A Cultural History of Race in the Middle Ages (The Cultural Histories Series) 9781350067431, 9781350067578, 1350067431

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Praise for A Cultural History of Race
General Editor’s Preface Marius Turda
Acknowledgements
Introduction Cord Whitaker
1 Definitions and Representations of Race Christine Chism
2 Race, Environment, Culture Suzanne Conklin Akbari
3 Race and Religion David Nirenberg
4 Race and Science Maaike van der Lugt
5 Race and Politics Geraldine Heng
6 Race and Ethnicity Thomas Hahn
7 Race and Gender Sarah Salih
8 Race and Sexuality Steven F. Kruger
9 Anti-Race? William Chester Jordan and Helmut Reimitz
Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE VOLUME 2

A Cultural History of Race General Editor: Marius Turda Volume 1 A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity Edited by Denise Eileen McCoskey Volume 2 A Cultural History of Race in the Middle Ages Edited by Thomas Hahn Volume 3 A Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age Edited by Kimberly Anne Coles and Dorothy Kim Volume 4 A Cultural History of Race in the Reformation and Enlightenment Edited by Nicholas Hudson Volume 5 A Cultural History of Race in the Age of Empire and the Nation State Edited by Marina B. Mogilner Volume 6 A Cultural History of Race in the Modern and Genomic Age Edited by Tanya Maria Golash-Boza

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE

IN THE MIDDLE AGES VOLUME 2

Edited by Thomas Hahn

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022 Thomas Hahn has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. Cover image: Moses Defeating the Ethiopians. © Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The editor and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permissions for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hahn, Thomas (Thomas G.), editor. Title: A cultural history of race in the middle ages / edited by Thomas Hahn. Description: London, UK ; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: Cultural histories A cultural history of race ; volume 2 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021017366 | ISBN 9781350067431 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Race–History–to 1500. | Middle Ages. Classification: LCC HT1507 .C86 2021 | DDC 305.8009/02–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017366 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6743-1 Set: 978-1-3500-6757-8 Series: The Cultural Histories Series Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

L ist

of

P raise

I llustrations

for

A C ultural H istory

vi of

R ace

G eneral E ditor ’ s P reface Marius Turda A cknowledgements  Introduction Cord Whitaker

ix xi xiv

1

1 Definitions and Representations of Race Christine Chism

27

2 Race, Environment, Culture Suzanne Conklin Akbari

47

3 Race and Religion David Nirenberg

67

4 Race and Science Maaike van der Lugt

81

5 Race and Politics Geraldine Heng

97

6 Race and Ethnicity Thomas Hahn

113

7 Race and Gender Sarah Salih

137

8 Race and Sexuality Steven F. Kruger

153

9 Anti-Race? William Chester Jordan and Helmut Reimitz

171

N otes

180

B ibliography

196

N otes

227

I ndex

on

C ontributors

230

ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1 A white supremacist holds a line with a shield and stick during clashes with counter-protesters at Emancipation Park where the white nationalists are protesting the removal of the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, 12 August 2017. The shield, partially visible at left, is emblazoned with the black eagle insignia of the Holy Roman Empire

2

0.2 Violence breaks out at Charlottesville free speech rally. Demonstrators hold shields and flags during the ‘Unite the Right’ rally at Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, 12 August 2017

3

0.3 Violent clashes erupt at ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. The silver Dodge Charger driven by James Alex Fields Jr passes near the Market Street Parking Garage moments after driving into a crowd of counter-protesters on Water Street on 12 August 2017. Thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer was killed and nineteen others injured when they were struck by Fields’s car

4

0.4 Mary Rambaran-Olm speaks at the RaceB4Race Symposium in September 2019 in Washington, DC. During this speech, she announced her resignation from the governing board of what was then the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists

5

0.5 Costume of German Jews of the thirteenth century. Much of the scholarly discussion about medieval ethnicity and race has involved medieval prejudice against Jewish people. This depiction displays the costume, including pointed hats, often associated with Jews in medieval Europe. From Herrad von Landsperg, ‘Luftgarten’

6

0.6 Rhazes working in his laboratory, c. 901 ce. Abu Bakr al-Hazi Rhazes (867–925), also known as Razi, the Persian physician and alchemist, in his laboratory in Baghdad with one other. From Louis Figuer’s ‘Vies des Savants Moyen Âge’

8

0.7 Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière pictured during the restoration of Chartres Cathedral. Realized in 1180, it is famous for the coat colour of the Virgin, ‘Chartres blue’

9

0.8 The Reliquary of the Three Kings at Cologne Cathedral is said to contain the bones of the biblical Magi, also known as the Three Kings or the Three Wise Men. The relics were transferred to Cologne Cathedral in 1164. The shrine is a large gilded and decorated triple sarcophagus placed above and behind the high altar of Cologne Cathedral 13

ILLUSTRATIONS

vii

0.9 ‘Happy’ Black slaves and ‘wretched’ white workers are depicted in this pro-slavery cartoon from 1850. It demonstrates the discourse of Black invulnerability and white victimhood when it contrasts the apparently happy life of American slaves in the southern United States with the misery of white child labourers and factory workers in industrial England

15

0.10 The discovery of the Pacific Ocean in 1513 by Vasco Núñez de Balboa (c. 1475–1519), Spanish explorer, governor and conquistador. From The History of Our Country (1899)

19

0.11 An example of the Olmec colossal heads that evidence Van Sertima’s claims of a pre-Columbian Africanist presence in Mesoamerica. Depicted here is Olmec colossal head I, known as the King, found in San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan. Olmec civilization, thirteenth–tenth century bce

20

0.12 Lee Maracle, photographed for an article on the recent practice of acknowledging you are on Indigenous land

24

2.1 Beatus of Liebana, Apocalypse

59

2.2 The Adoration of the Magi; the Queen of Sheba visits King Solomon. From Simon Bening (Flemish), The Prayer Book of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg (c. 1525–30)

60

2.3 Kent Monkman, mistikôsiwak: Welcoming the Newcomers, 2019

64

2.4 Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–19

65

4.1 Statue of Saint Maurice as a Black African

82

4.2 The King of Ghana sits on his throne, with sceptre

83

6.1 The Siege of Antioch (1097–8). White Christian and Black Muslim forces face off against one another in a significant battle of the First Crusade which Baldwin I supported

115

6.2 Moses besieges the Ethiopians in Saba. From Rudolf von Ems, Weltchronik

119

6.3 Moses gives Tarbis the ring of forgetfulness. From Rudolf von Ems, Weltchronik

120

6.4 Philippa of Catania marries the Ethiopian, in Giovanni Boccaccio, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes

124

6.5 The Prior and the ‘Sarrazin’ converse; image of the latter’s body and head defaced. From Honorat Bovet, Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun

125

6.6 The Prior and the ‘Sarrazin’ continue to speak; image of the latter’s head defaced. From Honorat Bovet, Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun

126

6.7 Jean de Meun surveys representatives of different racial types; note the badge worn by the Jewish interlocutor. From Honorat Bovet, Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun

127

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ILLUSTRATIONS

6.8 Marginal portrait of Muslim warrior as the Wicked Child in Passover Seder. The Rylands Haggadah, c. 1330s

128

6.9 Portrait of the Muslim warrior in the Rylands Haggadah, c. 1330s: detail 129 6.10 Christ mediates the redemption of Black and white captives on the outward-facing mosaic on the church of San Tomasso in Formis, Rome, c. 1210

132

6.11 Three Indian Gymnosophists converse with Alexander the Great. From Le livre des merveilles, c. 1410

135

6.12 Indian Gymnosophists – women, children, and men – encounter Alexander the Great in an unbuilt landscape. From Saint Augustine, La cité de Dieu, illuminated by Maître François, c. 1470

136

7.1 Ox-man of Wicklow. From Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hiberniae

140

7.2 Bestiality. From Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hiberniae

141

7.3 Umm Thomas arrives in London. From Queen Mary Psalter

146

7.4 Umm Thomas is baptized. From Queen Mary Psalter

146

7.5 Umm Thomas marries Gilbert Becket. From Queen Mary Psalter

147

7.6 Sultan and Sultaness of Damascus. From King of Tars

149

7.7 Saint Guthlac with demons. From Guthlac Roll

150

8.1 The Plinian races in Mandeville

157

8.2 Mandeville’s Androgyne, with genitals obscured, in Das buch des ritters herr hannsen von monte villa

160

8.3 Mongol violence and cannibalism. From Matthew Paris, Chronica majora

161

8.4 Representation of the Jew Samuel engaged in the supposed ritual murder of Adam of Bristol

164

8.5 The Magi approaching Herod, c. 1190–1200

167

8.6 The ‘Sarrazin’ among the poem’s other characters, in Honorat Bovet, L’Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun

168

8.7 Maistre Jehan speaks with the ‘Sarrazin’, in Honorat Bovet, L’Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun

169

PRAISE FOR A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE

‘The detailed, deep and comparative historicization of racial thinking is a very much needed and timely project: much writing about race is temporally and geographically focused and, in its wide-ranging ambitions, this Cultural History of Race represents a very welcome alternative. The use of a common chapter structure throughout the six volumes is a very valuable feature, which makes it easy for readers to follow particular themes, while the multidisciplinary approach is also highly attractive when dealing with a subject as mercurial as race.’ Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, UK ‘Learning from the past is a necessary act of cultural advancement and A Cultural History of Race, a project of sustained historical inquiry from Antiquity to the present, makes a muchneeded and exquisitely timely contribution. It argues for rigor and depth of exploration through nine recurring categories of inquiry across the six volumes and challenges the notion of a restrictive timeline of the ‘history of race’ as the product of modernity. It transcends temporal and geographic limits while expanding our understanding of the variant and shifting terminologies of race. As a result, readers will appreciate the breadth of material and value highly the intellectual diversity of the project’s multidisciplinary approach.’ Ian Smith, Richard and Joan Sell Professor of the Humanities, Lafayette College, USA ‘Marius Turda, the eminent cultural historian of science and racialization is the general editor for this foundational six-volume study attuned to this ‘moment of global reckoning’ sparked by #BlackLivesMatter and Indigenous justice movements. This is an outstanding critical, nuanced, useful, anti-racist cartography from European ‘Antiquity’ through the ‘Renaissance,’ into colonial ‘Empire’ formations and state eugenics practices through the racially-coded high tech, big data ‘Genomic Age.’ Epic and often brilliant, we become painfully aware of how narrow nationalist and nation-bounded scholarship are so painfully limited in contrast to this masterful, satellite counter mapping. Yes, racism and contesting this degeneration of humans and the natural world is a deeply embedded history and of the moment, it’s relational and intersectional, and it has infected all transregional cultural discourses. A must for all academic and public libraries - five stars!’ John Kuo Wei Tchen, Clement A. Price Professor of Public History & Humanities, Rutgers-Newark University, USA ‘In a contemporary moment afflicted by concocted culture wars that are also proxy race wars, this important collection of essays does what is urgently needed - by explicating the concept of race in a historical frame. Between them, these volumes show how concepts of ‘race’ and ‘an impressive racial edifice’ emerged in the West over several centuries, and became such a powerful political, scientific and cultural force. An important contribution to the historical literacy that is needed if we are to challenge race and racism effectively.’ Priyamvada Gopal, Professor of Postcolonial Studies, University of Cambridge, UK

x

PRAISE FOR A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE

‘A Cultural History of Race is an admirably ambitious survey of the cultural landscape of race and racism. Analysing the concept of race all the way from antiquity, and drawing in research from every relevant discipline, it paints a story of how difficult it has been for humans to grapple with the idea of human difference. Clarifying and comprehensive, it is sure to become necessary reading for every scholar who wants to understand what race means. It couldn’t have more contemporary relevance either. Truly outstanding.’ Angela Saini, Author of Superior: The Return of Race Science (2021) ‘A Cultural History of Race stands on a league of its own within the broad domain of race studies. This splendid, thoughtful array of essays by scholars in a truly diverse number of fields offers an unprecedented, kaleidoscopic panorama of the myriad permutations of race and racism in the West – from Greek and Roman antiquity all the way to the ages of the Genome and Black Lives Matter. The contributors to this collection exemplify just how fresh and engaging historical insight is when we as scholars remain fully engaged with the pressing issues of our own time. As a whole, this collection of essays forcefully delivers important lessons for a broad readership: first, race, racism and human rights advocacy itself are transhistorical phenomena reaching back to the foundational moments of Western civilization. Second, any truly critical history of race and racism requires an honest scrutiny of the manner in which our own fields of knowledge have been shaped by troubled legacies. And, most urgently, the identification of multiple forms of stigmatization, discrimination and persecution in our times – not to mention the quest for social justice – can hugely benefit from a rich reckoning of the multiplicity of  situated  forces that have shaped overt and systemic racism to this day.  A Cultural History of Race will remain obligatory reference for generations of readers.’ Nicolás Wey Gómez, author of The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (2008) ‘In this moment of global racial reckoning, there is a tectonic shift underway. As a more structural, systemic, and historical analysis of race and racialization is emerging, A Cultural History of Race, will be an important accelerant to this process. The pivot from a focus on identity towards one that more critically considers processes and patterns of identification is a process, one that takes time, sustained engagement and a nuanced understanding of the past and its relationship to the present. A Cultural History of Race is just such a text. Its recent completion will be a gift to scholars, activists, the human rights community, and others invested in a more just future, one that doesn’t posit certain people or for that matter species as disposable; there is no such thing! The time has come for us to embrace this reality and work towards a world in which this eliminationist ideology no longer governs our political, social, economic or philosophical spaces. A Cultural History of Race will prove to be a trusted companion and a useful tool for the long journey ahead and will certainly stake a claim to being a cornerstone text for the pivot that is underway.’ Milton Reynolds, Educator, Author, Diversity Equity Inclusion Practitioner, Critical Race Theorist

