JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. South Atlantic Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to South Atlantic Review. zGuerras civiles de Granada: Primera parte. Gines Perez de Hita. Ed. Shasta M. Bryant. Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 1982. (Ediciones criticas, 2.) xxiv + 323 pp. Paper, $15.00. The figure of the "sentimental [or Christianized] Moor" of the twilight of Islamic political and military power in Al-Andalus held a romantic fascination for writers both in Spain and abroad for centuries after the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand, and the actual historical events of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The literary chronicle Guerras civiles de Granada (
hereafter GCG) by Gines Perez de Hita (1544?-1619?) was a key work in the crystallization of the image of the Spanish Moor for such luminaries as Franqois-Rene de Chateaubriand, Washington Irving, and Sir Walter Scott during later centuries, and provided as much impetus for the preservation of that image as wouldany treatise produced to accredit another sentimental hero nurtured in the Romantic imagination of the nineteenth century: the "noble savage," celebrated in the thought of J.J. Rousseau and extended in the popular imagination to include, by the early 1900s, that unhappy object of curiosity, the conquered American Indian. The chroniclers of civilization invariably yearn, to some degree, for a nostalgic past that never really existed.Both scholars and the interested reading public are indebted to editor Bryant and the Juan de la Cuesta Press for providing this fine, affordable text of GCG, Part I, "based upon the oldest and most authentic version known, the edition published in Zaragoza in 1595, as reproduced by Paula Blanchard-Demouge in 1913