BHS 88.3 (2011) doi:10.3828/bhs.2011.8

Diana and Wild Boar Hunting: Refiguring Gender and Ethno-religious

Conflict in the Pastoral Imaginary

Javier irigoyen-garcía

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

AbstractThis article suggests that the pastoral trope of wild boar hunting is not merely an aristocratic pastime, but that it is transformed in early modern Spain into an exhibition of old christian male identity. Special attention is paid to symbolic overtones that refer to secular opposition against both the ethno-religious and the feminine other. also addressed is how wild boar hunting is coined as a literary device that serves to contain both others by controlling the recep-tion of the image of the classical Diana. By analysing several literary genres from the late Middle ages through to the seventeenth century, it is shown that, although the denotation of wild boar hunting is rarely made explicit, the contexts in which it is often used demonstrate that it holds an oppositional value.

ResumenEste artículo sugiere que el tropo pastoril de la caza del jabalí no refleja meramente un entretenimiento aristocrático, sino que sufre una transformación en la españa premoderna para convertirse en la exhibición de la identidad masculina cristiano vieja. Se presta especial atención a las connotaciones simbólicas que se refieren a la oposición tanto con el otro etno-religioso como con el otro femenino, y cómo la caza del jabalí se acuña como un símbolo capaz de expresar al mismo tiempo la contención discursiva de ambos a través del control sobre la figura clásica de Diana. Para ello se analizan diversos géneros literarios desde finales de la Edad Media hasta mediados del siglo XVII, mostrando que, a pesar de que la significación de la caza del jabalí rara vez se hace explícita, los contextos en los que surge indican la recur-rencia de su significado oposicional.

Diana is undoubtedly one of the most enduring literary names from early modern european literature for representing feminine virtue. Taken from the greco-Latin pantheon, her reign seems to be ubiquitous. The description of Diana was known during the Middle ages through ovid’s Metamorphosis, but it was not until the sixteenth century that it began to be widely translated and

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appropriated (Zerari-Penin 2007: 65 n. 15). nevertheless, like any other lasting symbol, Diana might have incarnated very different attributes of femininity for romans, for early modern europeans, or even for different national literatures.

Scholars working on early modern Spanish literature have pointed out that Diana, as a goddess indifferent to men’s sexual requests, is taken as the emblem of female chastity in post-Tridentine Spanish literature, mainly in the pastoral (Zerari-Penin 2007: 63; Hernández-Pecoraro 2006: 76–101). nevertheless, the goddess’s conceptualization as a model of feminine conduct is complicated by the fact that Diana is also the goddess of hunting, traditionally depicted with the animals she allegedly chases: wild boars and deer. Whereas the importance of hunting has been widely recognized as an element playing an integral part in early modern debates on gender roles, there is still an ideological implication of her depiction that does not seem to have attracted enough critical attention. What I explore in these pages is how Diana reflects the ostracism of ethnic mino-rities in early modern Spain, suggesting that the climax of ethnic and religious confrontation engulfing the Iberian Peninsula between 1492 and 1609 might have largely contributed to the tremendous success of the image of Diana in early modern Spanish literature. after all, the exclusion of the ethno-religious other is interrelated with the contention of the gendered other, since they usually share a similar rhetorical strategy in old christian male discourse (Dopico Black 2001: 1–47). In this economy of the sign, Diana will serve to conflate several kinds of otherness into a single hieroglyph.

The year 1492 is a symbolic date that marks the beginning of a programme of national building based on ethnic and religious homogenization in the Iberian Peninsula. In 1492, Jews had to choose between conversion to Christia-nity or expulsion. The very same year isabel of castile and Ferdinand of aragon conquered the last Muslim kingdom of granada, thus completing the century-long colonial expansion which christians had labelled the ‘reconquest’. only ten years after the fall of granada, castilian Muslims were forced to convert, and Muslims of aragon would face the same fate in 1526. in this way, all reli-gious minorities had to adapt to the new concept of national formation that was emerging, requiring ethnic and religious homogeneity.

nevertheless, long-standing ethnic boundaries based on religious differences were not to disappear despite the proclamation of Christianity as the official and sole religion of the iberian Peninsula. not only did former Muslim and Jewish communities immediately resist abandoning their religious beliefs and practices but also christians often refused to integrate conversos into the social fabric. Therefore, the old religious boundaries were soon reconstructed around ethnic boundaries based on genealogy. no longer was iberian society divided among christians, Muslims and Jews, but rather between ‘old christians’ and ‘new christians’.