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE MARIUS TURDA

A Cultural History of Race documents the long history of the concept of race from antiquity to the present day. In the six volumes collected here, scholars from a range of academic disciplines engage not only with the historical, cultural and philosophical realities of race but also with its aesthetics, literary functions and representations. To capture the elasticity of race as a concept, one needs to travel widely, across historical periods and geographical locations, to examine texts and images, cutting through the multilayered fabric of culture, science and politics. Viewed on a broad timescale, the densely textured content of the history of race is approached intersectionally, with an understanding of race’s complex relationship with other concepts such as gender, religion, class and nation. Given these vast territories of knowledge, then, to harmonize so many different aspects of the history of race is not an easy task. Besides mediating between the localized traditions of race and their transnational framework, A Cultural History of Race highlights entanglements, disruptions and mutations. At the same time, various national traditions are examined from a global perspective, and, thus, their purported uniqueness is challenged. It is important to understand the long history of race, not only through references to past events but also through the prism of current systemic racism. Engaging with the legacy of slavery, empire, colonialism and genocide, and not just with the overall historical trajectory of race, is another important aspect of this collective work. The concept of race cannot be decoupled from the very idioms that had been used throughout history to describe and classify humans, nor can it be expunged from projects of domination, subjugation and oppression. These projects were politically motivated, state sanctioned and often blessed by scholars and scientists. As adherence to a racial worldview became more explicit and formalized in culture, science and politics, however, its predatory ability widened. Scholars, politicians, artists, philosophers and poets were stirred by it. They created an impressive racial edifice that has, alas, endured until the twenty-first century. A Cultural History of Race offers critical perspectives on the traditional paradigms of thinking about the concept. It reflects as much shifting methodologies in the scholarship as the need to engage publicly with the normative saliency of race in the production of various forms of knowledge. Yet this is not just another cultural history of race but a decidedly analytical attempt to dislodge race from the intellectual pre-eminence it had occupied for centuries, and to disclose racial conceptions, beliefs, values and practices that had been used throughout history to make distinctions among groups of peoples on the basis of the colour of their skin and/or their intellectual abilities. The concept of race manifested itself in different ways at different times, but it always had supporters as well as detractors. Acceptance of race was not always universal. It was often met with suspicion and occasionally rejected. Anti-race thinking occurred in numerous spheres, including but not limited to religion and science.

xii

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

A considerable amount of literature exists on the history of race, particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But race had infiltrated major traditions of cultural, religious and philosophical reflection about human diversity already in antiquity. Elements of this discussion survived in the medieval and early modern periods, and new ones were added, particularly as colonial and imperial projects began to emerge in Europe. During the Renaissance and Reformation, and then more forcefully during the Enlightenment, race became a powerful concept, used not just to describe physical features of peoples but also to explain cultural achievements and behavioural attitudes. The subjugation and exploitation of non-European peoples, alongside slavery and extermination of Indigenous populations, only enhanced the power of race in defining white Europeans and their global expansion and dominance. During the nineteenth century and, especially, the twentieth, horrendous atrocities, most notably the Holocaust, discredited the concept of race and eroded its tentacular grip on social and political discourse and realities. Yet, race survived into the early twenty-first century, continuing to impact the lives of millions with reference to their biological attributes, cultural traditions and historical experiences. Although developments in human genetics, particularly in the second part of the twentieth century, completely dismantled any pretention of scientific respectability appropriated by racists, current debates in genomics reveal how race continues to impact our scientifically informed worldview. Incredibly, the completion of the Human Genome Project, for example, even spurred attempts to define a concept of race that is scientifically credible. A Cultural History of Race is timely. It provides not only academic guidance but, equally important, a nuanced and innovative critique of race and racism as well. These six volumes are informed by research and academic reflection and, equally, by lived experience. This is a critical moment to review how myriad assumptions and attitudes rooted in the history of race and its toxic ideology continue to affect our world in ways both obvious and hidden. To understand the past and present of race in all its different representations is essential in order to name and remove its symbols of discrimination, injustice, abuse and violence against Black, Indigenous and other peoples of colour. Any work on the history of race must unambiguously expose the extraordinary damage caused by racist thinking and practice. While not exhaustive, A Cultural History of Race nevertheless provides numerous historical examples and options of interpretation for anyone who wants to engage, in an accessible way, with problems of race and racism characterizing the world today. Both together and separately, these volumes reassess historical traditions, scientific paradigms and political agendas put forward in the name of race. Equally important, the volumes’ insights and clarity are accompanied by incisiveness and commitment to antiracist scholarship. The overall aim is to strike a balance between scholarly detachment, empathy and direct participation in the current conversations about decolonization, whiteness, anti-racism and Black Lives Matter. In the twenty-first century, the assumption is that race as a meaningful category of analysis has been de-ritualized and de-politicized. The truth is that race continues to lend itself to theories of social, cultural and political inequality. Combined with an aggressive rhetoric of national protectionism and ethnicity, race continues to frame regional, national and international issues around immigration, social justice and gender equality.

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

xiii

Wide in scope and detailed in analysis, A Cultural History of Race is therefore strongly embedded in current conversations about race and racism. We are in a moment of global reckoning. Presidents are banned from social media platforms, statues are being torn down, names of university buildings are being changed, museums are being decolonized and stolen artefacts are returned to their countries of origin. Continued scholarly engagement with anti-racist activism is critical, not just for understanding the decisions being made today but to help preserve the lessons learnt for future generations.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing about race, even (or especially) when the actual practices, mechanisms, sufferings and resistance are centuries removed from the present, requires a delicate interplay between the widest array of historical evidence and contemporary paradigms of scholarly and race critical analysis. The present volume, and each of its individual contributors, strive to identify the systems and the strategies through which medieval people and institutions produced, participated in, recognized and withstood marginalizing and racializing identities. Collectively and separately the chapters also address the historiographical complexities that inevitably suffuse twenty-first century attempts to come to terms with the varieties of race circulating in the Middle Ages. I hope that readers will find that these essays help them in their own efforts to recognize and undo the injurious effects of racemaking. I wish here to offer at least an incomplete thanks to those who have contributed to the making of this volume. Gerry Heng was a source of thoughtful counsel and warm encouragement at the earliest stages of this project, and continued to share suggestions and ideas as the volume took shape. I also received helpful advice from Jeffrey Cohen, Jonathan Hsy and Monica Green early on. All of the contributors to this volume have been vigorously engaged and warmly responsive to the project, and have made my work as editor feel productive, even enjoyable. Marius Turda, the General Editor of A Cultural History of Race, provided constant support for the volume, offering sound advice and apt suggestions, as well as some timely and effective alerts. Professor Alexandra SterlingHellenbrand generously took on the task of providing an initial translation of Rudolf von Ems’s Middle High German in his Weltchronik. I had the opportunity in 2018 and 2020 to try out some of these materials with advanced students in History and Literature and would like to thank the members of those seminars for their vigorous inquiries and provocations. Dana Symons joined the project in its latter stages as editor and improved every feature of the volume through her acuity, expertise and inventiveness. I have had unwavering support, as well as insightful advice, from Georgia Eaves, Morris Eaves, John Michael and Sharon Willis. My family – Jonathan Hahn and Amy Harrington, Geoffrey Hahn and Francesca Luciani Hahn, along with Olivia and Marcus – have continuously replenished my reserves through their sustained interest, warm encouragement and lively questions. Bette London has been my collaborator in the entire process, from the first hesitant conversations about the project, through the practical, intellectual and moral blockages and breakthroughs over the last years, to the final editorial and authorial fixes: without her steady investment and dynamic responsiveness, this volume would not have seen the light.

Introduction CORD WHITAKER

CRITICAL MEDIEVAL RACE STUDIES: ITS PAST AND PRESENT CLAMOUR AND ITS FUTURE SONG This volume on race and the Middle Ages is urgent and timely. It appears during a period when far-right and racist groups are finding new adherents and media prominence in the Americas and Europe. The fascism and quasi-fascism that are attendant upon far-right medievalisms have found acceptance in venues from Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (formerly National Front) party in France to Jair Bolsonaro’s election to the presidency in Brazil. In the spring of 2018, former US Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright released an ominously titled book, Fascism: A Warning. The book was released on 10 April, and it was #1 on the New York Times Non-fiction Bestseller list by 29 April (‘The New York Times Best Sellers’ 2018). As the idea of the European Middle Ages has been weaponized by far-right groups, the Middle Ages and medieval studies have been integral to the fascist resurgence. These far-right groups want to organize the United States and Western European nations into white ethnostates, states in which racial whiteness is the criterion for inclusion (Dickson 2018). To be sure, the current moment’s political implications supersede the expected domain of academic medievalism. Yet, medieval studies has nonetheless prepared the ground for the growth and maintenance of a fascist and racist popular political medievalism, even as it also births robust strategies to resist the same. In preparing its readers for the contributions that follow, this introduction considers the history and politics of medievalism. In particular, it focuses on the subfield of critical medieval race studies in the twenty-first century in order to foster an understanding of what may be medieval studies’ place in the world going forward. Among scholars in medieval studies, the imbrication of medievalism – whether in amateur or university professional contexts – with race and racism was made newly palpable in the summer of 2017. On 11 August, the so-called Alternative Right, or altright for short, together with other white supremacist, white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups, staged the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, near and on the campus of the University of Virginia (see Figure 0.1). The ostensible purpose was to defend a statue of Confederate leader Robert E. Lee and such monuments generally, in response to the controversies over what to do with Confederate monuments in cities in the United States, ranging from New Orleans to Baltimore. White nationalist demonstrators carried medievalizing battle shields – that is, they were medievalist in nature, evoking at once and to varying degrees medieval historicity and their modern provenance – along

2

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

FIGURE 0.1  A white supremacist holds a line with a shield and stick during clashes with counterprotesters at Emancipation Park where the white nationalists are protesting the removal of the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, 12 August 2017. The shield, partially visible at left, is emblazoned with the black eagle insignia of the Holy Roman Empire. © Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

with flags bearing racist insignia based on runes and a plethora of other relics of the Middle Ages – early, high and late. These appeared along with classicizing signs and symbols of ‘Western civilization’, such as the fasces that denote Roman imperial power (see Figure 0.2). The gathering was violent. One anti-racist counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed and scores of other anti-racist protesters were injured when a white nationalist named James Alex Fields Jr drove his car through a crowd (see Figure 0.3). Other hand-to-hand violence resulted in significant injuries as well, such as those to antiracist counter-protester DeAndre Harris (Shapira 2019). Since this event, scholars of medieval studies in multiple disciplines – English literature, foreign language literature, history and art history, among others – have pointed to the event as evidence for the urgency of an anti-racist medieval studies. Indeed, many, including me, have identified as a central component of such an anti-racist approach the support and expansion of critical medieval race studies as an academic subfield.1 Even before the rally, now colloquially referred to as ‘Charlottesville’, racism’s relationship with the Middle Ages and its study required significant response. In the summer of 2017, before the rally, anti-racist energies coalesced to form the academicactivist group the Medievalists of Color. The organization formed in response to racially insensitive comments made during a plenary session of the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom earlier that summer. The offensive statement occurred when a white male moderator joked that he could be

INTRODUCTION

3

FIGURE 0.2  Violence breaks out at Charlottesville free speech rally. Demonstrators hold shields and flags during the ‘Unite the Right’ rally at Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, 12 August 2017. © Emily Molli/NurPhoto/Getty Images.

