Patricia E. Grieve, a professor of Medieval Spanish and comparative literature at Columbia University, traces the mythic tale of Visigothic Spain’s fall to Muslim invaders in 711 from medieval times through the twentieth century. The standard telling of the legend recounts that the last Visigothic king of Spain, Rodrigo (Roderic), raped the beautiful Florinda “La Cava,” daughter of his vassal Count Julian. In retaliation, Julian, whose territory was in North Africa, aided the Moors in their invasion and subjugation of Christian Spain. La Cava is thus the legendary catalyst for Spain’s fall, like the biblical Eve initiated mankind’s fall. Grieve attempts to illustrate how this story of rape, betrayal, and treachery both influenced the creation of a Spanish “national myth” of origin and reflected societal perceptions of feminine sexuality in its several forms.

Grieve analyzes a number of primary texts and secondary sources to outline the myth of Spain’s fall from its inception in medieval times, through the Golden Age of Spanish literature in the early modern period, to the Orientalists and historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Grieve analyzes the many iterations of the Rodrigo-La Cava-Pelayo legends over the centuries, from medieval chronicles and early modern ballads, to the first printed books like Crónica del rey don Rodrigo (1499) and the Golden Age plays and poems of Lope de Vega. In the thirteenth century, as Alfonso X of Castile tried to create a Hispanic “empire,” the myths are used to “foster nationalistic impulses and patriotic sentiments” (p. 50). In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, writers concerned with “blood purity” (limpieza de sangre) utilize the legends to emphasize Spain’s Christian and Visigothic roots, essentially obliterating the Jewish and Moorish contributions to Spanish history. Grieve marshals a dazzling array of evidence showing how chroniclers, playwrights, kings, and storytellers employed these legendary stories to create a national mythology, creating linkages to a supposedly unified Christian and Spain that existed before the Muslim conquest. Much of this material fits well into the recent literature on Spanish identity and nationalism, such as Henry Kamen’s Imagining Spain (2008).

While Grieve’s sprawling attempt at creating a “feminist study that examines the shifts in how La Cava is portrayed” in “larger social, political, religious, and cultural contexts” (p. 29) is an admirable corrective to the hoary “masculine” histories that focus on Pelayo, military conquest, and the “inevitable” conflict between Christianity and Islam, Grieve stumbles in her tendency to force all of her sources into her gendered and nationalistic schemas. For Grieve, Christian Spaniards created works “gendering and demonizing the enemy Other” (p. 14) and exploited the tropes of “bad, sexual Christian women and the seductive Jewess, who were dangerous to men” and the “sexually available Muslim woman” who are a metaphor for “the recovery of Christian lands in Spain” (p. 27). Yet several texts she cites (and ignores) do not always fit into that simple paradigm, nor do they offer evidence for a steady evolution of the story, and she never satisfactorily explains away the conflicting material. In some retellings, La Cava’s overt sexuality is the cause of Spain’s downfall, in others it is Rodrigo’s lustful rape, while in still others Count Julian’s treacherous perfidy is to blame. In the fifteenth century, for instance (ch 3), author Pedro de Corral portrayed La Cava as a temptress responsible for causing the Muslim conquest while historian Gutierre Díaz de Games mocked such a notion, dismissing that La Cava’s rape would bring down such a punishment from God. Where many authors exhibit the misogyny and fear of female sexuality Grieve often highlights, she also quotes others, like the poet Juan de Mena, who ignored women completely. Nor does she ever explain how the sexually available Muslim female, a symbol for the Reconquista, was squared with Christian fears about limpieza de sangre and “Old Christian” lineages. Grieve also only records instances in which Christian authors “otherize” the minorities of the peninsula, ignoring the complex nature of the peninsula’s multicultural, syncretic heritage. (Convivencia—the concept that Christians, Muslims, and Jews often coexisted and intermingled rather peacefully—is only mentioned twice in passing.)

The Eve of Spain is an excellent addition to the growing body of literature about the creation of European nationalisms and national identities, offering some literary angles often overlooked by historians. It fits too into historiographical works that demythologize the narrow Spanish historiography of yesteryear that presented the 711–1492 period as mere interruption in Spain’s Christian, male, and ethnically European history: there was a concerted (but unpremeditated) effort by Spain’s mythmakers and historians to delegitimize and erase the contributions of women, Muslims, and Jews to Iberian society. Grieve’s attempt to place everything in a feminist and imperialistic/nationalist context, whereby Spanish authors primarily sexualized and demonized their enemies, ignores the complex and intricate nature of society and culture on the Iberian Peninsula. ( )