When religion lost its power as the marker of ethnic difference, old chris-tians sought symbolic markers of cultural practice that were more ‘visible’ than the covert criteria of inner belief. Because individuals from Jewish and Muslim

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origins allegedly did not eat pork and were supposed to preserve this gastrono-mical refusal even after their formal conversion to christianity, pork consump-tion became one of the most definitive markers of ethnic affiliation from the fifteenth century on. Paradoxically, ‘New Christians’ were branded with the derogative term marranos (swine), precisely the name of the animal they were supposed to avoid (Espadas Burgos 1975; Glaser 1954; Castro 2002: 206–212).

The early modern text that best embodies the rhetorical animalization of the converso comes from the fifteenth-century poet Antón de Montoro, in the poem ‘Porque yendo con D. alonso de aguilar a monte le mandó estar a una parada de un puerco’:

Por vuestros mandos y ruegos,presumí de muy montero,y por Dios, buen caballero,que me veo entre dos fuegos.Si le huyo pensaréisque so cobarde mendigoy si le mato diréisque yo maté a mi enemigo. (1900: 216)

This condensed poem expresses the hermeneutic paradox of the converso as a body that is socially illegible, whose acts are examined with an inquisitorial gaze that looks only to confirm the pre-existing suspicion of heresy: if the converso flees the wild boar, he exposes not only his fear of the beast but also his fear of the shunned meat; conversely, if he kills the animal, it is seen as an act of revenge, because the wild boar symbolizes the repulsive but mandatory rite of passage of eating pork. as Michel Jonin demonstrates in his analysis of hunting parodies, by the end of the fifteenth century, the chasing of wild boars became a contradictory rite of initiation for the conversos, who sought to display their integration into christian culture by hunting the very animal that symbolized their Semitic past (Jonin 1993: 67–68).1 Jonin’s analysis demonstrates how wild boar hunting works as a rhetorical staging of the problematic inclusion of the marrano within christian society. yet he does not explore the extent to which the choice of the wild boar image frames the discussion of the converso identity into a much larger discourse that represents and justifies, in general terms, the war against the infidel.

in the aforementioned hunting scene, the ‘puerco’ of the poem refers to the puerco jabalí (wild boar), and not to the puerco doméstico (pig). The link between

1 argote de Molina, in his Discurso sobre la montería, published in 1582 as an appendix to his edition of the Libro de la montería by alfonso Xi, points out that one privilege of the ‘monteros’ (royal hunters) in the past was the right to collect a special tribute from the Jews for their ‘protection’: ‘todas las veces que los reyes entraban en algún lugar donde hubiese sinagoga, los judíos estaban obligados a salirse a recebir, y pagaban a los Monteros por cada tora doce maravedís, porque los guardasen que no rescibiesen daño, que en aque-llos tiempos era un gran derecho’ (Molina 1882: 22). This ‘right’ might seem anecdotal, but it exemplifies how easily the Jew could become, almost literally, the prey of the royal hunters.

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the pig and the wild boar was linguistically related in early modern castilian, which usually named the latter either puerco jabalí or puerco montés. covarrubias makes the connection clear in his entry ‘puerco’, where he traces the distinction between the tame and the wild version: ‘Unos son domésticos, que llamamos absolutamente puercos o lechones; otros salvajes, dichos puercos monteses o javalíes’ (covarrubias 2003: 886). The distinction between the tame and the wild ‘puerco’ could be properly applied to the old christian view of the differences between their two kinds of fundamental religious other: the domestic Jew and the warlike Moor. Whereas inquisitorial persecution was aimed at the conversos of Jewish origin, by the middle of the sixteenth century the anxieties of the cris-tianos viejos were being redirected towards the Moriscos, also known as cristianos nuevos de moros, Spanish Muslims who were forced to convert to christianity. although the derogatory marrano is perpetuated nowadays to refer to conversos of Jewish origin, it was also used to speak about the descendants of Muslim origin as well.2 By taking the emblem of the wild boar instead of that of the tame pig, Montoro may be blending the discursive aggression against the converso with crusade language, showing their common underlying tenets. His coplas foreclose an extensive abuse of the literary wild boar hunting imagery as one of the privi-leged tropes for expressing anti-converso propaganda.3

The identification of the invading Moors with wild boars reappears in full swing during the expulsion of the Moriscos. in his propaganda treatise, Expul-sión justificada de los Moriscos Españoles (1612), Pedro aznar cardona, arguably not satisfied with merely reproducing the habitual insults, draws a deeper analogy, which is unequivocally stated in the title of chapter 37: ‘Que Mahoma es a la letra el Puerco montes que vio Dauid, y el verdugo que mató infinitos santos, y el ladron que hurtó las riquezas mas insignes de españa’ (aznar cardona 1612: i § 144r). In this case, he interprets the biblical wild boar in Psalm 79 as a prophetic warning of the coming of islam:

