Muslims are not normally considered members of the diverse colonial societies that flourished in Spain's American kingdoms. Royal law prohibited Muslims and Moriscos (converts from Islam), like conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity), from entering its American possessions. Yet, scholars have known that, to varying degrees, these prohibitions failed to achieve their desired ends. While the experiences of conversos within Spain's empire have received most of the scholarly treatment, Karoline Cook's Forbidden Passages represents the first monograph to explore the social and cultural space inhabited by Moriscos in Spanish dominion. She argues that during the sixteenth and seventeenth century the term Morisco became increasingly racialised as Spaniards sought to forge new national identities that excluded longstanding religious minorities. Cook analyses the discourse over the category of Morisco and the experiences of individuals so labelled. In doing so she highlights that, despite the increasingly racialised stigma of the Morisco label, such individuals interacted with a wide array of other Spanish American subjects, including Africans and indigenous people. All told Cook reveals the ‘Morisco’ label to be a complex category, concealing an immense range of lived experience, and offers a glimpse into the myriad ways that colonial subjects negotiated honour, status and belonging in Spain's empire.

Forbidden Passages explores the meanings and experiences of Moriscos through eight chapters, bookended by an introduction and epilogue. The introduction helps to situate the topic. Here Cook notes that she defines ‘Morisco’ broadly, reflecting a host of connotations assumed by Spaniards of the time. Importantly, this means that ‘Morisco’ should not be construed only to mean a person who had converted to Christianity from Islam. Like other Spanish categories of difference, ‘Morisco’ could have polyvalent meanings depending on context, social positioning and time period. Over the course of the eight chapters, the focus transitions from the juridical construction of Morisco, to experiences of individuals labelled as such, to the place of Moriscos in the broader social and cultural imaginary.

The first chapter tackles the historical formation of Iberian Moriscos during the Reconquista through to the early seventeenth century. Importantly, Cook notes that Iberian Moriscos varied widely. Families who had converted during the thirteenth century occupied a very different social, cultural, political, and economic position from those who faced forced conversions in the early sixteenth century. Additionally, Cook traces how religious and secular authorities increasingly sought to identify particular practices and beliefs typical of Moriscos, especially those believed to be indicative of apostasy. This process inevitably conflated cultural practices, such as eating couscous, with religious ones, like a continued belief in Islam.

The second and third chapters explore the movement of Moriscos within and across the Spanish empire. During the initial decades of conquest and settlement, Moriscos moved relatively freely with other individuals. Over time, increasing fears of Moriscos in Iberia led to less malleable policies and to new mechanisms of enforcement, including the extension of the Inquisition to the Americas. Yet, importantly, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the limited bureaucratic capacity for regulation and enforcement fostered the creation of spaces where Moriscos could escape notice or oversight.

The middle three chapters turn to issues of religious, medical and magical practice and the ways in which the ‘Morisco’ label could be mapped on to particular beliefs and practices deemed dangerous and unorthodox. Christian understandings of Islamic practice helped to forge the perception that Moriscos were dangerous ‘bogeymen’ hiding their apostasy within the ranks of Spanish society. In particular, Christians, especially theologians, recognised that the Islamic concept of taquiyya allowed Muslims to engage in the outward devotions of other faiths if they faced persecution. Additionally, the continued conflict between Moriscos in Granada and Spain's religious and secular authorities helped to stigmatise all Moriscos as recalcitrant and subversive. In these chapters, Cook highlights the ways that Moriscos, or individuals claiming to be Moriscos, engaged in healing, divination and love magic. Such activities could be dangerous for the practitioners. While Moriscos were frequently associated with Islamic medical knowledge, the use of seemingly heretical or unorthodox rituals or methods could become the basis for a denunciation to authorities.

The seventh chapter tackles the issue of such accusations and the ways in which public perception of lineage and ancestry became increasingly central to social status during this period. Accusations of Morisco heritage could prove damning to individuals; deft legal manoeuvring, including amassing documentation of public reputation and ancestry, was often required to disprove such allegations. Cook's examination of these issues raises a particularly poignant question. Did the diversity of Iberian Moriscos and their varying degrees of integration into the social, cultural and political order stimulate accusations of Morisco ancestry because such claims could be particularly useful for disparaging colonial subjects of presumed Iberian descent not easily ascribed other pejorative colonial categories (castizo, mestizo, mulato, zambo, etc.)? In other words, if Moriscos could look like most españoles, did accusations of Morisco ancestry represent particularly pernicious means to attack individuals who would otherwise be assumed to be españoles in the colonial context?

The last chapter examines the way that images of Moriscos penetrated colonial ways of knowing. Spaniards frequently presented and represented Moors, Muslims and Moriscos in depictions of the Reconquista. In the Americas, recalcitrant indigenous groups could be compared to Moors and Moriscos. Even debates over the legitimacy of slavery mobilised concepts of just war in ways that drew together indigenous people and Moriscos. In the Americas, this imagery could even be appropriated by indigenous groups in a variety of ways.

Forbidden Passages represents an excellent addition to our growing understanding of Iberian and Spanish categories of difference. Cook's attention to the interplay between the juridical and the social/cultural helps to demonstrate the way that the label ‘Morisco’ became increasingly racialised over time. Moreover, her emphasis on the breadth of meaning conveyed by and subsumed within the term ‘Morisco’ helps to reveal the diversity of ways that the category could be mobilised. Overall, this work represents a significant contribution to the fields of Latin American and Iberian history, and its interweaving of religion, law, race and society reveal the complex landscape inhabited by Moriscos in Spain's empire.