confused for a person of colour after some time in the sun. In addition, several panels, focused on alterity, faced criticism for including only white panelists. The Medievalists of Color’s initial position statement pointedly asserts that it takes offence not at a single incident but rather at the pervasive culture from which the moderator’s joke issues: ‘a culture, both in medieval studies and in the wider world, in which we regularly hear jokes about our appearances, accents, names, and experiences’. The organization has gone on to publish statements decrying the events of Charlottesville, which occurred mere days after the statement in Leeds (Medievalists of Color 2017b); calling out the sharp increase in anti-Semitic activity in Europe and the United States in the wake of the 2016 referendum on the UK’s exit from the European Union and the United States’ presidential election (Medievalists of Color 2017c); and identifying medieval studies’ potential to be at the forefront of a more just and equitable academic culture in which ‘voices not previously permitted to speak’ – those of the racially, ethnically and economically marginalized – are heard loudly and clearly (Medievalists of Color 2018b). The Medievalists of Color have not limited its efforts to thoughtful position statements. Its members have also offered ‘Whiteness Workshops’ in which white participants have been able to explore their own identities and those identities’ interactions with race and racism in order to improve and expand their skills as allies to persons of colour in medieval studies and in the world at large (Medievalists of Color 2017a, 2018a). The Medievalists of Color have not been alone. Individual scholars of colour – those associated with the group as well as those unaffiliated with it – have worked tirelessly to increase medieval studies’ inclusivity and to combat the white supremacy that has

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

FIGURE 0.3  Violent clashes erupt at ‘Unite The Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. The silver Dodge Charger driven by James Alex Fields Jr passes near the Market Street Parking Garage moments after driving into a crowd of counter-protesters on Water Street on 12 August 2017. Thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer was killed and nineteen others injured when they were struck by Fields’s car. © Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images.

been deeply entrenched within the field. Dr Mary Rambaran-Olm, in particular, has been credited with fostering a more inclusive culture in early medieval studies and the study of pre-Norman Conquest England (Medievalists of Color 2019) (see Figure 0.4). In early September 2019, at the RaceB4Race conference whose advent has been a joint effort of the Medievalists of Color and scholars in early modern race studies, and is headed by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Rambaran-Olm resigned from the board of the now former International Society of Anglo-Saxonists in protest over the organization’s refusal to accept that white supremacy was integral in its founding and has continued to be an operative force in its proceedings. Media coverage has focused on the white supremacy inherent in the terms ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ and that these terms empower and embolden white supremacists (Natanson 2019). But Rambaran-Olm’s efforts far surpassed nomenclature as she sought to increase the representation of early career researchers in the organization’s leadership and advocated for meaningful steps to address a history and culture of misogyny within the group’s ranks. For her various efforts to make the organization more inclusive, Rambaran-Olm met with ‘endless and total stonewalling’ until she decided resignation in protest was the best option. After hers and several other high-profile resignations in its wake, on 17 September 2019, the organization voted to change its name (Natanson 2019). The work of the Medievalists of Color, Rambaran-Olm’s efforts and the cultures and events to which they have responded demonstrate medieval studies’ and popular

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FIGURE 0.4  Mary Rambaran-Olm speaks at the RaceB4Race Symposium in September 2019 in Washington, DC. During this speech, she announced her resignation from the governing board of what was then the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists. © The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

medievalism’s long imbrications with race and racism. Their efforts also evidence that the current volume appears at a critical moment in that history. Presaging the efflorescence of anti-racist scholarship and activism that recent events have required, medieval studies has openly wrestled with the question of race and racism’s implications for medieval studies, along with those of the European Middle Ages for modern race, for some time now. The turn of the twenty-first century saw the release of a groundbreaking issue of JMEMS, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, titled Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages. The essay collection was edited by Thomas Hahn, who has also edited the current volume, and it bravely explores the question of whether the concept of race in the European Middle Ages is worth investigating. In his introduction, Hahn mimes detractors’ charges of ‘presentism’ or ‘empowering the preoccupations and concerns of the early twenty-first century to distort the self-contained truth of the past’ (Hahn 2001a: 26). William Chester Jordan, in an essay at the end of the collection, calls for more work on the matter of medieval race and commends contributors for ‘playing’ with the concept of race in ‘sophisticated ways’. He ultimately jettisons the term ‘race’ in favour of ‘ethnic identity’ for fear that readers will not ‘sufficiently shed their modern notions of race’ (2001: 169). Jordan’s conclusion is in keeping with that of another essay in the collection: Robert Bartlett’s inquiry into the fittingness of ‘ethnicity’ for examining the differentiation of people in medieval material. Bartlett concludes that ‘[t]he medieval situation was one where “race” almost always means the same thing as “ethnic group”’ and that it ‘allowed a picture of races as changing cultural communities, often

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in competition, often forming and reforming, overflowing and cutting across political boundaries, providing identities and claims for their members’ (Bartlett 2001: 53–4). Since medieval people did not find it ‘necessary or desirable to have a group or identity of primary allegiance’, then race is not necessarily the best term. Even as Bartlett uses the term ‘race’ in his penultimate sentence, the final sentence lands the conclusion that this investigation has really been a question about ‘ethnic identity’ (53–4) (see Figure 0.5). Bartlett’s essay has been popular: a Google Scholar search identifies 225 publications that cite it (Google Scholar 2020b). By comparison, Hahn’s substantive introduction to the issue, itself popular, is cited only half as often at 110 citations (Google Scholar 2020a). The popularity of the call to use ‘ethnicity’ speaks to an impulse within medieval studies to set the field apart from late modernity. Popular among scholars who agree with the conclusion and those who disagree alike, the essay’s usage suggests that the impulse to separate the Middle Ages is so deeply embedded that it requires vehement confirmation and inspires active rejection. Such separation protects the field and its objects of study

FIGURE 0.5  Costume of German Jews of the thirteenth century. Much of the scholarly discussion about medieval ethnicity and race has involved medieval prejudice against Jewish people. This depiction displays the costume, including pointed hats, often associated with Jews in medieval Europe. From Herrad von Landsperg, ‘Luftgarten’. © Culture Club/Getty Images.

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from the exigencies of alignment with late modernity’s values. Medieval ethnicity, so the logic goes, is easier to swallow than medieval race. The publicity of racialized medievalism in events such as Charlottesville along with a proliferation of very fine work on the elements of race and racialization that permeate medieval European materials have meant that some of the very same voices that rejected race in medieval studies twenty years ago now recognize its value. For instance, Jordan, whose work is also featured in the current volume, is far less suspicious of using the concept of race in medievalist analysis in his latest book, The Apple of His Eye: Converts from Islam in the Reign of Louis IX (2019). Describing the situation of Muslim converts to Christianity living in France under the protection of Louis IX, he notes that ‘The somatic markers of Middle Eastern “Arabness” or even Cuman-ness were not so obviously othering as the markers (skin color, hair texture) of, say, sub-Saharan negritude’ (Jordan 2019: 127). He also notes contemporary interest in skin colour: ‘Contemporaries acknowledged that French complexions varied from brown to ruddy, from swarthy to white, “E brun e bai e sore blanc.” And since Antiquity there had been an equally wide variety of complexions in Egypt’ (127). Today, it has become far more mainstream in medieval studies to recognize that skin colour was an element, even if not the element, in the medieval construction of what Geraldine Heng, also featured in this volume, has called a ‘hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment’ (Heng 2018b: 27). While not without controversy, critical medieval race studies has become over the last several decades a firmly established subfield within medieval studies. Part of the field’s establishment has been the proliferation of forms of evidence that scholars have examined. In addition to the literature studied by scholars such as Heng and myself or the historical documents studied by scholars such as Jordan, other approaches to the question of race in the Middle Ages have focused on physiognomy, the science of using phenotypic or other exterior signs to judge the intellectual, spiritual and other interior characteristics of humans. Physiognomy has its origins in classical antiquity and enjoyed significant popularity in the Middle Ages. Very important work on physiognomy has been done by historian Joseph Ziegler, who has explored the role of physiognomy in the development of race and racism. Ziegler has focused on the fluidity of physiognomic interpretations epitomized by Rhazes’ admonition that physiognomers must avoid judging a subject from a single one of his physical traits; instead, he must cope with a multiplicity of sometimes contradictory signs (see Figure 0.6). The admonition is repeated throughout the medieval physiognomic tradition (Ziegler 2001: 159–82). While this admonition contrasts sharply with the primacy accorded to a single trait – usually skin colour – in later modern racial ideology, it offers compelling evidence for the medieval conceptualization of race when it is considered an element in the far more fluid concept that Heng has called ‘race-making’ and that I have termed ‘race-thinking’ (Heng 2018b; Whitaker 2019a).2 Indeed, in 2009, a mere eight years after Ziegler wrote on the fluidity of physiognomic interpretations, he, along with collaborators Miriam Eliav-Feldon and Benjamin Isaac, published the well-regarded edited collection The Origins of Racism in the West (2009). In Zeigler’s contribution to the collection, he concludes that medieval physiognomy is focused on judging individuals and not collectives of people such that whatever appears racial or even ethnic is but a ‘marginal digression’ (2009: 184–5). On the contrary, I have argued that reading the medieval literary deployment of blackness through the lens of physiognomy illumines blackness’s moral and ethical import; what is more, the examination reveals the extent to which blackness and physiognomy were ripe for their integral roles in the moral and spiritual hierarchy that is modern racial

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FIGURE 0.6  Rhazes working in his laboratory, c. 901 ce. Abu Bakr al-Hazi Rhazes (867–925), also known as Razi, the Persian physician and alchemist, in his laboratory in Baghdad with one other. From Louis Figuer’s ‘Vies des Savants Moyen Âge’ (Paris, 1867). © Leemage/Corbis/Getty Images.

ideology.3 Physiognomies, as (pseudo)scientific manuals, exhibit a different relationship to their readers than do literary texts, theological treatises or historical documents such as legal records or parliamentary rolls. There is more work to be done on physiognomies’ roles in the medieval development of race, to be sure, but what has been done indicates the continual growth of a field that strives to be as capacious in its lines of inquiry as race and racism are in their strategies for categorization and judgement. The expansion of breadth that indicates critical medieval race studies’ establishment extends to the discipline of art history as well. This should come as no surprise, given art history’s mission to interpret and historicize visual artistic evidence. Indeed, the visual arts have had no small role in the public scholarly debates about the Middle Ages and race. Historian Rachel Fulton Brown has faced accusations of white supremacism, evidenced in part by her close association with far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. In response to the accusations, Fulton Brown has sought to dissociate race and racism from the Middle Ages and medieval studies by claiming the darkness of the Virgin Mary’s face in her depiction as Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière in Chartres Cathedral (see Figure 0.7). Claiming that ‘Our Lady’s face is dark, you might even say, black’, Fulton Brown asserts that she is not a white supremacist because she has spent ‘[her] life studying the devotion of medieval Christians to a Jewish woman of color!’ (Fulton Brown 2017b; emphases in the original). Fulton Brown’s claims have elicited pointed responses from art historians. Marian Bleeke (2017) writes of the Madonna in the window: her skin tone is not shown to be notably darker, or lighter, than that of the surrounding figures. Instead, skin tone seems to be consistent among the figures in any given window, although it does vary from window to window. That variation may have to do with

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the original dates of production of the individual windows, the level of damage each has incurred over time, the amount of restoration each has been subject to, and the circumstances under which the photographs of the windows have been taken. (Bleeke 2017) In short, Bleeke asserts that the evidence is simply not present to support Fulton Brown’s claim that ‘somebody in Europe wanted Mary depicted as dark, whether in the Middle Ages or the nineteenth century’ (Fulton Brown 2017b). If the Virgin’s skin tone is darker than any other figure in the window – and Bleeke is doubtful – then it is merely an accident of history, whether by restoration, weathering or another variable. It is erroneous to judge from this evidence that the veneration of a dark-skinned figure means that medieval people held no skin-colour prejudices. What is more, and as I have argued, the actual medieval veneration of dark-skinned figures (such as the African representative among the three Magi) is part and parcel of race-making.4 The worship of holy Black figures does not absolve medieval Europeans from involvement in the development of race. Rather, it represents a medieval moment, substantially different from our modern

FIGURE 0.7  Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière pictured during the restoration of Chartres Cathedral. Realized in 1180, it is famous for the coat colour of the Virgin, ‘Chartres blue’. © John Kellerman/Alamy Stock Photo.

