Music, identity and the Inquisition in fifteenth-century Spain

Abstract

Sometime between the years 1330 and 1343, Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita in Castile, included this maxim in his literary masterpiece, the Libro de buen amor. This verse, like others in the poem, attributes an ethnic identity both to objects and to vocal music, a form of ethnic marking that has been preserved in Spanish culture by linguistic usage: the Arabic particle a[1] in the prefix to words for musical instruments such as adufe (square tambourine), ajabeba (transverse flute) or anafil (a straight trumpet four feet or more in length) is a possible reminder of this phenomenon. About a century later, the chronicler Alonso de Palencia (d. 1492) applied similar ethnic markings when speaking of the music of a young Castilian converso who was to become one of the most powerful courtiers of King Enrique IV, Diego Arias Dávila: ‘per rura segobiensia…cantibusque arabicis advocabat sibi coetu rusticorum’.