Negros, o de cualquiera monstruosa nación: Juan Martínez Silíceo’s Racial Histories

Scholars of late medieval and early modern Iberia acknowledge the persistence of limpieza de sangre (blood purity) into the era of Habsburg control over Spain and the conquests of the Americas. Yet few writing in English appreciate the ways in which Juan Martínez Silíceo, archbishop of Charles V ’s Toledo, both preserved the medieval ideal of blood purity and reshaped it to his own political ends when he enacted a limpieza statute in the city’s cathedral in 1547. Silíceo and the opposing faction of his cathedral chapter left a paper trail of the ensuing controversy. I read Silíceo’s letter to Charles – namely, his list of reasons, his opponents’ reasons, and his refutations of those reasons – to argue that Silíceo used histories both local and universalist to make claims about Old Christian racial supremacy. I conclude with the University of Alcalá’s humanist protest of Silíceo, which includes an allusion to monstrous blackness, marshalled as evidence of the church’s universalism.