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experience, in the long history of the development of modern racial ideology (Whitaker 2019a: 97–122). After criticism such as that by Bleeke, Fulton Brown walked back her previous claims: she writes that ‘[w]hat matters about the window is not the color of Mary’s face’ (Fulton Brown 2017a). She admits that renovations may have influenced the glass’s colour, and declares that ‘medieval exegetes, liturgists, and artists did not care what color Mary was … Nor – and this was my main point – do I’ (Fulton Brown 2017a; emphasis in the original). This is a bold contradiction of her previous post. Nonetheless, Fulton Brown’s and Bleeke’s posts demonstrate how politically fraught the matter of the Middle Ages’ imbrication with race can be in the realm of art history where colour, the primary element in modern race-thinking, is most visible yet also most subject to variables including weather, other damage, restoration and photography. Debates in art history lay bare, perhaps better than in some other disciplines, how very charged arguments over evidence for or against medieval race-thinking can become. Art historical engagements with critical medieval race studies have played out in more nuanced and traditionally scholarly ways too. For instance, art historian Asa Simon Mittman has offered a thoughtful and thoroughgoing investigation of whether the so-called ‘monstrous races’ magisterially treated by John Block Friedman some forty years ago should be called ‘races’ at all (Mittman 2015). Mittman compares manuscript descriptions of cyclopes, epiphagi and blemmyes in the medieval travel narratives Mandeville’s Travels and the Wonders of the East. He tests the depictions against evolutionary biologist Daniel G. Blackburn’s definition of race, in which race’s presence requires: readily identifiable physical features … features should be relatively heritable, that is, their diversity would have a significant genetic component … [they] should have functional significance … [they should] be useful in defining categories of people that are more or less discrete … the putative racial categories [should] reflect genealogies and evolutionary history. (Blackburn 2000: 7–8) Mittman finds the fixity and permanence that Blackburn’s definition requires hard to come by when even ‘“monstrosos partus” (“monstrous births”)’, according to Augustine, ‘shall be rendered normal at the resurrection’ (2015: 45). He then turns to a discussion of ethnicity and Bartlett’s treatment thereof before turning back to his main question about the fittingness of the term ‘monstrous races’ in his essay’s conclusion. Engaging with multiple definitions of, and related to, race, in addition to literary and theological contexts, in order to investigate the term’s appropriateness for medieval studies demonstrates a nuanced approach indeed. In an insightful and illumining way, Mittman distills the problem that often characterizes the debate about whether the terms and concepts of race fit the medieval situation – the same question addressed by Hahn, Bartlett and Jordan fifteen years earlier. Mittman cites his own previous work in which, in reference to the ‘monstrous’ figures of classical and medieval fantasy, ‘[he retains] the term “race” because it makes us think of them as human, because it makes us think of our relations with them, and because it makes us think of our own world in a way “group” or “kind” would not’ (2015: 39). In nearly the same breath, he writes ‘The term “race” does make us think of our world, but in so doing, also flattens the essential differences between then and now, and places

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modern conceptions onto medieval texts and images, and onto their medieval creators and audiences’ (39). He has changed his mind and by the end of the essay concludes that we should no longer call ‘the wonders, marvels, “monstra, ostenta, portenta, prodigia” (“monsters, signs, portents, prodigies”) (as Augustine, 1845, col. 0722, called them), the one-footed folks and Cyclopes and centaurs – and, by extension, Jews and “Saracens” and “Tartars” – and so on as “monstrous races”’ (39). Instead, he argues, we could call them ‘monstrous peoples’ because that terminology would emphasize their ‘potential’ humanity while also avoiding the problems that come with using race; these include anachronism in that the word would either have had no meaning or a radically different meaning for medieval people and that it ‘reifies the implicit reality of the “white” or “European” or “Christian” “race” at the core of medieval discourse’ (39). In other words, it reinforces the artificial hierarchy designed to guide ‘differential treatment’ unto even reinforcing white supremacy. The nuance with which Mittman addresses the question demonstrates the value to be had in critical medieval race studies’ expansion beyond the literary and strictly historical disciplines, yet it also illumines the insidious and all-encompassing nature of racial ideology: to use the term ‘race’ in pre-modernity may reify racism in modernity, but not using it runs the risk of obscuring the intimate relations between humanity now and humanity in the medieval past, including the myriad ways that medieval peoples’ ways of thinking about the world and the people in it have influenced our own. Some scholars have plotted a way out of the divisive and difficult binary of race versus ethnicity by coining entirely different language. A notable example is Suzanne Akbari, who uses the concept of ‘bodily diversity’ to encompass the sheer variety of bodies in medieval representation. Mapping closely onto the skin-colour markers that are primary in modern race, Akbari’s concept is embodied in ‘the division of Saracens into those who are white, well proportioned, and assimilable, and those who are dark-skinned, deformed or of grotesque stature, and doomed to destruction’ (2009: 156). Engaged with classical and medieval climate theory as well as geographic knowledge, bodily diversity, according to Akbari, occurs along a spectrum ranging from white bodies in the cold north to black bodies in the torrid south (156). The plasticity of ‘bodily diversity’ is fitting for the Middle Ages’ uses of skin colour and physiognomic features because these function as metaphors whose referents and meanings are less restricted in the Middle Ages than in modernity. Indeed, Akbari argues that white-skinned European Saracens represent Christendom’s desire to convert and assimilate Muslims of means and status while blackskinned Muslims represent the aberrance and inassimilability of those who are religiously and culturally different. Though the plasticity of bodily diversity is a peculiarly medieval mode of race-thinking, according to Akbari, ‘modern theories of race, developed in the wake of the Enlightenment and elaborated in the colonial context, have their roots in medieval theories regarding the effects of climate in determining the humoral makeup of individuals and the anatomical, physiological, and even behavioral predispositions of nations’ (141). What matters is not so much whether to use race or ethnicity, but that the operations of medieval race-thinking – especially climate theory in Akbari’s treatment – participate in the history on which modern racial ideology relies. This recognition has allowed the field to begin the hard work of turning towards the study of the nuanced dynamics of medieval race-thinking’s operations and implications. That the study of race in the Middle Ages has turned increasingly to the functions of differentiation in the medieval period and their implications for and contributions to race in modernity is demonstrated by the trajectory of Heng’s work on the subject. In Heng’s

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Empire of Magic (2003), an analysis of the thirteenth- or early-fourteenth-century crusades romance King of Tars leads to the conclusion that ‘religion, which we had assumed to belong purely to the realm of culture, can shape and instruct biology: a startling logic suggesting that secreted within the theory of religious difference in this tale is also a theory of biological essences seemingly indivisible from religion’ (2003: 228; emphasis in the original). Medieval race-thinking then is, according to Heng’s 2003 definition, a sort of religious race. More accurately, and as I have argued, race-thinking in the Middle Ages was developed as a tool in the service of religious conflict and differentiation. With the dramatic paradigm shifts of the late Middle Ages, especially the waning hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe as well as European exploration in and colonization of the New World, race-thinking emerged from under the umbrella of religious competition in order to overtake it as the dominant paradigm for differentiating and categorizing humans (Whitaker 2019a: 180–97). The trajectory of Heng’s work demonstrates the growth of interest in race-thinking’s internal dynamics: in her 2018 book, she writes that ‘race-making’ is the process by which ‘strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices and pressures, so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment’ (2018b: 27). In other words, race is ‘a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content’ (27). Over the last several decades, scholarship on race in the European Middle Ages has trended from considering whether race existed and where it could be found towards the study of what functions it served and exactly how, through its ‘strategic, epistemological, and political commitments’, it operated (27). Despite its establishment and turn towards more nuanced inquiries, challenges to critical medieval race studies have persisted. In 2015, I bolstered the study of racethinking’s dynamic operations by arguing that: the question of race’s relevance is solved: yes, the Middle Ages have been thoroughly raced. The question at hand is, exactly how are they raced? Not whether, but how is medieval race-thinking different from modern racism? How does it contribute to the formation of modern racism? (Whitaker 2015: 7) Since then, other scholars have taken up the charge. For example, Sierra Lomuto in a well-read scholarly blog post writes that: We can stop saying ‘race’ doesn’t apply to the Middle Ages when what we mean is that later forms of racial codification don’t apply; we can start asking, what forms of race do we see operating in the primary sources we study and teach? (Lomuto 2016) Lomuto calls on scholars of the Middle Ages to reject the notion that modern race’s incongruity with medieval culture means that the Middle Ages are free from race and its implications. Her argument registers a continued resistance among some scholars to the conclusions of work by Heng and others, to medieval race scholarship’s establishment of medieval race-thinking and to its trajectory away from establishing race-thinking’s presence towards examining its dynamics. Despite such resistance, the establishment of medieval race-thinking has made possible the examination of the Middle Ages’

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implications for race and racial ideology in modernity without resorting to the anachronism of which critical medieval race studies’ opponents accuse it. A major element in critical medieval race studies, and one by which it avoids anachronism, is the active nature of the medieval period’s construction of race. The argument that the Middle Ages featured race-making and race-thinking could be mistaken for a teleological approach in which, because modernity is characterized by race, the historical periods that preceded it must bear signs of race. This, however, could not be farther from the truth of the matter. In fact, critical medieval race studies proposes that modern racial ideology did not appear ex nihilo and examines, without further assumption, pre-modern evidence that may point to previous ‘strategic, epistemological, and political’ dynamics that could have contributed to the development of race in modernity (Heng 2018b: 27). Critical medieval race studies does not presume that these dynamics necessarily coalesced in order to produce racial ideology but instead examines critically whether they did and, if so, how. That the medieval situation was open to view as an active endeavour is demonstrated by the encyclopedic tradition, including the lists of nations prominent in texts such as John of Hildesheim’s fourteenth-century Three Kings of Cologne (see Figure 0.8) and that have predecessors in classical texts that sought to describe and categorize the people and places of the world such as Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. Such texts present themselves as recording observations and may at first appear to strive for objectivity. Upon closer inspection, as I have argued regarding the

FIGURE 0.8  The Reliquary of the Three Kings at Cologne Cathedral is said to contain the bones of the biblical Magi, also known as the Three Kings or the Three Wise Men. The relics were transferred to Cologne Cathedral in 1164. The shrine is a large gilded and decorated triple sarcophagus placed above and behind the high altar of Cologne Cathedral. © Wolfgang Kaehler/ LightRocket/Getty Images.

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Three Kings, they offer highly prescriptive judgements about cultural differences. These judgements serve to normalize and naturalize the Christian European culture of the texts’ creators (Whitaker 2019a: 103–22). In Mittman’s treatment of the ‘monstrous races’ that appear in texts such as Mandeville, he confirms that ‘it is, in actuality, the medieval author or illuminator’s group – his tribe, nation, ethnicity, gens, natio, gentes, moncyn, kynde – often in practice “white” European Christian culture, that is constructed as a race’ (2015: 47). Indeed, the primary effect of race-making and race-thinking in the Middle Ages was the consolidation of whiteness as an identity apart from the Latin Christendom that had sought global dominion and therefore endeavoured to incorporate people of diverse phenotypes. The consolidation of whiteness is a condition that undergirds modern racial ideology and must precede it. That there is evidence for its active consolidation in the Middle Ages strongly refutes any claims that studying race’s development in the Middle Ages is anachronistic. The situation is further evidenced in that modern racial ideology is composed of static categories and hierarchies. In the wakes of colonialism, chattel slavery, genocides, apartheid, Jim Crow and other legal and social systems of modernity for the differential treatment of people, race appears a fixed system that might have different nuances in different cultures but that is ultimately born of the same fruit. Though far from the only form of racism, and though light complexions are certainly not germane to most of the world, a preference for lighter over darker skin has permeated much of the globe in modernity. Modern race’s static appearance is summed up in Toni Morrison’s magisterial treatment of whiteness’ role, with blackness’, in American literature: ‘Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable’ (1993: 59). Whiteness’ normativity inheres in its appearance as indivisible, impermeable and blank. The stasis that characterizes modern race depends on whiteness’ appearance as an unassailable monolith. Studying whiteness in the Middle Ages exposes that the idea of whiteness consists of discursive elements that interact with fluidity, whirling and distorting one another as they go. Recently, whiteness studies has been shedding light on the constructed nature of whiteness: not only was it consolidated or made in the Middle Ages, it continues to be actively constructed even now despite its appearance as a monolith. For example, a victimhood complex attends the white supremacism and nationalism that informed the Charlottesville rally. It is evidenced by such material as alt-right spokesperson Richard Spencer’s 2015 speech given at a meeting of American Renaissance, a conservative organization devoted to the idea of race-realism, or the belief that race is not in fact constructed but is instead the expression of a natural and ineluctable hierarchy of peoples. His speech is tellingly titled, ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’. ‘They’ refers to the altright’s perceived political adversaries on the left; it includes those who do not subscribe to white supremacy as well as those who believe in democratic political organization and its expression in egalitarianism. The victimhood complex is an element of racial ideology that has been constructed in modernity.5 In the nineteenth century, Robin Bernstein has shown, ‘pain functioned as a wedge that split childhood innocence, as a cultural formation, into distinct black and white trajectories’ (Bernstein 2011: 33). Black children were depicted as unable to feel pain while white children were depicted as innocent and therefore quite vulnerable to pain and suffering. The dichotomy served an important role as a servant class had to be maintained even while social critics sought to curb the ills of child labour in a period of increasingly mechanized and brutal manufacturing methods (33–5). The result is that, in today’s cultural climate, the ability to feel pain, the condition

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of being vulnerable and the state of being aggrieved coalesce to form a central pillar of white supremacist identity. Always under attack, the white supremacist ideologue depicts him or herself as suffering and vulnerable at the hands of those who would challenge their identity and its attendant senses of superiority and entitlement. While the monolithic façade of whiteness would portray white victimhood as a natural fact born of others’ envy, it is in fact a highly constructed and discursive element in the architecture of whiteness (see Figure 0.9). When alt-right and other far-right representatives air grievances, they in fact demonstrate the ongoing active construction and maintenance of racial ideology. The active processes of race-making continue in modernity; it is merely that race’s modern development into a full-fledged ideology has cloaked it with a façade of facticity and timelessness.

