Surviving Inquisition and Morisco sources overstate community piety.

Evidence

The evidence that comes down to us about the Moriscos tends to be skewed in various ways that lead us to form a view of them as all pious men committed to their religion. Both the Inquisition evidence, gathered with the object of proving that the accused were guilty of Islamizing, and the writings of the Moriscos themselves, surviving aljamiado and other Morisco documents that tend to be on religious subjects, might well lead us to conclude that Moriscos were all exclusively concerned with religious matters. Indifference in matters of faith was no doubt more rare in such a polarized society than in any modern one; the evidence of Morisco economic activity gathered by C´ıscar Pallares (1993, 60–103) is a useful corrective to the picture of an exclusively devout community that might emerge from the other sources. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1168

Categorization

• XREF: This source-skew argument — where the documentary record systematically conceals secular life — resembles the argument about the diary records in A Midwife’s Tale and about the silences in the historical record generally.