cumpliose en esto […] la profecia del rey Profeta, publicada en el Psalmo, donde […] habla tambien, muy en sentido literal, del dicho temerario destroçador Mahoma […], dize: Exterminauit eam Aper de Sylua, Hechola de sus terminos el jauali de la sylua, digo, de sus proprios lugares, donde fauorecida del cielo gloriosamente florecia […]. Mas para que veamos como infaliblemente y fuera de toda duda, esta profecia de Dauid habla a la letra de Mahoma, debemos aduertir, que a Mahoma con todos sus sequaces y secta, llama el Profeta, Puercos monteses, y al mismo Mahoma, como cabeça de ellos, lo nombra con apellido de iabali de la sylua, por esta razon; que los arabes y los Tartaros y los Turcos […] [e]ran […] hombres monteses, y syluestres,

2 For covarrubias the marrano is just: ‘el rezién convertido al christianismo, y tenemos ruin concepto dél por averse convertido fingidamente’ (2003: 791). Covarrubias does not leave any room for uncertainty about the sincerity of religious conversions, as if linguistically asserting that all conversions are false would dispel doubts about the difficulty in reading the subjectivity of the converso.

3 it would be possible to interpret as well that Montoro was making a pun with the homophony between his own name MonT-oro and the adjective MonT-és, a synonym for ‘jabalí’.

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dados a viuir siempre en chozas y cabañas por las syluas, y desiertos solitarios, hechos fieras. (Aznar Cardona 1612: I § 144r–144v)4

it is this same animalization of the Muslim that medieval and early modern texts had conceived: the wild boar being chased during the frontier wars. Hunting has always been an aristocratic pastime (Greer 2007; Delpech 1999; Erias Martínez 1999), but during the reconquest, aristocratic hunting is reconceived as prepara-tion for the crusade against the infidel (Erias Martínez 1999: 321). In the medieval epic Poema de Fernán González, the castilian count comes across the hermitage of San Pedro de Arlanza as he is pursuing a wild boar (Victorio 1984: 92). This passage is in fact a digression from the main plot, right after the count convinces Castilian knights not to pay tribute to Almanzor (89–91), and right before the prophecy of the monks announcing his forthcoming victories (94–95) and his first campaign against the Moorish king (96–99). The wild boar, harassed by the count, takes the altar as shelter, and the count dare not kill it in this sacred place: ‘entro por la ermita, llego fasta el altar. / Quando vio don Fernando tan onrado logar, / desanparo el puerco, no l’ quiso y matar’ (92). This behaviour of the wild boar, enmeshed between two scenes of military campaigns against the Moors, already contains, allegorically, the aftermath of every reconquest move: the lingering in the territory conquered by christians of the Moor, who, like the wild boar, seeks refuge in religious conversion as a way to integrate into chris-tian iberian society.

What is allegorical in the Poema de Fernán González is explicit in other accounts, such as one ballad by Lucas rodríguez that likens the conquest of granada to the chasing of a wild boar:

Tan quejoso está y tan sañudo,y tan feroz, recio y bravoel invencible rey chicoDe granada y su reinado,cual suele el jabalí heridoDel cazador acosado,con los agudos colmillosY el pelo todo erizado. (Durán 1851: 114)5

The presence of the wild boar during the last frontier war against the kingdom of granada is especially prevalent in the comedia. Don garcía, in the play Del rey abajo ninguno, chases the same ‘cerdoso jabalí’ (Rojas 1972: 48), as he prepares for war. as he stated earlier, hunting is not merely a courtly entertainment, but rather a substitute for war:

4 In the Tesoro de la lengua castellana (1611), published one year earlier than aznar cardona’s text, Sebastián de Covarrubias had evoked the same biblical psalm in his definition of ‘javalí’: ‘Puerco silvestre, animal fiero, latine aper; por otro nombre puerco montés que es todo uno. Es fuerte y de gran furia, rompe con quanto topa. Psalmo 79: Exterminavit eam aper de sylva’ (2003: 714), although he did not make any reference to the Moriscos.

5 christians branded the rebellious Moriscos and north african Moors as wild boars due to the fact that their armies were composed of nomadic people and irregular gatherings of corsairs (Perceval 1997: 256–57).

