made Christianity blind to its own "bodiliness." "Christian spiritualization becomes false consciousness about its own reality, fantasizing its own perfection and unable to cope with its own hypocrisy." As we have just seen, the opposite is also true. The negative pole of "Judaism" provided a powerful diagnostic tool for Christians to identify and condemn "carnal tendencies" within their society and themselves. It thereby threatened to "judaize" any Christian who, for example, practiced usury, confessed infrequently, or enjoyed secular learning. Nevertheless it is certainly the case that the projection of carnality upon the Jews facilitated the repression (to echo Ruether’s psychologizing language) of Christian anxiety about a great deal of "materialism" and "carnality" in their own beliefs and practices. It is thanks to the power of such projection, for example, that neither St. Vincent nor his audience were confused when in one breath he derided what he described as the Jews’ "carnal" belief that proper piety brings reward in the form of health and good harvests, and in the next threatened Christians with famine and plague if they did not enforce segregation. Of course these projections had little to do with "real Jews" or "real Judaism," and the hermeneutic they were part of did not necessarily require the presence of living Jews to function (of this late medieval England and France are proof). But the existence of living Jews, badged, bearded, and circumcised, gave foreign flesh to these negations of the Christian, and thereby heightened Christian society’s sense of its own coherent identity.

In this sense (among others), medieval Christians defined themselves theologically against the Jews. In the Iberian peninsula more than in many other regions of late medieval Europe, they did so sociologically, as well. Individually and collectively they asserted their honor as members of God’s privileged people by contrasting themselves to the dishonored Jew. This sociological process was of course already encoded in venerable theological principles. As St. Augustine had put it, the Jews’ abjection in comparison with Christians was witness to the truth of the latter’s faith. This doctrine of witness was in fact the chief theological justification for the continued toleration of Jews in Christian society. But the performance of this contrast also became fundamental to the representation of Christian political and social privilege.

The logic of sexual privilege and sexual boundaries discussed above provides one example of such sociological differentiation. There were, however, countless others. At a political level, for example, community privilege could be asserted through juxtaposition with Jews. When King Peter the Ceremonious attempted to raise funds for his expedition to Sardinia and Sicily in 1378, the town council of Valencia replied that the imposition of arbitrary taxation "is nothing other than to make a jewry out of each of his municipalities [universitats]…, and we will not give way to such a demand, for we would rather die than be made similar to Jews." And just as the erosion of corporate privilege could threaten to turn universitas into juheria, so the erosion of honor could judaize the individual Christian. St. Vincent himself frequently complained of Christians who believed that failure to avenge an injury "would be a dishonor to me, for they would say of me ‘Oh, the madman, oh, the Jew!’" According to this view, to withdraw from the economy of violence was tantamount to withdrawing from the fraternity of honorable Christian males. It was, in other words, to become "Jewish."

These examples confirm what we should already know: that Christian identity and Christian privilege were defined in large part by insisting upon their distance from the Jew (and the Muslim). The performance of that distance could take place in countless venues: in the taking of vengeance or the paying of taxes, in the choice of foods or sexual partners, in law (as in the preferential treatment of Christian witnesses) and in ritual (as in the enclosure and stoning of Jews during Holy Week), to list but a few. It is through the repeated performance of this essential distance that the symbolic capital of Christian honor and privilege was amassed.

The mass conversions of 1391 threatened the performance of Christian identity because they raised, perhaps for the first time in Iberian Christian imagination, the possibility of a world without Jews. Many in the generation after 1391 worked to make that world a reality: a few by urging the slaughter of the unconverted; others, such as the citizens of Barcelona and Valencia, by banning Jews from their cities in perpetuity; still others, like St. Vincent and his supporters, by mounting a program of evangelization intended to achieve the full conversion of the infidels. These were exhilarating times for a Christian society trained to see footprints of the Messiah in the conversion of the Jews. But they were also unsettling, destabilizing Christian identity in two important ways. First, the messianic "disappearance of the Jews" promised to eliminate the living representatives of a negative pole vital, as we suggested above, to the coherence of Christian theological self-understanding. Second, the emergence of the converts as an intermediate class produced a rapid narrowing of the social space that had previously separated Christian from Jew, and a consequent perception of the erosion of Christian privilege.