FIGURE 0.9  ‘Happy’ Black slaves and ‘wretched’ white workers are depicted in this pro-slavery cartoon from 1850. It demonstrates the discourse of Black invulnerability and white victimhood when it contrasts the apparently happy life of American slaves in the southern United States with the misery of white child labourers and factory workers in industrial England. © MPI/Getty Images.

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Medieval studies has been called to recognize the creation and maintenance of race in modernity along with medieval studies’ role in modern race-making – whether in the European imperialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the medievalism of the United States’ ante- and post-bellum South; or in the alt-right, far-right and fascist movements of the twentieth century and now the twenty-first. It has met these calls with varying degrees of success. On the one hand, Tom Hahn’s JMEMS issue remains the journal’s most often downloaded issue to date and William Chester Jordan’s response essay in that issue is among his most cited essays; my own 2015 postmedieval special issue ‘Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages’ has received critical acclaim; and Geraldine Heng’s 2018 The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages has as well. These are among a host of other essays appearing on blogs, in edited volumes and in featurelength books that take seriously the study of race in the Middle Ages. See the helpful bibliography ‘Race and medieval studies: a partial bibliography’ compiled by Jonathan Hsy and Julie Orlemanski (2017: 500–31). On the other hand, struggles, especially around the representation, or lack thereof, of scholars of colour have led to controversy. For example, Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past (Albin et al. 2019) is a new collection designed for the non-specialist reader and for scholars teaching at the undergraduate level. It was also prepared as an academic response to the ‘Unite the Right’ rally. The volume’s breadth of approaches is impressive: the twenty-four essays, including the introduction and bibliography, use methods germane to art history, history, literature and religious studies to examine the historical sedimentation of modernity and the Middle Ages as well as their mutual implications for our understanding of each. The expression of that historical sedimentation is to be found in crusades studies, in the study of the medieval estates, in the study of cultural and phenotypic diversity in medieval Europe, in the study of modern national mythical uses of the Middle Ages, and in Nazi and other far-right and fascist uses of the period. This is to name only a few of the areas addressed. My own contribution takes up the use of the Middle Ages by African-American thinkers in the Harlem Renaissance to assert Blacks’ equal ownership in the European Middle Ages and its legacies (Whitaker 2019b: 80–8). These scholarly contributions have been very effective in advancing knowledge on the imbrications of race, the Middle Ages and medieval studies. There have been shortcomings, however. Take, for example, the imbalance created by a lack of racial diversity among contributors and the diversity of intellectual contributors (who are not contributing authors) in Whose Middle Ages? Despite the volume’s impressive range, it is sorely lacking in the phenotypic, cultural and experiential diversity of its contributing authors. Lomuto, who wrote copy for the book’s jacket and recognizes its value, points out the lack and its dire consequences. She writes: ‘The impetus behind the volume was a white supremacist rally and the introduction makes explicit its antiracist aims. YET, the volume was exclusively edited by white scholars and only TWO of its essays were written by scholars of color’ (Lomuto 2019b). What’s more, the volume ‘wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the intellectual work of POC and the risks we take starting difficult conversations long before white people ever care’ (Lomuto 2019b). After offering several examples of how white contributors’ essays have been influenced by the work of scholars of colour – and in ways that some contributors openly recognize – Lomuto concludes that the ‘volume is itself implicated in the whiteness of the field, in power dynamics structured by white supremacy’ (2019b). The editors recognize the omission and attribute it to haste born of political urgency as well as the limitations of their own networks, and they have vowed to highlight the volume’s demonstration of the

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power dynamics Lomuto cites (O’Donnell et al. 2019). The fact remains that the volume’s make-up demonstrates dynamics – of closed networks, of insufficient attention to racial diversity and of an institutional culture that does not foreground such attention – that remain very much alive in medieval studies and have bound the field’s hands as a potential anti-racist political actor. Nonetheless, that medieval studies has recently turned towards the examination of indigeneity demonstrates that gatekeeping and related dynamics have not thwarted critical medieval race studies’ growth. In a recent essay on the King of Tars and Mongol identity, Lomuto writes that reconsidering ‘a romance that is often read through a white-black and Christian-Muslim binary of racial-religious conflict’ reveals how that text ‘is engaged in a much more complex process of racial thinking’ (2019a: 171). In other words, the construction of modernity’s Black–white racial matrix in the Middle Ages is merely part of the story. Another integral and newly addressed element is to be had in medieval indigeneity – that is, medieval engagements between Europeans and Indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere as well as the implications of Indigenous epistemologies for the Middle Ages and medieval studies. Heng offers a valuable argument for this turn when she considers episodes of encounters between Norse explorers from Iceland and Greenland and Indigenous peoples in North America in the early eleventh century. Evidence appears in two extant Vinland sagas, the Grænlendinga (Greenlanders’ Saga) and Eiríks saga rauða (Eirik the Red’s Saga), that relate the encounters. Nearly half a millennium before Columbus, these narratives chronicle encounters in which Europeans trade with Indigenous peoples. The narratives depict trading practices that seem, on the Europeans’ part, highly exploitative and in which effective communication is sorely lacking. What is more, they convey significant assumptions on the parts of their writers, who share a cultural identity with the historical Europeans depicted; they assume that some things are universally understood, such as the value of metal weaponry and its suggestion that a society is technologically advanced (Heng 2018b: 259–66). The narratives inspire many questions: What were the rubrics of value by which the Indigenous traders operated? Were the European traders successfully cheating the Indigenous traders by those rubrics? Were European interpretations correct when they believed Indigenous peoples to be returning, after peaceful earlier meetings, in order to attack them? What are the rhetorical and culture-building effects of the texts’ suggestions that the Indigenous traders highly valued European weaponry? The conclusions that could arise from such interrogations are alone enough to justify the turn towards Indigenous medieval studies. Still, the turn towards indigeneity could seem out of step with medieval studies’ usual concerns. If the turn seems an inordinate response to newly treated evidence for contact and influence between American indigenes and northern European medievals such as the Vinland sagas, it is only because medieval studies has developed two seemingly distinct strains of scholarship on race and the Middle Ages. In her introduction to Literary Compass’s special issue on race and the Middle Ages, editor Dorothy Kim follows eminent early modern race scholar Margo Hendricks in identifying two distinct intellectual genealogies. One of these is pre-modern race studies (PRS) or ‘the practice of approaching race studies as if “you’ve just discovered the land”’ (Hendricks 2019; D. Kim 2019a: 2). In other words, this approach gives little to no attention to the history, methodologies and established conclusions of critical race studies. It acknowledges an interest in race and its interrogative intellectual value while treating race in pre-modernity as an investigative subject for which entirely new apparatuses must be created. The approach has ‘actively [erased] the critical race genealogies that have worked often in toxic academic ecosystems

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yet still have created and nurtured such work’ (D. Kim 2019a: 2). The second approach, pre-modern critical race studies (PCRS), ‘actively pursues not only the study of race in the premodern … but the way that … those studies can effect a transformation of the academy and its relationship to our world’ (Hendricks 2019; D. Kim 2019a: 2). Part and parcel of PCRS, according to Kim, is that it ‘recognizes and acknowledges its genealogies. It celebrates that lineage [by] citation’ (2019a: 3). PCRS intentionally and deeply engages with critical race studies and uses the methods, theories and conclusions of that field to adapt them to the temporal and cultural contexts that attend medieval and early modern materials. In other words, it uses critical race studies tools to, in the words of Audre Lorde, ‘dismantle the master’s house’ (Hendricks 2019; D. Kim 2019a: 3). Dorothy Kim builds on Hendricks’s work by identifying the bibliographies of these strains for medieval studies: The first is the genealogy of primarily medieval historians and is an example of premodern race studies that is about white supremacist methodologies and premodern race denialism [that has] focused on the term ethnicity rather than race but [whose scholars] have neither cited nor been involved in addressing the critical scholarship on race and ethnicity for the last 60 years in the social sciences … The second is the genealogy of medieval literature and other fields (outside of history) that have engaged in the critical race scholarship of the last 60 years in the social sciences. This is the critical genealogy of premodern critical race studies. (D. Kim 2019a: 4) If one follows Hendricks and Kim in the stark distinction between the two approaches, then the turn towards indigeneity seems out of step with medieval studies precisely because it necessarily calls on that field to engage with an apparatus that was designed to work on a material archive different from the literary texts, historical legal and customary documents, and other evidence traditional to historian or literary scholarship in Western academe – and one that deeply engages critical race studies. The methods by which we produce scholarship within disciplines are, of course, produced through myriad conversations between a plethora of scholars often over significant periods of time. The study of indigeneity, given how circumscribed it has been within ethnic studies programmes and departments within North American universities, is necessarily daunting according to an approach in which a shift in temporal field requires entirely new methodologies to be built from the ground up; in Hendricks’s and Kim’s estimations, this is what PRS requires. Indigenous studies has much to offer medieval studies, and its contributions are of a piece with those of critical race studies. Indigeneity should be taken as an important element within the study of race yet one that offers particular challenges to medieval studies, even apart from those challenges offered by critical medieval race studies on the whole. One of these is Indigenous studies’ role in recovering histories from erasure, and in particular from erasures in which medieval studies has been implicated. As Adam Miyashiro has put it, ‘White supremacy is transnational, deeply rooted in myths of white, “Anglo-Saxon” heritage, and structured in indigenous elimination’ (2019: 9). Key to understanding the processes by which the European Middle Ages are subsumed within a white ‘heritage politics’ is a proper understanding of indigeneity (4).6 The erasure of Indigenous peoples that long persisted under the popular myth that Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas is undergirded by forms of erasure that are more readily legible within the discourse of critical race studies.

INTRODUCTION

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Critical race studies has been especially concerned with peoples of African descent. Even before the advent of modern critical race studies, it was in order to combat erasures such as the Columbian ‘discovery’ fallacy that early twentieth-century scholars including Arthur Schomburg, an Afro-Puerto Rican historian of the African diaspora and founder of the collection that has become the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library, undertook the study of Africans in the Americas before Columbus. In 1935, Schomburg addressed the presence of Africanist people in Central America. He cites previous research by Carlos Cuervo Marquez that ‘postulated the existence of black Africa in the plateau of Central America’ (Schomburg 1935: 6). At the same time, he registers mainstream academe’s resistance: ‘The learned American writers on this question commit themselves against the theory that there were African Negroes among the earliest inhabitants in America’ (6). Emphasizing their incredulity, he goes on: ‘as a whole this school of thought is agreed against any inclination or suggestion that will admit any Negro element in the ethnic construction of the Amerindian’ (6). In a longer unpublished study of the African presence in pre-Columbian America, Schomburg substantiates his claim by first citing accounts of Balboa’s 1513 expedition to the Americas, in which Balboa ‘had already found Negroes wild and cruel in a region two days’ distant from Quareca’ (n.d.: 11) (see Figure 0.10). Relying on a number of contemporary scholars and on photographs of Egyptian documents, Schomburg argues for an early fourteenth-century Guinean transatlantic expedition that may have deposited the Africanist people Balboa encountered (15–16). He goes on, however, to cite Marquez’s earlier claim that ‘before the formation of the ethnographic groups the Panameans, Andeans, and Caribs, a large part of the Americas was occupied by an

FIGURE 0.10  The discovery of the Pacific Ocean in 1513 by Vasco Núñez de Balboa (c. 1475– 1519), Spanish explorer, governor and conquistador. From The History of Our Country (1899). © Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.

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inferior race of Negroid type’ (18). Some Indigenous peoples, ‘it is said when their first for[e]bears arrived in these regions found the country settled by small Negro men, who afterwards retired to the fastness of the country’ (18). Schomburg’s argument represents an earlier moment in a school of thought that eventually found its fullest expression in the later twentieth-century work of Ivan Van Sertima. Van Sertima writes that the Olmec, the name given by later scholars to the Indigenous Mesoamerican people who flourished between 1500 and 400 bce and in whose artefacts Schomburg and then Van Sertima find evidence for an African presence, were a people of three faces, that is, a people formed from three main sources or influences. One of these faces was Mongoloid … The second face or influence was Negroid … the emergence of the Negroid face, which the archaeological and cultural date overwhelmingly confirms, in no way presupposes the lack of a native originality … Fusion is the marriage – not the fatal collision – of cultures. (Van Sertima [1976] 2003: 149; see Figure 0.11)

FIGURE 0.11  An example of the Olmec colossal heads that evidence Van Sertima’s claims of a pre-Columbian Africanist presence in Mesoamerica. Depicted here is Olmec colossal head I, known as the King, found in San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan. Olmec civilization, thirteenth–tenth century bce. Xalapa, Museo De Antropologia De Xalapa. © DeAgostini/Getty Images.