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la caza, que a la guerra sustituye.yo soy el uno, rayoferoz de vuestras fieras, que me ensayopara ser, con la sangre que me inspira,rayo del Castañar en Algecira. (Rojas 1972: 39)

Don garcía is referring to the campaign against the Moors of algeciras, of which the Castilian King Alfonso XI has put him in charge, and is reflecting a common trope used to glorify hunting: ‘así con razón es llamada la caza viva imagen de la guerra’ (Mateos 1928: 10).6

The enduring iberian tradition of conceiving the religious other as a wild boar that has to be chased and eventually expelled from the nation, i argue, will condition the reception of the image of Diana and the associated pastoral literary trope of wild boar hunting transmitted by the italian renaissance. over time, the pastoral mode will replace frontier conflict as the locus for national representation: by idealizing, essentializing and classicizing, the bucolic dream refigures a country with defined boundaries and stable and homogeneous self-identity, erasing in the process any cultural or human trace of Moorish iberia. Thus, the pastoral mode aims at overcoming the anxiety of influence and conta-gion that underlined the porous religious frontiers of medieval iberia. on the other hand, the rise of the pastoral mode in all kinds of literary genres in early modern Spain might owe to the fact that the figure of the shepherd had been identified as the representation of Old Christians since the late Middle Ages.7

The conflation of the rhetoric of hunting, anti-Morisco propaganda, and the pastoral mode is pervasive in early modern Spanish literature, as is exempli-fied in the epic poem Expulsión de los moriscos rebeldes de la sierra y muela de Cortes (1635), by vicente Pérez de culla, who celebrates the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609–1614. The second canto is a pastoral interlude that describes the kingdom of valencia as a worldly arcadia. When the description moves towards the mountain in which the rebellious Moriscos will take refuge, the mention of wild boar hunting is quickly made in the text:

no de arcadia en los campos atalantaPisó tan excessiua pesadumbre,Quando matando el jauali valiente,Laureles puso a su virginea frente. (1979: 22r)

Thus, the conventional classical trope of the presence of the wild boar in arcadia serves to introduce the uprising of the Moriscos in the mountains of valencia. in

6 Taking Montaigne’s essay ‘of cruelty’ as the departing point, greer draws a vivid account of how hunting is discursively conceived as a preparation for war: ‘the traditional aristo-cratic noblesse d’epée is schooling itself in cruelty, accustoming itself to taking pleasure in the slaughter of innocent creatures. That cruelty is all too easily transferred from animals to human rivals in an aristocratic culture of honor and revenge, to taking sadistic satisfac-tion on the torture and death of human victims of their superior power’ (greer 2005: 207).

7 Old Christians were usually identified with the figure of the shepherd, as a way of conveying their rustic, humble origin, in opposition to the nobility, who had allegedly mixed their blood with families of converso origins (Surtz 1983: 230–32; Hermenegildo 1971: 40–45).

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turn, the Morisco rebels also hunt during the christian siege, a scene that echoes the parodic hunting by a converso written by Montoro more than a century ago; as in Montoro’s poem, the outcome of the hunt proves that this rite of initiation will not constitute a redemption for the ethno-religious minorities, as they are excluded from the nation-building process:

Parecian mas fieros, y espantosos,vestidos con horror de brutas pieles,Despojos ya de jaualies cerdosos,De quien los Moros eran los lebreles. (26v)

even when the Moriscos engage in wild boar hunting it is only to become like the prey, since they allegedly avoid eating the boar. Hunting does not ennoble them; on the contrary, it initiates a degradation that is twofold. By dressing up in wild boar skins, they physically transform into wild boars themselves. Despite their hunting, they are not recognized as hunters,8 but rather as the other animal used by the hunter, namely the hound (‘lebrel’), another anima-listic insult applied to the infidel. Pérez de Culla’s text shows the extent to which the Moriscos are enmeshed in the same demeaning cycle of anti-pastoral stereo-types.

another characteristic of the blend of the traditional representation of war as hunting with the literary pastoral fashion as summarized in the figure of Diana is that it allows for the staging of a surrogated feminine ‘virility’, as one can find in El caballero sin nombre, by antonio Mira de amescua. While her suitor don gonzalo is planning to participate in the ‘reconquista’, doña Blanca kills a wild boar, and her squire Mendo praises her in a mix of pastoral, hunting and recon-quest spirit: ‘Deja estos cerros; parte a la sierra, / casta Diana, Palas española, / pues para el moro vil tú bastas sola’ (2002: 35). The invitation to join the war against the infidel expressed in his praise of her hunting skills must not be interpreted literally, but only as a hyperbolic compliment; but at the same time the seed of subversion of gender roles is potentially denoted there, as moralists would be quick to point out.

The semantic risks of invoking Diana as a model for women are thematized in the epic poem La Austriada (1584), which Juan Rufo writes to praise the deeds of Juan de austria, the stepbrother of Phillip ii. Juan de austria’s most famous deeds were his participation in the battle of Lepanto, in which Spain, along with the papacy and venice, defeated the Turkish navy in the Mediterranean, and the repression of the uprising of the Moriscos in the Alpujarras (Granada) in 1569 after Phillip ii banned all expression of Moorish culture. as he sets the historical frame for his hero’s actions, rufo reminds the reader that it was Queen isabel of Castile who had first conquered Granada in 1492, depicting her with the customary comparison with Diana. But in this case, rufo invokes Diana while

8 As Jonin (1993: 68) points out, the ‘caçador’ (hunter) is usually equated with the ‘hidalgo’, who vaunts of ‘pure blood’. on the other hand, the hunt of the wild boar was also common among Muslim aristocracy in al-Andalus (Arié 1982: 312–13), although this parity is for the most part often ignored in christian representations of the Moor.

