Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain

The first cultural analysis of the secret literature of sixteenth-century Spain’s Muslim communities.

Covert Gestures reveals how the traditional Islamic narratives of the moriscos both shaped and encoded a wide range of covert social activity characterized by a profound and persistent concern with time and temporality. Using a unique blend of literary analysis, linguistic anthropology, and phenomenological philosophy, Vincent Barletta explores the narratives as testimonials of past human experiences and discovers in them evidence of community resistance.