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The lines of inquiry followed by Schomburg and eventually Van Sertima demonstrate the intimate relationship between the study of Indigenous histories and cultures and the study of Africanist histories and cultures as both fields strive to recover that which has been erased. That the school of thought represented by both Schomburg and Van Sertima has been roundly disregarded or vehemently rejected by most Mesoamericanist scholars shows the durability of the erasures they strive against even as it also lays bare the complicated nature of the relationship between Indigenous studies and the Black studies that is an intimate of critical race studies. Against charges that Van Sertima argues that the Mesoamerican Olmec civilization was entirely African in its origins and strengths, Runoko Rashidi reminds readers that Van Sertima ‘thought of [the Olmec] as a Mesoamerican civilization in which Africans entered at a pivotal period and exerted an influence’ (Rashidi 2016: 365). While such accusations were certainly levied earlier in the life of Van Sertima’s thesis, it took some twenty years after the publication of Van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus ([1976] 2003) before anthropologists took to task his conclusions in a manner that was at all thoughtful. The scholars to do so, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano and Warren Barbour, note that Van Sertima’s book ‘was either completely ignored or generally dismissed by anthropologists, historians, and other academic professionals’ and that no scholars ‘ever developed a detailed or cogent response to the main thrust of Van Sertima’s ideas’ (1997: 419). Haslip-Viera and colleagues endeavour to give Van Sertima’s work such a ‘cogent response’ when they address the claims central to the Afrocentrist movement with which Van Sertima’s work is associated. They charge that Afrocentrism claims that ‘all of the world’s early civilizations, including those of ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, India, China, Europe, and the Americas, were created or inspired by racially “black” peoples’ (419). The scholars take down Van Sertima’s argument on many counts – from its reliance on previous scholarship that ‘accepted the racist Western definition of “blackness”’, that is, the one-drop rule, to his ‘enormous number of claims’ that would require ‘several large volumes … to deal with all of them’, to his reliance on physiognomic features such as ‘short, flat’ noses to authenticate ancient Olmec colossal heads as depicting Africans and their descendants, to the temporal evidence for the use of cotton, the bottle gourd and maize. They argue that the last of these resists Van Sertima’s claims that these crops were transmitted from Africa to the New World before Columbian exploration (420–3, 428–9). They conclude that Van Sertima’s thesis, and the Afrocentrists associated with it, have accepted a hegemonic and racialist view of pre-Columbian America that is completely lacking in historical accuracy. They have also accepted a theory and a methodological approach that grossly distort the historical record at the expense of Native Americans. (Haslip-Viera, Ortiz de Montellano and Barbour 1997: 431) That Haslip-Viera and colleagues accuse Van Sertima’s thesis of having ‘trampled on the self-respect or self-esteem of Native Americans’ in the service of being ‘more concerned with the need to raise the “self-esteem” of African-Americans’ should come as little surprise when their essay opens by identifying Van Sertima’s work as ‘pseudoscientific’ and asserting that it ‘became a profitable venture for both Van Sertima and his publisher’ (419, 431). Despite a valiant attempt at a

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‘cogent response’ – and indeed, the essay does contain many worthy points – Haslip-Viera and colleagues’ conclusions are nonetheless as much preordained as they claim Van Sertima’s to be. Haslip-Viera and colleagues’ conclusions represent the complicated nature of the relationship between Indigenous studies and Black studies – and with it, critical race studies – and reveal racial ideology’s power to uphold the historical erasures in which it trades. The scholars represent the debate between Native American originality and African influence as a zero-sum game: if ancient African travellers did indeed influence Mesoamerican civilizations, then those Mesoamerican civilizations are somehow reduced in their capacities and their worth. At best, Haslip-Viera and colleagues have erroneously valorized a kind of cultural originality in which a culture has the most worth if it somehow sprang forth, fully formed, from nothing prior. At worst, they have presented a racist proposal in which potential African influence is a kind of infection that can only decrease an Indigenous culture’s value. Pointing out weaknesses in Van Sertima’s studies could have been done – more effectively – by focusing on the valuable comparisons of timelines and other evidence that trouble Van Sertima’s claims. Avoiding sweeping scorched-earth claims that Afrocentrist arguments are ‘trampling’ or ‘robbing’ Native Americans and their cultures would have gone a long way towards jettisoning from scholarship the kind of racism that makes Van Sertima’s claims necessary and controversial. Instead, the authors did not see a different path forward, and that they did not should serve as a cautionary tale for a medieval studies that has also struggled to admit unconventional approaches and conclusions. Following the litany of replies and comments, Haslip-Viera, Ortiz de Montellano and Barbour decried the ‘“other ways of knowing” debate that has so vitiated anthropology here [in the United States]’ (1997: 436). They do so in reply to Rebecca González Lauck, whom they identify as the most recent excavator at La Venta, Van Sertima’s ‘linchpin site’ (Haslip-Viera, Ortiz de Montellano and Barbour 1997: 436).7 With clear exasperation, she writes that ‘[a] stone’s throw from the 21st century, it is a sad reflection on our societies that we need to conduct this kind of discussion’ (Haslip-Viera, Ortiz de Montellano and Barbour 1997: 435). Haslip-Viera and colleagues lament that González Lauck does not say more and assert that she may be less bothered by the advent of ‘other ways of knowing’ because she is located in Mexico. The moment reveals that the authors may indeed by quite blinded by their own commitment to a methodology that leaves no room for alternate epistemologies. When the authors suggest that González Lauck may be missing out on the ‘vitiating’ foothold that alternate epistemologies have in American anthropology, their logical leap intimates a sophomoric understanding of American influence on global scholarly disciplines. To suggest that González Lauck, who practices in Mexico but is published with the University of California Press and who regularly presents research at universities in the United States, would be unaware of a major turn in American anthropology is to suggest that national borders impede the exchange of knowledge to a much greater extent than they actually do. The scholars’ approach exhibits a tendency towards gatekeeping that makes troubling assumptions even about the experiences of scholars whose work they expect will corroborate their own. It leads to what anthropologist Fredrik Barth has called a ‘truncated account of what others are thinking and doing’ (1995: 65). A debate in anthropology serves as this introduction’s example because the concept of ‘other ways of knowing’ has been introduced most spectacularly and with equally spectacular backlash in that field, and the concept is increasingly relevant as scholars limn the contours of critical medieval race studies by staking out the place of Indigenous

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studies within medieval studies. In his 1995 essay, Barth reminds us that he had called for a ‘perspective that recognizes knowledge as a major modality of culture’ repeatedly since 1975. He pithily defines other ways of knowing as ‘referring to what people employ to interpret and act on the world: feelings as well as thoughts, embodied skills as well as taxonomies and other verbal models’ (1995: 66; emphasis in the original). Though Barth means it in a context in which the scholar is contemporaneous with his subject – an especially important point in the wake of Johannes Fabian’s groundbreaking work about anthropology’s tendency to examine contemporaneous subjects as primitive (Fabian 1983) – his definition is also fitting to the work of medieval studies, which strives to understand medieval people’s ways of knowing. See, for instance, Shirin Khanmohamadi’s thesis on the ‘dialogizing’ worldview that readers find in The Book of John Mandeville and other texts concerned with travel and exploration. In this worldview, readers’ cultural assumptions are put into conversation with those of the others treated in the text, and these worldviews interact ‘dialogically’: each stands on something that approaches equal footing and they relate without the presumption that hegemonic power belongs to either position (Khanmohamadi 2014: 113–44). A reader also sees a peculiarly medieval worldview on display in thirteenth-century encyclopedist Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum. He writes on the unity of diversity in nature: Mundus itaque ex rebus multis oppositis et contrariis est compositus, et tamen in se est unus. Mundus enim unus est numero, et non plures mundi … Mundus ergo de quo hic loquimur, non est diversus in se, nequae divisus secundum substantiam, quamvis in ipsius partibus inveniatur contrarietas, quo ad aliquam qualitatis repugnantiam. Summam enim et necessariam habet mundus in suo toto convenientiam, et quasi quandam musicam harmoniam … Ex quo patet, quod mundus ratione suae mutationis est siquidem admirandus … Nulla enim est tam vilis, tam infima in tota mundi machina pars sive particula, in qua tam in materia, quam in virtute et forma non reluceat laus divina. Nam in materia et forma mundi quaedam est differentia, sed cum harmonia est pars [sic] summa. (8.1: 369–70, 443–4; quoted in Akbari 2009: 145) (The world is made of many things opposite and contrary, and nevertheless in itself is one. The world is indeed one in number and not many worlds … The world therefore of which we speak here is not diverse in itself nor is it divided in substance, though contrariety is found in parts of it, where there is a certain contradiction in qualities. Indeed the world in its entirety has the most necessary agreement, as if it has a certain musical harmony … From which it follows that the world by reason of its changing is accordingly wonderful. Nothing indeed is so vile, so low in all the scheme of the world or in each particular part, that divine praise does not nevertheless shine in its matter, virtue, and form. For in the matter and form of the world is some difference, but while harmony is the greatest part.8) According to Bartholomaeus, all things in the world – plants, animals and humans – are interdependent. Together, they produce a ‘certain musical harmony’, of which their contrariety is part and parcel. As I have written elsewhere, Bartholomaeus ‘posits the recognition of the harmonic interdependence of distinct constituents as an absolutely central and indispensable element in any attempt to understand the world’ (Whitaker

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2014: 166). The recognition of ‘harmonic interdependence’ comprises a medieval way of knowing. Inasmuch as medievalists ought to strive to inhabit, at least to some extent, this way of knowing because it is a medieval method, medievalists ought to submit their understandings of the relations between multiple ways of knowing to the condition of harmonic interdependence. The introduction of indigeneity into medieval studies is a site at which the comportment towards the harmonic interdependence of epistemologies is of paramount importance. Indigenous medieval studies calls on scholars to examine medieval history and culture through the lens of non-European modern as well as ancient epistemologies. In Akbari’s lecture, ‘What Is the Value of the Humanities? How We Read (and Write) Today’ (2019a), delivered at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, she considers Indigenous modes of storytelling as an alternate epistemology. Remarking on the work of Stó:lō author and scholar Lee Maracle (see Figure 0.12) on oratory and narrative, Akbari writes that in Maracle’s Indigenous approach ‘oratory is fully participatory and it is iterative’. It ‘requires the active performance of listening by the witnesses’. It ‘makes spaces for responses in return’, and these are then ‘integrated into the collective pursuit of knowledge’. This goes on until ‘the accumulation of story, of oratory, and of response’ results in ‘a more and more fully exposed object of knowledge’. Stories are received, retold and developed until they result in ‘a moment of peace and recognition’ that evidences the revelation of new truths. In this method, ‘story itself is a

FIGURE 0.12  Lee Maracle, photographed for an article on the recent practice of acknowledging you are on Indigenous land. © Bernard Weil/Toronto Star/Getty Images.

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mode of interpretation, rather than simply the object of interpretation’ (Akbari 2019a). Interpretation is not achieved in the methods more germane to university research, in which the whole is parsed into discrete elements whose interactions are identified and characterized. Instead, interpretation is achieved via an accretive process that recognizes the integral role of another element, personal experience, that in ‘traditional’ Western methods is meant to be rejected, overcome or at very least minimized. In its distinction from ‘traditional’ methods, Maracle’s Indigenous American epistemology resonates with the ‘dialogizing’ methods used in the European Middle Ages as demonstrated by scholars such as Shirin Khanmohamadi. Surely, such an accretive method as Maracle’s has valuable insights to offer about medieval materials whose modes more closely resemble its own. What is more, Maracle’s method reminds scholars that marrying accretive methods, other Indigenous methods and ‘traditional’ Western university methods may reveal truths that are unattainable by any one method alone. The song sung by multiple methods’ harmonic interdependence promises to be a beautifully truthful tune indeed. As this volume’s reader embarks on the journey that contributors offer below, keeping in mind a more accretive epistemological method will have its advantages not only because the writers offer different, and sometimes conflicting, conclusions. It is also advantageous because it can help scholars contextualize the history of critical medieval race studies that makes this volume possible and necessary. A more accretive epistemology troubles the dual genealogies for the study of race’s imbrication with the European Middle Ages that Hendricks posits and Kim further develops. Taking pre-modern race studies and pre-modern critical race studies, PRS and PCRS, and placing them in contradistinction to one another is thoroughly in line with ‘traditional’ Western research methodologies. An integral element is identified – in this case, citational and conceptual engagement with critical race studies – and its presence or absence is used to sort scholarship into two discrete camps, as if one has nothing to do with the other. That, of course, is not the case. In a move meant to evoke critical race scholarship’s radical convention of including personal experiences in order to limn the contours of race, I offer as an example my own case. My 2015 postmedieval special issue ‘Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages’ is correctly classified as in the PCRS camp. Essays in the issue engage emphatically with important work in critical race and Black studies, treating and using the work of a range of thinkers, from Frantz Fanon to Henry Louis Gates Jr. This is in addition to the work of earlier critical medieval race scholars such as Geraldine Heng, Jeffrey Cohen and Sharon Kinoshita. Nevertheless, as I state in the special issue’s introduction, I could not have conceived nor compiled the 2015 special issue without the trailblazing work of Hahn’s special issue (Hahn 2001a; Whitaker 2015: 6). These two special issues are in an explicit genealogical relationship with one another. A more accretive epistemological approach recognizes that this genealogical relationship can exist even while signal differences persist. A more accretive analytical approach also might admit that work that Hendricks identifies as PCRS is regularly ‘signifyin’’ on work that she calls PRS. To use Gates’s famous iteration, it reiterates and reconsiders with a signal Black difference. That difference changes comportments, intertextual and other interactive relationships, and ultimately meanings, all while also repeating. To use Maracle’s methodology, PCRS may obtain the place of the story that has been added to, revised and changed until it reveals the truths that inhere within it. PRS would occupy the space of the story as it is first being received and before it has been repeated. A more accretive analytical approach recognizes that PRS and PCRS are of a single genealogy and that their lines of descent are messy and intertwined, and that they double and triple back upon one another and