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at the same time denying that isabel had acted like the goddess and had instead engaged in the battlefield as a soldier, because it would be an indecorous act for a woman to participate in an activity considered to be properly and solely suited to men:

no meneó las armas con sus manos,como en Éfeso un tiempo las más dinas […]Que los triunfos de Marte soberanosSon del femíneo sexo obras indinas:Mal parecen varones feminiles,y no bien las mujeres varoniles.así que esta honestísima señora,observando los límites de dama,Fue de ejércitos firme protectora,Echando nuevos cargos a la fama. (Rufo 1854: 6)

Times have changed, rufo seems to state, clearly setting the limits on how the comparison with Diana should be defined in post-Tridentine Spain. Classical Diana is no longer a model for women because warlike (and hunting) virility should be the prerogative of men. chastity itself is not even an issue, because Queen isabel is a married woman. Therefore, the only remaining trait of the classical Diana – after moralist attitudes about women conveniently relieved the mythical figure of her original features one by one – is an allegory of war against the infidel, a trait that is the product of its specific semantic evolution in early modern iberian imaginary. The fact that rufo had to make explicit the possible indecorous outcomes of the instrumentalization of Diana means that he perceived some kind of abusive use in his contemporary poets, who, in their zeal for stressing opposition with the ethno-religious other, might put at risk gender boundaries with the feminine other. Women symbolized by Diana, thus, had to be relegated to a passive role from where they could hover and contem-plate men’s actions, never engaging in battle or hunting as active participants.9 The myth of Diana therefore had to be rewritten as a symbol that could contain both the feminine and the ethno-religious other.

The moral dangers of the literal, anachronistic appropriation of the myth of Diana by early modern Spanish women are treated in the play La serrana de la Vera, by Luis Vélez de Guevara, whose argument takes place during the final conquest of granada. The main character, gila, who is described as a masculine woman whose main aim is to participate in the military campaign against the last Moorish kingdom, boasts at great length about her last hunt. it is striking that she devotes a long speech of 58 lines to narrating her fight against one wild boar, quickly adding in roughly two lines that she has killed other animals as

9 Rufo provides, in fact, another example of how the rebellious Moriscos were conceived as wild boars during the massacre that Christians inflicted on the Moriscos in the fortress of galera: ‘Mas, si algún moro o turco se ofrecía / entre la mortandad acaso vivo, / era cosa de ver cuánta alegría / causaba con su muerte al bando altivo; / cual suele la orgullosa montería / cercando al jabalí cerdoso esquivo, / Donde no hay apelar de entre sus hierros / Si no es para los dientes de los perros’ (1854: 86).

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well: ‘Maté este lobo después / y ese oso fiero’ (Vélez de Guevara 1982: 83). The asymmetry between the attention paid to the wild boar on the one hand and the wolf and the bear on the other suggests that, when speaking about the recon-quest, the ‘jabalí’ assumes a unique symbolic force. Unlike the women hunters in previous plays, gila actually embodies the moralists’ anxieties concerning the blurring of gendered spheres of action as the one expressed by Juan rufo in his epic poem. By declaring her intention of enrolling in the army like a soldier – a literal rendering of the metaphor between the chase of the wild boar and the war against the Moor – gila clearly overcomes the terms of the post-Tridentine iden-tification with Diana. In the end, Gila’s ambition for glory will not only prove unsuccessful but will also cause her downfall at the margins of society. captain Lucas de carvajal, who is in charge of recruiting an army for the war against granada, seduces and tricks her. in revenge against not only the captain but also the male gender as a whole, she decides to repair her dishonour by fleeing to the mountains, killing every man who enters her territory. in the third act, the military conception of hunting is again underlined by King Ferdinand when he arrives by chance close to the territory of the fugitive gila:

cebado en el jabalí,a la falda desta sierrahe llegado. ¡oh caza!, imagenjustamente de la guerra. (Vélez de Guevara 1982: 172)10

The excessive identification with Diana thus proves to turn its metaphoric value upside down, redirecting the aggression against Moors first unto men and later unto gila, who ends up being chased down like one of them, when King Fernando sentences her to death for her crimes.