This second point bears elaboration. When the converts of 1391 emerged from the baptismal waters they immediately occupied a good deal of the cultural "no-man’s land" that had hitherto divided Christian and Jew. On the one hand, they enjoyed all the privileges of the Christian. They could now go to university, hold political office, or throw rocks at Jews during Holy Week. They could even have sex with Christian prostitutes or marry Christian women, and we know that many of them did. In the early sixteenth century, after the forced conversion of many Muslims to Christianity, the town council of Valencia complained that the Christian brothel was so crowded with Moriscos seeking to exercise their new sexual privileges that Old Christians couldn’t get in the door. We have no such official record from the Jewish conversions a century before, but we do have plenty of complaints from individuals such as the Valencian Jaume Roig, who wrote a poem denouncing his former concubine for allowing herself to be penetrated by the "hatless rod" of his converso rival.

But at the same time that converts enjoyed the privileges of the Christian, many of these converts still lived in close social, cultural, and physical proximity to their former coreligionists. The converts often occupied, as they had before their conversion, houses in or near the Jewish quarter. For many years (and certainly throughout the period that concerns us here) their financial affairs remained hopelessly entangled with those of their earlier communities of faith. And of course they had Jewish relatives with whom they might need to communicate for any number of reasons. Some even had Jewish spouses with whom they remained legally married.

Such proximity undercut the radical distinction between the two groups and thereby destabilized the foundations of Christian privilege and identity. It was this destabilization, this narrowing of the gap between Christian and Jew, which "old" Christians were reacting to when they complained that it was now impossible to distinguish Christian from Jew. Many converts perceived the problem as well. When a handful of Zaragozan conversos living in a Jewish neighborhood evoked the orders of segregation in the hope of having their much more numerous Jewish neighbors evicted, they were seeking to heighten the distance upon which their new privileges depended. The same logic motivated their invasion, together with other Christians, of the Jewish quarter. When, in the course of that invasion, the son of Jerónimo de Santa Fe stabbed a Jew, he was not merely acting out the excessive zeal of a convert. He was performing his claims to Christian honor and privilege in the idioms of his new religion.

Once again, the point was most succinctly articulated by St. Vincent himself: "The Christian who is neighbor with a Jew will never be a good Christian." Such "neighborliness," he went on to say, dishonored God, and put Christian society at risk of famine, plague, and other manifestations of divine displeasure. St. Vincent and his sponsors sought to reinstate the necessary distance between Christian and Jew in three ways. One focused on the religiosity of the conversos, seeking to integrate them as fully as possible into "old Christian" society and thereby distance them from "Jewishness." (Recall the efforts of the town council of Valencia to force all conversos to leave their homes and move into Old Christian neighborhoods). A second strategy was to sharpen the boundaries between all Christians and Jews through a massive program of segregation. The third possibility was that of eliminating the Jewish antithesis to Christianity altogether, by achieving the conversion of all remaining Jews to Christianity. The least important of these, if the surviving evidence is any guide, is the first. It is not with the conversos, but with the segregation of Jews, and with their elimination through evangelization, that the generation after 1391 was most concerned.

Historians have been tempted to treat segregation (and the sexual language in which it was justified) as merely instrumental to evangelization. It is certainly true that the onerous disabilities imposed by complete segregation, coupled with an active program of disputation and evangelization, together provided a strong impetus for conversion. But we should not lose sight of the more basic concern from which both these responses sprang. Both were nourished by the fertile imagination of a society confronted for the first time by the possibility that the differences by which it defined itself might actually disappear. The evangelizing millenarianism of the age is a vital symptom of this imagination, and its study can teach us a great deal about the crisis of identity I have been describing. But the period’s sexually charged segregationism is equally vital and equally instructive.

* * *

These "sexualized" attempts to stabilize Christian identity completely reversed one of the fundamental attributes of the pre-1391 interfaith sexual economy. Instead of narrowing the region of sexual risk in the interest of freeing space for other forms of interaction, it generalized that risk in order to achieve segregation. But in light of the future, there is an important negative observation to be made. The worries of St. Vincent’s generation were sexual, but they had little to do with reproduction, and even less to do with race. They do not seem to have feared that mixed intercourse would compromise the transmission of Christian identity, or result in offspring that inadequately reproduced Christian values. Christian law codes, for example, clearly stipulated that children born of a mixed union were fully Christian, and were to be raised as such.