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themselves. Their relation calls to mind the ‘rhizomic identity’ expounded by the AfroFrench philosopher and literary critic Édouard Glissant. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome, in which processes of thought are not linear, Glissant adapts the idea to identity (Deleuze and Guattari [1987] 2003: 3–25). In this notion, identity is not established by its connection to a single root or originary history. Rhizomic identity reveals, by contrast, just how invested are Anglo-Saxonist medieval studies and, even more certainly, alt- and far-right medievalisms in single-root or, to use Glissant’s term, ‘atavistic’ origins. Instead, rhizomic identity is ‘errant’, ‘nomadic’ and abandons linearity and causality (Hiepko 2011: 259–60). It is a great testament to Hendricks’s and Kim’s analyses that they demonstrate for their listeners and readers the atavistic obsession with one-dimensional methodologies comported towards reduction – such as that in which the engagement or lack thereof with the critical race scholarship of the past sixty years betokens two separate, distinct, mutually unintelligible genealogies – that dogs not only the study of race in the Middle Ages but also the study of race and related matters within the Western university tradition at large. The chapters in this collection survey the history of critical medieval race studies, present new theses regarding matters germane to the field of critical medieval race studies, continue to consider the value of critical medieval race studies and analyse medieval materials according to the methods of critical race studies. The relationships among the chapters, however, should be considered using an accretive, or rhizomic, epistemological method. The chapters and their conclusions add to one another, they do not detract from one another. Even disagreement adds to the story: there is always an element, no matter how small or nuanced, of difference between any two situations in literature or in history, and disagreement about how a moment or moments should be read promises to reveal the value of a distinctive element that has perhaps been overlooked. As the analyses in the following pages progress, their contributors build a narrative that moves ever closer to presenting ‘a more and more fully exposed object of knowledge’, to presenting its readers with some shadow, however faint and translucent or strong and opaque, of truth.

CHAPTER ONE

Definitions and Representations of Race CHRISTINE CHISM

INTRODUCTION: RACING AT THE GATES OF CONSTANTINOPLE At the gates of fourteenth-century Constantinople, a Muslim traveller found himself detained by the Eastern Christian inhabitants of the city. Even though he was protected by a royal entourage and was visiting a city whose emperor had married his daughter to a Muslim Khan to cement border amicability, Ibn Battuta found the chaos at the gates so terrifying he went and hid among the baggage. Several decades after the event he related the story to Muslim readers back in his Maghribi homeland: We found there about a hundred men, with an officer on a platform, and I heard them saying Sarakinu, Sarakinu, which means Muslims. They would not let us enter, and when those who were with the khatun said that we belonged to their party, they answered, ‘They cannot enter except by permission.’ So we stayed at the gate. (Ibn Battuta 2004: 504) How do we describe this moment? We have an epithet, Sarakinu, a Greek word that originally identified a particular Arabian tribe, which had been generalized over centuries of transregional war and commerce to designate (and render fearful) any Muslim. We have a recognition and marking of otherness: Ibn Battuta looks like a Muslim to the citizens of Constantinople, whatever that means. Most of all, we have a gate, at which he is caught because he wears whatever threat that Sarakinu entrains in his body, dress and face: the gates slam shut for him while admitting others in his party. We could call this a moment of routine civil surveillance, a clash of ethnocentricities or an encounter of Christian-Muslim interconfessional enmity; and it is all these things. What is added when we recognize racialization at this moment? Are we being inadmissibly presentist I am indebted to my writing groups, the WIP and the ZEDs, for cogent readings, to Candace Barrington and Tom Hahn for peerless editing, and also to the seminars of Della V. Mosley, Pearis Bellamy and the many other scholars who collaborated in the Academics for Black Survival and Wellness (Bellamy et al. 2020). https://www. academics4blacklives.com/ (accessed 4/1/2021).

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if we see a form of racial profiling here? Does Ibn Battuta, by translating Sarakinu as ‘Muslims’, propose a racial dimension to religious practice? How can defining premodern race help parse this encounter? For instance: Can present-day associations with racial violence bring this moment to life for modern readers? Can racing this encounter help us attend more to Ibn Battuta’s subjective experience of fear, isolation and reduction to a vulnerable body? Would mobilizing such sympathies be somehow illegitimate because it draws on twenty-firstcentury experiences? Why is this connection more presentist, than, say, analogous affects sparked by the moments of pre-modern humour, love, piety and aesthetic accomplishment which animate scholarship? In short, how emotionally dead to us does a past need to be for us to respect its historical alterity? This chapter argues for the tactical utility of seeing medieval race in scenes like this but tries to define race not as a thing done but as a contingent doing. It argues that race is an action whose definition is always in contest. For Ibn Battuta, racing emerges in the translation from Sarakinu to Muslim. What Sarakinu means to the Byzantines is quite different from what Muslim or muslimīn mean to Ibn Battuta and his audience, and the gap between the dehumanizing epithet and its translation is why definitions of race slip at the moment of racing. As a result, the reason race cannot be firmly defined in any particular situation is actually structural to its violence. Race defines against resistance: part of its violent action is to crush counter-definitions in a way that dehumanizes. Racial definitions can be imposed, reclaimed, mimicked and redeployed for the purposes of parody, for the purposes of ‘sly civility’ (Bhabha 1994), but they are always works in progress. This chapter therefore looks at definitions of pre-modern race as a verb, exploring the very slipperiness of pre-modern racial operations to illuminate the ways racing continues to work as a violently improvised and affective performance in both the past and the present. Since race is a fighting word in our present, the chapter argues for the utility of not separating the medieval from the contemporary because, while racing evolves very different structures, institutions and performance practices in each time period, it does so by using similar sets of tactics. Adapting Audre Lorde’s ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (Lorde [1984] 2007), we can better track not only how the master’s house continually changes but also how the tools, while also changing, often persist across time. This will allow us to draw upon critical race theory among the other archival, theoretical, historical and literary technes we bring to the study of the past. This chapter is in two parts, (1) an introductory many-voiced section, peppered with recent definitions of race from critical race theorists and medievalists; and (2) an exploration of how medieval texts do racing through tactics, which can both manage human difference in horrific and effective ways (Heng 2018b: 23), and fumble into self-contradiction and mismanagement. I argue that pre-modern racing is best seen as a gambit, a bad-faith negotiation, whose unexpected turns can at once violate its victims and its perpetrators.

RACE(N)/RACING Race-making… operates as specific historical occasions in which strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices and pressures, so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. My understanding, thus, is that race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content. (Heng 2018b: 27)

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that the noun ‘race’ did not exist in the English language for the greater part of the pre-modern period but entered the lexicon in the early sixteenth century. Middle French used a form of ‘race’ that it later contributed to English but even it is late-attested in the fifteenth century. Instead, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen comments, a conglomerate of other nouns in a variety of languages (‘Natio, gens, genus, stirps, … populus, nomen, sanguis, and lingua’) do work that post-medieval readers have (on and off and sometimes against historicist resistance) identified as racializing (Cohen [2004] 2006). However, there is a form of race(n) in Middle English – a verb rather than a noun, and although it means something quite different than race in its modern senses, this homophone can help us rethink how we define pre-modern race as a work in progress. The Middle English race is a verb, meaning to race, rush, tear apart, ravage, erase (Middle English Dictionary 2021: s.v. ‘race(n)’). Consequently, I will argue that pre-modern race is best seen not as a noun but as a verb, an activity that works with a violence, precipitousness and erasure similar to its Middle English homonym: race(n). In reaching towards pre-modern racings, I draw upon contemporary scholars of race and racism, because the critical urgencies driving their work resemble those that galvanized the field of medieval studies over the past two years. Our twenty-first-century perspectives are created within four centuries of white supremacy. Racism is a self-norming system that functions institutionally, interpersonally and psychically. Current definitions of racism focus on its double power of investment and disinvestment, flourishing or de-development, each dependent on phenotype. Thus, Camara Phyllis Jones globally defines racism as: a system of structuring opportunity and assigning value, based on [the social interpretation of] phenotype (race), that: ●●

unfairly disadvantages some individuals and communities

●●

unfairly advantages other individuals and communities

●●

undermines realization of the full potential of the whole society through the waste of human resources. (Jones 2003: 10)

The double action of racism needs marking to identify how the system naturalizes either entitlement or disadvantage. Those marked as white are given opportunities to flourish. Those not so marked – but most of all Black people and Indigenous people – are sequestered from opportunities, exploited and killed. Yet whiteness has taken many forms as a historical industry, and medieval forms of whiteness were quite different from the forms determining current racial dynamics, just as medieval forms of blackness depended on situated metaphorical plays between darkness and sin (Whitaker 2019a). Medieval race is not only or primarily rooted in phenotype. Instead it emerges at contested intersections of class, religion, geophysical location, ethnic origin, gender, health or disability, and behaviour. Thus, we shall see that medieval whiteness is continually in motion: constructed and reconstructed as an idea rather than entrenched, universalized and occluded as a norm. Because contemporary race theory similarly underscores that race is not simply a thing done (let alone a biological fact) but also a doing – ongoing, fast-as-light and phenomenologically opaque, even in its most violent operations – contemporary race theory has much to teach scholars of pre-modern race.

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Rethinking definitions of race from noun to verb can focus salutary attention on what race does in pre-modern texts, and also how those doings can speak to some current racializing operations. Racing still goes by many names (including Islamophobia, antiSemitism, anti-immigration). Verbs such as race-ing have turned up in a number of influential race studies, notably Toni Morrison’s collection Race-ing Justice: En-Gendering Power (1992). Other useful coinages are racecraft (Fields and Fields [2012] 2014) and racework (Steinbugler 2012). I will use all three but particularly racing throughout this chapter, because its verbal form (like the Middle English rase(n) it echoes) preserves the slippery, violent, half-visible force with which race does its most potent work.

UNMOORING RACING FROM THE PRESENT Yes, the Middle Ages have been thoroughly raced. The question at hand is, exactly how are they raced? Not whether, but how is medieval race-thinking different from modern racism? How does it contribute to the formation of modern racism? What can we decipher of the intellectual, cultural, psychological and even emotional dynamics that give rise to race-thinking in the Middle Ages? In short, how does medieval race work from the inside out? (Whitaker 2015: 7) Building upon two decades of scholarly racecraft and driven by a sense of contemporary urgency, this volume explores how racing works within pre-modern world-systems very unlike contemporary ones. Current, ever urgent, manifestations of critical race theory ask how the hegemonies profiting from centuries of imperialism and settler colonialism have strategized racing as forms of domination and structural state formation. Racing entangles with colonialist histories when it enables racializing regimes (1) to control Indigenous lands and (2) to expropriate human labour through slavery, indenture, criminalization and socio-economic de-development. In a comparison of racializing tactics across four modern settler-colonial regimes (the United States, Australia, Brazil and Israel), Patrick Wolfe shows how colonizers encode the particular racial expropriations they require in diametrically opposing ways to fit their ends: ‘It is not as if social processes come to operate on a naturally present set of bodily attributes that are already given prior to history. Rather, racial identities are constructed in and through the very process of their enactments … In other words … race is colonialism speaking’ (2016: 5). Each system of expropriation produces different strategies for control. For instance, the de-development, criminalization and continued othering/demonization used to race African Americans contrast with the systematic extermination and forced assimilation used on Indigenous Americans. Immigrants, the homeless and refugees are also subject to particular racializing regimes. Other populations, such as Muslims and Jews, are racialized in complex ways, for while many are legally white, they are raced through a complex of ethnic origin, economic stability, religious practice and immigration history (Guhin 2018). S. Maghbouleh (2017) discusses how populations on the margins of whiteness actively negotiate racial status using ‘racial hinges’ and ‘racial loopholes’. On the one hand, racing denotes imposed processes of control and violence, on the other hand, it allows individuals to leverage racial discourses and community-building for mutual support (1–13). But what about race before European colonial hegemony? If (as I think) hegemonies exist in pre-modern world-systems, they differ from those in current global world-systems.