This is arguably why, even though gila is one of the characters that most resemble the classical Diana, she is not the woman being named after her in La Serrana de la Vera. it is during the stay of the catholic Kings in Plasencia, on their way to granada, that Ferdinand of aragón praises Queen isabel as ‘católica Diana y venzedora / de tanto cuello alarbe belicoso’ (Vélez de Guevara 1982: 115). Thus, both women in the play seem to personify several traits of the mythical Diana. Whereas gila represents the antisocial usurpation of men’s social spaces, Queen isabel by contrast symbolizes the proper understanding of Diana as a model for women in Spanish early modern society. contrary to gila, Queen isabel is named ‘católica Diana’, an apparent oxymoron which expresses her embrace of both catholic morals and classical allure, a woman who promotes war against the infidel but at the same time avoids engaging in direct battle. Gila identifies herself with Queen Isabel and tries to emulate her, but by crossing gender role boundaries she puts herself into a debased social category that is

10 it should be noted as well that gila’s lineage seems to make her prone to chasing the ‘wild boar’, since we know how her father boasts of their ‘cristiano viejo’ strand: ‘soy un labrador / con honrado nacimiento, / cristiano viejo y honrado’ (Vélez de Guevara 1982: 71), and he later describes himself as ‘hombre / llano y humilde, aunque de limpia sangre’ (132).

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not dissimilar to that of the wild boars she hunted or the Moors she was aiming to fight. The paradox in the Spanish appropriation of Diana is that the warlike woman that the goddess originally represented ends up being equated with the Moors she has been confronted with. as is evidenced in the poems by Montoro and Pérez de culla, when the other – be it gendered or ethno-religious – tries to usurp the place of the male old christian as hunter, it always ends up, fatally, in the position of the object – the prey.

Taking into account the iterative, almost ritual refiguring of Diana as a feminine, pagan counterpart of Santiago ‘Matamoros’ who presides over an allegorical and endless reconquest in the literary imaginary of early modern Spain, one might wonder whether this feature is not always evoked when the name of Diana or wild boar hunting appear in pastoral literature. Using the whole literary system as the context for interpretation would allow the reader to quickly recall the missing Moor when the wild boar makes its presence felt in the text, or the missing reconquest when texts drop the name Diana. repetitive association often works as a pervasive rhetorical device that may be independent from any poetic agency. once the synecdochical value of the pair wild boar-Moor has been established, the link is always there in the social imaginary, as a prima-rily unconscious association that nevertheless conditions its reception as a sign of the animalization of conversos within the hegemonic discourse.

a burlesque ordinance included in the picaresque novel El Diablo Cojuelo (1641) mandates ‘que se instituya una Hermandad y Peralvillo contra los poetas monteses y jabalíes’ (Vélez de Guevara 1989: 171). It is difficult to clarify exactly what is meant by ‘jabalí’ poets, but it probably signifies ‘indecorous’ or ‘unedu-cated’. What matters to me here is that the next ordinance in the text refers explicitly to the Moorish literary vogue: ‘mandamos que las comedias de moros se bauticen dentro de cuarenta días o salgan del reino’ (171). a third consecutive ordinance seems to skip to a different topic, dealing with pastoral literature: ‘que ningún poeta, por necesidad ni amor, pueda ser pastor de cabras ni ovejas’ (171). nevertheless, beyond the apparent changes in subject, the latter ordi-nance concedes an exemption to the prohibition of poets working as shepherds: ‘mandamos que en tal caso, en pena de su pecado, guarde cochinos’ (171). Thus, the ordinance about pastoral literary fashion reverts elliptically to the animal that symbolized the Semitic element, encouraging the shepherd poets to guard pigs precisely to show their old christian condition. Whatever ‘poeta jabalí’ meant in the first ordinance, it is obvious that it immediately triggers both the evocation of the Moorish literary issue and the need for a new pastoral mode that includes the swine and definitely excludes the very possibility for conversos to be included within it. although they are presented as three different and isolated ordinances, their contiguity in the parodic ‘premática’ shows that the wild boar/pig, the pastoral mode, and the anxieties about Semitic Spain share the same semantic field.

in light of these texts, even the extended critical assumption that Diana is per se a pastoral goddess might well be contested. it is undeniable that Diana