These laws were confidently enforced. In 1401, for example, the Christian Antoni Safàbrega declared on his deathbed that he had once had an adulterous relationship with a Muslim woman. The woman, named Axa, had been married to a Muslim named Adambacaix, with whom (it had till now been thought) she had a son named Mahomet. She was now deceased and could not be interrogated about paternity, but on the strength of Antoni’s confession Christian authorities seized the boy, and sent him away to be raised Christian. St. Vincent himself made a similar point when he reproached Christian men for having sex with Muslim prostitutes. Under such circumstances, he explained, the father’s obligation to baptize the child could not be fulfilled, and the offspring’s soul, damned to perdition as a Muslim, would clamor against its Christian progenitor on judgment day. These are not the actions of a society anxious about the biological reproduction of religious identity.

In other words, St. Vincent and his contemporaries drew on the language of sex to widen the separation between Christian and Jew. But they did not often invoke it in order to sharpen the line between Old Christian and New, even though a sharp distinction between what quickly came to be called "natural" Christians and converts might have helped to render the converts’ proximity to Jews less threatening. The point is worth emphasizing in light of the future. By the mid 1430s, we will find a number of people articulating the view that converts and their descendents were in some way tainted, essentially different from (i.e., worse than) "natural" Christians, and therefore (among many other things) unmarriageable. Such a view represents a profound shift from the anxieties about intercourse that I have been describing to this point. This new taboo is based, not on the fear that sexual proximity to "Jewishness" (in the form of the convert) endangers the present by offending God, but that such intercourse endangered the future by corrupting the "breeding stock."

These "reproductive strategies" for stabilizing the privileges of Old Christian identity acquired a great deal of influence in the later fifteenth century. It is therefore all the more important to point out that, in the years following the mass conversions of 1391, they were virtually unknown. We can find a few (very few) documented examples of attempts at discrimination. In 1392, Enrique III of Castile wrote to the town council and citizens of Burgos, exhorting them to treat the converts as brothers, with a right to all the "privileges, liberties, and customary rights" that they themselves enjoyed. More than twenty years later, in 1414, St. Vincent preached against the great sin of those Christian women who "disdain the Jewess who has become Christian, and refuse to go with her to Church…. And there are others who do not wish to give [the converts] their daughters and sons in marriage, because they had once been Jews." St. Vincent urged these women, not only to associate with the converts, but also to marry them, for they were "brothers in Christ." These are interesting, but rare, exceptions amongst a mass of documentation. Such complaints would suddenly become widespread in the 1430s. But they were alien to the long generation that came of age in the aftermath of the massacres of 1391.

These contrasts suggest two conclusions. First, medieval Iberian societies (like so many others) were more complex than historians generally allow, in that they had available any number of ways to work through the consequences of mass conversion. The "judaization" of the conversos was only one of these, and for more than a quarter century not a significant one. In other words, this "rejudaization" was not the result of a straightforward extrapolation of earlier discriminations and identities, nor of some ineluctable process by which societies always recreate their essential "other." It represents instead a radical shift in Christian self-understanding, a shift that needs explaining.

The contrast also points to a more specifically sexual conclusion. The previous pages have traced the development of a system of group differentiation based upon a logic of displaceable sexual boundaries. This logic drew its force from its ability to represent the myriad distinctions Christians (as well as Muslims and Jews) held sacred in this multi-religious society, and to respond with hydraulic power to the slightest change in pressure upon these distinctions. The system was capable of producing sexualized and at times highly segregatory conceptions of group identity that may seem eerily familiar to students of later Iberian (or other) societies. But it did so without drawing upon the discourses of nature, reproduction, or "raza" that would so conspicuously define religious identity later in the century: again, a radical shift that needs explaining.

Readers with an eye to the future may be frustrated that I have not provided an explanation here. My goal in this article, however, was a different one: to take seriously the sexual preoccupations expressed by a society witnessing rapid, even cataclysmic, religious change and assimilation. It turns out that these preoccupations belonged to a vanishing world. The 1430s would produce very different sexual logics, now closely tied to questions of orthodoxy and its reproduction. I cannot yet explain these differences and discontinuities, but at the very least I can now insist that an explanation is necessary. That is not so modest a goal as it may seem. Wandering as historians often do in an unrelenting landscape of human cruelty, we tend to forget that hatred too has a history, that persecution and discrimination are not simply the result of inertia, but rather require rebuilding by each generation’s hands.