ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the critical discourse on the Black Legend by showing how English authors weaponized Spain’s tainted Gothic and Scythian pedigree to produce a fluid etiology of Spanish cruelty. It focuses on the English Reformation’s apocalyptic views of Magog and Gothic Spain demonstrates the plurality of Orientalisms, to use Edward Said’s term, disseminated by an apocalyptic discourse whose familiarization and alienation of Spain cut across blood, geography, and time. The English apocalyptic racialization of Spaniards has broader implications for discussions of biblical constructs of race in literary and cultural studies. Genesis’ accounts of monogenesis were a source for the premodern formation of regional identities and for the distinction, classification, and stratifications of peoples according to the shifting interests of these self-identified groups. Magog becomes an immutable demarcation of difference that is not necessarily defined only by confession but also by biological and geographic origin.
