Lecture: "Black Legends and the Invention of Europe"

Carmen Nocentelli, associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of New Mexico, is a speaker in the Comparative Literature Colloquium series.

Spanish Black legend is often thought of as a unique phenomenon in the history of early modern culture. Yet the commonplaces of this legend—intolerable tyranny, unspeakable cruelty and a dubious ethnicity—were also deployed against Turks, Dutch and French. There was not just one Black Legend, but several, integral parts of an ethnoethics that developed steadily from the 15th century onward. As they circulated across national, linguistic and confessional boundaries, Black Legend commonplaces marked the shifting boundaries of Europe, investing this space with an imagined identity bound up in freedom, justice and purity of lineage.