To Live Like a Moor is a posthumous book edited by Robin Vose based on the author's last draft. The book analyzes the complex ways in which Muslims (and their descendants, the Moriscos) were perceived from the Middle Ages until the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609. Instead of taking an essentialist approach to the relationship between religious and cultural identity, Constable is careful to discriminate how the perception and attribution of certain cultural markers depended on larger social and political contexts that varied over time.

The book is divided into four chapters dealing with several cultural traits that were prominent in the differentiation (real or imagined) between Christians and Muslims, such as clothing, bathing, and food. Constable had planned for a fourth chapter on music and dance that, unfortunately, she could not finish, even though she offers some remarks about these aspects in the introductory chapter, which serves as a historical introduction for the general reader. The second chapter deals with the regulation of clothing and appearance. As Constable shows, in the medieval period, legislation policed the appearance of Muslims by ordering them to wear distinctive garments to differentiate them from Christians. While this idea has already been pointed out by previous historians, Constable not only documents it thoroughly but also puts the medieval legislation in its larger social context by connecting it with the sumptuary laws that regulated the use of luxury clothing across class lines throughout Europe. Thus, she suggestively argues that “while legislation for Muslims was undoubtedly restrictive, it is not clear that it was more restrictive then sumptuary legislation for many Christians” (31). With the massive conversions at the beginning of the sixteenth century, however, the Moriscos were asked to conform to “Christian” dress, thus inverting the logic of how appearance should be enforced upon them. This chapter also deals with the use of henna and veiling, connecting it with contemporary issues while at the same time respecting historical distance.

The third chapter addresses bathing and delineates how public baths came to be perceived as a site for Islamic practice only in the sixteenth century, when social tastes changed, and hygiene started to be considered as a domestic matter. Chapter four deals with how certain foods were regarded as proper to Muslims while they influenced Christian cuisine. The most contentious issue was, however, the cutting of halal meat, which had to follow a special ritual and placed Muslim and Christian butchers in situation of competition but also of collaboration.

The entire book is articulated around Francisco Núñez Muley's memorandum to Philip II in 1567, written in response to the monarch's prohibition of Morisco cultural practices. All chapters follow a similar structure, which starts with the passages of Núñez Muley's memorandum dealing with each topic, then goes back to trace these issues in the Middle Ages, before progressing forward in time until reaching 1567 again (occasionally progressing well into the seventeenth century). At first, this may look like a confusing swinging structure moving back and forth in time. After the first chapter, however, the reader gets used to this temporal pattern, which is justified because, as the editor states in her introductory remarks, this is a book on “how medieval and early modern Iberian Christians’ perceptions of their Muslim neighbors actually manifested and changed over the course of more than five centuries” (xiii).

It is always difficult to review a posthumous book, as one may wonder how the author would have revised the finished product would she have had had the time to incorporate other findings made in recent years. Most notably, given the centrality of Núñez Muley's memorial in the articulation of the book, one can only imagine how Constable would have dealt with the document discovered by Javier Castillo Fernández, which he reproduces as an appendix in his edition of Luis del Mármol Carvajal's Historia del rebelión y castigo de los moriscos del reino de Granada (Universidad de Granada, 2015); the notable Morisco did not write his memorial out of his own initiative but was hired to produce it by the Christian noble and commander of Granada the Count of Tendilla. While this finding does not diminish Constable's contribution, it would have been interesting to see how she would have incorporated the way politics interfered with the legislation of religious and cultural difference. Throughout the book, there are glimpses of such an approach in her discussion of how gender separation in bath houses may have been caused by economic concerns (93–94) and in her analysis of the complex taxation involved in licenses for butchers in the medieval period (114–125).

In sum, this is a thoroughly researched book advancing the study of how Muslims and Christians interacted in the Iberian Peninsula and the interrelations between cultural and religious identity. Vose's effort in bringing to light Constable's last project should be much appreciated. In spite of the circumstances under which it was produced, To Live Like a Moor does not read as a draft of a potential project, but as a finished book. In his short but insightful afterword, Vose wraps up some of the lines of inquiry outlined in the book and problematizes the concept of “identity” by pointing out that the markers of difference “tended to be invented and infused with significance only as and when necessary” (141).