Lexical approaches to some 16th-century Castilian Arabisms in the Inquisition case of Lucrecia de León.

Abstract

Based on Lucrecia de León’s oneiric records, this study focuses on a series of Arabisms in the Inquisition manuscripts of her persecution and imprisonment. The written documents of this young woman’s dreams, collected and conserved by scribes and inquisitors at the end of the sixteenth century, comprises 415 narrative fragments, dated between 1587 and 1590. The main goal of this article is to analyze three Arabisms, alcabala, ataifor, and búcaro, as examples of the Arabic influence on the Castillian vocabulary of the time. Besides the sociolinguistic analysis of these three words, we present this woman as representative of her gender at the end of the sixteenth century, which will enable us to reflect on stereotypes against women’s voices at that time. The strength of this article rests on the sociolinguistic analysis of lexical terms, while also providing the reader an opportunity to reflect on women’s social roles and voices in a male-dominated discourse.