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became a common name in renaissance pastoral romance in Spain. There is no doubt that La Diana by Montemayor would become the model – along with Arcadia by Sannazaro – for the development of the genre in europe. But it is only in the Spanish pastoral romance that this name becomes ubiquitous and almost unequivocally associated with the genre. continuations named after La Diana proliferated in Spain: La Diana enamorada (1564), by Gil Polo; La segunda parte de la Diana (1563), by alonso Pérez; the now lost Tercera parte de la Diana (1582), by gabriel Hernández; Primera parte de la clara Diana a lo divino (1599), by Bartolomé Ponce; Tercera parte de la Diana (1627), by Jerónimo de Texeda; Las auroras de Diana, by Pedro de castro y añaya; and the short novel ‘Las fortunas de Diana’ (1621), by Lope de vega. even titles such as La Cintia de Aranjuez (1629), by Gabriel del Corral, or La serrana de Cintia (1641), by Alonso de Alcalá y Herrera, should be taken into account, because cintia is also one of the heteronyms of Diana (Zerari-Penin 2007: 71). By contrast, european pastoral romances, while recognizing in many cases the influence of Montemayor, would rarely opt for the name of Diana. I suggest that the reason for this is that Diana did not make so much sense as a pastoral goddess for non-Spanish authors as she did for iberians.

Strikingly enough, the most complicated refiguring of Diana is probably the one that appears in the initiator of the genre in Spain: La Diana (?1559) by Jorge de Montemayor. For some critics the name in the title stands for the incarnation of moral values (Gómez Bedate 1991). Nevertheless, as many other critics have highlighted, there seems to be a discrepancy between the title and the multiple characters that embody the myth of Diana in the novel. The main character, named Diana, is not chaste because she is married and, paradoxically, she is the only female character who is not allowed to enter the temple of Diana (armas 1978: 188). Although the temple of Diana is placed at the centre of the novel in Book Four and presides over the characters’ actions, the goddess herself is absent from the novel. For this reason, Perry wonders whether the title refers to Sireno’s beloved or, rather, to the goddess (1969: 228). We also find a nymph called cinthia, whose name is another version of Diana, and cinthia is the one who invites Felismena to bathe in the temple. although her name does not relate to Diana, Felismena is the female character truly depicted like the goddess since her first entrance in the story: ‘Su arco tenía colgado del brazo izquierdo, y una aljaba de saetas al hombro, en las manos un bastón de silvestre encina, en el cabo del cual había una muy larga punta de acero’ (Montemayor 1999: 188). While armas suggests that all three characters embody Diana, Zerari-Penin stresses the inconsistency of Sireno’s beloved, who does not incarnate any of her classical features: ‘cette Diana n’est pas une Diane’ (Zerari-Penin 2007: 64), proposing that the hunter Felismena would be better suited to become the incarnation of the goddess within the fiction.

This interpretation is further complicated if we take into account the hypothe-tical converso identity of Jorge de Montemayor (Castro 1942: 57–63; Nepaulsingh 1995: 103–121; Rose 1971: 37–38; Bataillon 1964: 39–40).11 if La Diana were to

11 Despite the bibliography on the subject, Montemayor’s converso genealogy identity has

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be read as a text that conveys the quandaries of converso identity, why would Montemayor have chosen an ‘anti-Semitic’ deity such as Diana? There are many instances that suggest that the subtext of this choice is not the classical tradition as the renaissance understood it, but rather the parodic hunting poem by antón de Montoro, used as a new effort to deconstruct old christians’ hunting meta-phors. on the one hand, Diana is disintegrated into so many characters, none of them truly conforming to her attributes, that the narrative would seem to express the inadequacy of any moral (or genealogical) model. on the other hand, the final irony lies not only in the fact that the character named after Diana does not hunt, but also that the female hunter Felismena does not hunt wild boars, but men: first, the savages that try to kidnap the shepherdesses Dórida, Cinthia, and Polydora in Book Two; second, the rival knights of her beloved Felis at the end of the novel in Book Seven. Whereas the savages share some common traits with the wild boar and therefore with the imaginary Moors that they encode, such as their wilderness and the fact that their weapons – alfanjes – are markedly ‘Moorish’ (Montemayor 1999: 188–89),12 the enemies of Felis, in contrast, do not show any Moorish traits (371–72). The evolution in Felismena’s ‘hunting’ prac-tices shows, like vélez de guevara’s gila, that forces originally directed at the war against the infidel will eventually be redirected against the national self. The first and the last act of Felismena in the narration are framed by the subversive martial virility that was being criticized by moralists and poets, the excessive attachment to the image of Diana that might break down gender boundaries. La Diana turns wild boar hunting into an absent rite of initiation that shows that the ultimate prey are human beings rather than savage animals. Simply put, by beaming up the wild boar from arcadia, Montemayor’s La Diana reveals that the literary representation of courtly hunting in the bucolic world is nothing but a mere metaphoric sublimation of ethno-religious violence and real suffering inflicted upon human beings.

Montemayor’s continuators would prefer to ignore his subtle irony and reins-cribe the wild boar into arcadia, even if only in passing, precluding altogether the refiguring of women as hunters. The narrator’s introduction to Los pastores del Betis (1633) describes the forest of the Sierra de Segura ‘en cuyas espesuras se encuentra el cerdoso Iauali, que afilando los ardientes colmillos renueua el llanto a la hermosa venus, y la memoria de su perdido adonis’ (Saavedra y Torreblanca 1633: i § 5). Later on, the shepherd Beliso kills a wild boar near the shores of the river Darro, close to granada, in a geography distinctly characte-rized by its recent Moorish past (i § 23–25). in Lope’s Arcadia (1598), the shepherd anfriso recounts his previous life, when all his worries were ‘adornar las aras de Diana de cabezas de ciervos armados de ganchosos cuernos, de jabalíes colmi-

not been conclusively demonstrated. a similar hypothesis has been suggested for vélez de Guevara (Peale 1983). This kind of deterministic reading based on lineage has been criti-cized by Seidenspinner-Núñez (1996: 16).

12 covarrubias traces a classical etymology for the ‘alfange’, but nonetheless remarks that ‘esta arma han conservado los turcos’ (2003: 83).

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lludos, astutas zorras y silvestres búfalos’ (Vega 1975: 223). While he is alluding to conventional aristocratic entertainments, it is significant that the eulogy of the heroes of the reconquest follow immediately after that in the text (227–30). in Ninfas y pastores de Henares (1583), by Bernardo gonzález de Bobadilla, the shepherds tell a story of how the shepherd Pindo and his lover crise were killed by an enraged wild boar (1978: 202r–202v). In Las Abidas (1566), by Jerónimo de Arbolanche, the young Abido grows up hunting ‘el fiero Iauali de cerdas largas’ (1972: II § 17v), as part of his preparation to become king of Iberia. In Trage-dias de amor (1607), by Juan de arce Solorzeno, the deity of the river Sil makes his first entry ‘aviendo alanceado un cieruo, y muerto un fiero jauali’ (1607: 96v). In the Diez libros de la fortuna de amor (1573), by antonio de Lo Frasso, the shepherd Duriano boasts of having killed two wild boars (92v), only to immedia-tely deliver a speech that is obliquely supporting the statutes of ‘blood purity’ against converso lineages (93r–94r and 152r–154r). Although there are no explicit remarks that the wild boar stands for the Moor or the converso of Jewish origin, its reference serves in pastoral romances as the indexical mark that reminds the reader of the latent presence of an interloper in arcadia that cannot be named. The elusive historicity of pastoral romances is due to their intent to refigure the essence of the nation as an enclosed space unaltered throughout time, in which the explicit recognition of the historical confrontation with the Moors and Jews would make the illusion of sameness fall apart.

The praise of the national boundaries implied in the pastoral romance, along with the process of religious and ethnic homogenization imposed after 1492 with the stigmatization of descendants of Moors and Jews, had facilitated the selection of Diana from the entire greco-Latin pantheon as the most meaningful pastoral deity for old christians. its success within Spain might be explained in terms of its adaptability to the iconographic tradition that equated the Semitic other with the wild boar. The trope of Diana’s wild boar hunting might be inter-preted either as the reiteration of a conventional motive belonging to the renais-sance literary tradition, or as an aristocratic entertainment and display of power. The presumption also is true that the myth of Diana might have been chosen because it incarnated a strong sense of chastity in a post-Tridentine moral that sought to control women’s sexuality. indeed, iberian pastoral poets and mora-lists have it both ways: early modern Dianas must interpret their model literally as far as chastity is concerned, but only allegorically if wild boar hunting consti-tutes not an invitation for engaging in virile activities, but rather an emotional and moral provision to support men’s martial cleansing of the national body. Still, someone must hunt the wild boar/Moor under their banner in order for the symbolism of the name to be reenacted. By selecting which features of the clas-sical image must be read literally and which ones allegorically, Diana serves both to idealize and classicize ethnic violence and to castrate any trace of feminine agency available in classical mythology, entering an economy of the sign that serves to imaginarily contain both the feminine other and the ethno-religious other of old christian male society.

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The symbolic overtones that refer to the secular conflict with both the ethno-religious and the gendered other transform the trope into an exhibition of old christian male identity. as we have seen, the literary representation of wild boar hunting does not diminish with the end of the reconquest, nor with the inquisi-torial repression of judeoconversos and the expulsion of the Moriscos, but instead soars in fictional genres during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as if the actual disappearance of the opposing other unleashed a compulsive, compensa-tory ritual of national identity. What is finally idealized in wild boar hunting is the presumption that the Other can easily be identified, hunted, and contained in the absolute position of the object. contrary to arcadia, the real world of early modern iberia, where the descendants of Jews and Moors were indistinguishable from old christians and where women had many ways to elude post-Tridentine discourses on feminine conduct, did not provide such an epiphany of otherness and phantasmatic feasibility of containment.

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