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From the perspective of longer historical timescales, we gain a sense of hegemonies in process rather than in entrenchment. For instance, Latin Christian crusading Orientalism may move people and armies to violently remap existing geopolitical arrangements, but they often struggle to assemble and stabilize the programmatic epistemological and imperial infrastructures of enforcement that would give them colonialist staying power. At the same time, empires of broad cultural domination – such as the Mongol Yuan, the Ming, the Abbasids, Seljuk Turks and Ayyubids – can adopt radically different formations (Stoler, McGranahan and Perdue 2007) that can change within a single generation. By paying attention to the opportunistic tactics used to manage human difference in these emerging powers, we can trace how the volatilities of racing in premodern world-systems contribute to longer histories of race. We might also illuminate contemporary areas where racing flails in similar gambits, thereby rendering their propositionality more visible, their proponents more accountable and their imperatives more readily resisted. In addition, by widening our pre-modern lens beyond Latin Christendom’s texts, we can find many self-universalizing voices that do not use the language of whiteness. In this way, we can disentangle racing from the modern production of whiteness as a form of property and privilege (Harris 1993). Certain demographics emerge as dominant by conglomerating nobility, settlement history, confession, geographical location, material/ corporeal practice and kinship community, and it speaks in their name. In fact, whiteness (in its modern raced sense) masks analogous conglomerates. Thus by considering premodern racing as situated historical processes, we can see the different strategies of control that pre-modern racings used to bolster many different hegemonies. For instance, we might see racings rooted in aristocratic privilege in fifteenth-century Burgundy but rooted in confessional identity in William II’s Sicily. We might find racings galvanized by nationalist competition between England, France and the Holy Roman Empire during the crusades (Ambrisco 1999; Heng 2004; Yeager 2008; Blurton 2016), or by dynastic ties to particular Islamicate regimes in Abbasid Baghdad, al-Andalus and North Africa. In the inter-crusade Levant, regional settlement histories might speak louder than phenotype (Ellenblum 1998), and across Mongol regimes kinship-tribal lineages and traditions may race the expanses of Asia (Jackson 2018). In Mamluk Egypt, phenotype may matter (Heng 2018b), while in Abbasid Baghdad, people of African or Persian descent may be sequestered from Arabizers trying to instate new ‘purity’-oriented forms of Islam (Hunwick and Powell 2002; Bennison 2010), even in the midst of accelerating transculturations (Crone 2006). The munificence of Mansa Musa, the tenth sultan of Mali, might be seen as economic racing: his surfeit of gold debased currencies along his pilgrimage route to Mecca for a decade and established an economic hegemony extraordinary in human history (Gomez 2017: 93–143). Racing across pre-modern world-systems is thus polymorphic, situated in competing networks and power structures. For students of the European Middle Ages, these Afro-Eurasian hegemonies often contest those of Latin Christians. European (or even Latin Christian) hegemony itself was notional and laceratingly self-divided throughout most of the period under question. Crusaders could theorize a God-willed inheritance of Jerusalem, but Salah al-Din’s and the Mamluks’ armies, caught up in their own empire-building, were unconvinced and effectively enforced their own Islamic typologies for al-Quds. The Latin Christian conquest of Spain took centuries, less a Christian recovery movement than an uncoordinated set of land grabs by mutually warring North Iberian regimes, who would ally with Christian or Muslim leaders alike as needed. As a result, ideas of ‘whiteness’, ‘Europeanness’ and

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even ‘Christendom’ were competing fantasies (sometimes with local armies to back them) rather than intransigent hegemonies buttressed by centuries of colonial infrastructure. Their proponents could opportunistically prosper and do irreparable harm, but their fragile foundations often prevented political persistence. Given this, how do pre-modern local hegemonies speak race amid competing and mutable infrastructures? If modern race is colonialism speaking, we cannot take the distinctive structures of pre-modern colonialism for granted. Whether racing concerns skin colour, bodies, moral status, soteriological destiny or geophysical location, it is in constant improvisation throughout the period. Pre-modern racing builds towards performance histories and forms of sociality (Butler 2016: 4). While its imagined or actual futures may not mirror our own self-orientations, it can stir our experiential recognitions. We must recognize both such connections and disconnections. As Tom Hahn suggests, A robust engagement that takes ‘medieval race’ – as constituted by religion, geopolitics, physiognomy, color – as at once parallel and discontinuous with more recent racial discourses will insure that the Middle Ages does not become (remain?) an excluded Other. (2001: 26; emphasis in the original)

FORMS OF RACECRAFT The rest of this chapter defines various operations of racing: actions that get racing done. It exemplarizes them through representative Latin Christian texts providing instances of various degrees of complexity. Each yields a different form of racing and different way of managing difference, and thus each contributes to the broad improvisational palette that defines racing in pre-modern texts. However, since the forms often work in tandem, I group them into three distinct families: (1) cultural: generalization, the token and the exception; (2) biological: body, family and cultural reproduction; and (3) relational: alienation and mapping. These activities impact across cultural, institutional and personal scales (J. Jones 1996). Thus they do racework by methods analogous to those of today’s racist regimes. By inflicting violence and trauma upon certain peoples, while nurturing others, their systems delegate positive and negative cultural values and sequester opportunities accordingly (C. Jones 2003). Once a person or people is raced, further opportunity and value transactions can be negotiated via three additional racial-management strategies: toleration, assimilation and self-reflection. My discussions note these strategies’ power but also underscore how they often spawn unforeseen consequences, as the figures whose differences are managed often escape affective containment, or they return from repression, or they deconstructively shift from margin to obsessional centre. I chose these activities as representative, but there are many others, and these activities are overlain with other denigrating/opportuning systems such as gender, class and religion, in intersectionalities that can be further explored. In these ways – despite all the historical differences that separate pre-modern cultures from contemporary ones – racial systems can dialogue transhistorically. Tuning our ears to that sinister basso continuo, even in the midst of historical variation, may add urgency to the work of constructing a longer durée for race studies.

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THE CULTURAL FORCE OF GENERALIZATION, THE TOKEN AND THE EXCEPTIONAL The process of generalizing is crucial to racing, as it oscillates ceaselessly between the one and the many. In her discussion of Latin Christian treatments of the life of Muhammad, Geraldine Heng describes the racializing powers of generalization: ‘the personality of a singular individual becomes transcoded into the character of a collective totality of peoples, [to] exemplify processes of racethinking and racialization’ (Heng 2018b: 116). Generalizing feeds racing by enlarging individual animosity into group hate, only to laser-focus the redoubled force of group hate onto hapless individuals, in endless, affectfeeding cycles of reinforcement. Generalization produces sets of abstracted essentialisms which become ‘sticky’ in Ahmed’s terms (Ahmed 2004), through repetitive reassignment and regeneralization. Generalization is thus a racial sentiment machine that grounds racist institutions and cultures. Generalization depends on norming – a sense that one can identify a typical figure whose characteristics encapsulate the ways of living of larger groups of people. In this way, as Heng discusses, for many clerics the Prophet Muhammad’s scurrilous biographies characterize Muslim life collectively (Akbari 2009; Heng 2018b). Similarly, narratives of the biblical rabbi Caiaphas or the disciple Judas are levied to darken all Jewish lives. The memory of Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Berber Umayyad conqueror of Visigothic Iberia, can be reembodied and counter-historically repulsed in the invading Moors, Yusuf ibn Tashfin in the Cantar del Mio Cid and Baligant in Chanson de Roland, before ballooning into a fantasy demonizing the threatening rapacity of all African Black people. Chaucer’s Prioress can move with startling ease from her murderous Asian ghetto to the thirteenth-century tale of the murder of Hugh of Lincoln. Here, as Heather Blurton argues, we can see the power of textual networks to expand case instances into racial mythologies by providing ‘links in a narrative chain with wellworn parameters and expectations on the part of medieval audiences’ (Blurton and Johnson 2017: 104). Racing generalizations can also change tactics over time while still targeting particular communities and individuals for denigration. Thus David Nirenberg at once situates ‘communities of violence’ as specific local forms of managing difference (Nirenberg 1996), while also tracking centuries of anti-Judaisms that enfold recent antiSemitisms amid their permutations (Nirenberg 2013). Once a representative victim for racing is selected, however, racing generalization needs no other historical referent, since it grows into a discourse more tied to narratives than social experience. A case in point is Moriaen, a Black knight in a Dutch romance, whose name both derives from ‘Moor’ and becomes interchangeable with ‘Moor’. For centuries both ‘Moor’ and ‘Moriaen’ were used in Dutch texts to designate people of African descent; and yet a shadow of history remains: there is still a tradition of naming children Moryan in the Loma communities in Liberia (Rashidi 2014). Through these mythic narrative chains, races can be ontologically absent but discursively present – for centuries. Thus, after the expulsions of visible Jews in England (1290), France (1300s) and Spain (1492), discursive Jews were generated to take on a variety of cultural functions. Sylvia Tomasch’s ‘Virtual Jew’ (Tomasch 2000) or Stephen Kruger’s ‘Spectral Jew’ (Kruger 2006) or Jeremy Cohen’s Jewish witnesses to the literality of Old Testament law (Cohen 1999) illuminate the often terrifying work discursive Jews were put to, in areas of literary, historical and ecclesiastical production. Generalized Muslims also did discursive work in the Latin Christian imaginaries (Tolan 2002, 2008; Akbari 2009), operating forcefully in crusade literature and apology (Ramey 2001; Calkin 2005;

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M. Moore 2014): liturgical, civic and parish drama; and geographical and ethnographical thought (Akbari 2009; Khanmohamadi 2014). The mysteries of Africa and its peoples exerted pressure on geographical thought and travel narratives (Heng 2018b: 181–256). The Mongols and the rich kingdoms of East and South Asia provided a mixture of threat and beguilement in Western descriptions of the world, from Marco Polo and Mandeville, to Orderic of Pordenone, William of Rubruck and John de Plano Carpini (Heng 2018b: 287–416; Jackson 2018). However, those who indulge in this discursive racing machine sometimes sense its contrivance, self-referentiality and obtuseness. A need for external verification can grow. Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit makes this need a passage to engagement as his young hero, the race-hate mythologizing Johannes Betzler, craves to see beyond the spectral Jews who live in his head to the real Jew who lives in his dead sister’s wainscoting (Jojo Rabbit 2019). That is where the next racing gesture can come in: exceptionalizing. The process of admitting only extraordinary exceptions to such generalized types can ameliorate the strain of maintaining these long narrative-based mythic chains. To singularize would seem the opposite of to generalize, but in racing, they aid and abet each other. Particular others who are exceptionalized, and thus become extraordinary, can become sublime sites for transcultural projection and desire. This is because race produces group affect in ways messier and less certain than they aspire to be. The racegeneralization machine requires exceptions to continue to work, because they provide a nominal rooting in the evidential authority of historical encounter. Exceptions allow a temporary abatement of demonization, but transport this counter-evidence into an abstract, highly sentimentalized realm where it can be more easily managed. This becomes the logically ridiculous ‘exception that proves the rule’ that allows racists to save face by admitting a purely abstract and sequestered admiration within an actively oppressed group. Thus appears the idealized ‘noble savage’ or ‘pagan philosopher’ standing quiet amid the frenzy of settler colonialist expansion, an innocent, generous or self-sacrificing ally to his imperial oppressor. One instance is the extraordinary Jewish scholar and doctor Josephus in The Siege of Jerusalem (Livingston 2004), who aids Roman-Christian victory, even as he stays staunchly loyal to his own people. The more abstract and selfless the virtue of these exceptional racial others, the more easily they can serve as sites for projecting racial sentiment, desire and admiration. However, these exceptional figures sometimes escape affective containment. If they are reproduced concretely, complexly and historically enough, their exceptionality can suddenly become generalizing, setting up countercurrents that threaten the racial fantasies keeping them pedestaled. Within these eddies of reverence and revilement, figures such as Marco Polo’s Kubalai Khan and the historical-romance Saladin operate. In Marco Polo’s narrative, Kubalai Khan stands outside of Christendom to model strong rulership, imperial organization and rich economic management to Latin Christian readers; and in his racial, cultural and religious alterity, he challenges the assimilative cultural fantasies encoded in a figure like Prester John. There is no question of conquering the Khan; European sovereigns could only hope pallidly to imitate his accomplishments, and he endures as an admirable exemplar long past his actual historical reign and the fall of the Yuan dynasty to the Ming (1370). A more proximal exception, Saladin, or Salah al-Din, who conquered Latin Christian Jerusalem in 1187, becomes an idealized Muslim leader in many European texts, although he can be conscripted as a disposable adversary within crusading revenge fantasies like Richard Coeur de Lion. As the master of Jerusalem, Saladin opens cross-cultural doors.

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Saladin texts invite readers to re-evaluate such shared values as hospitality, chivalry, devotion and kindness at the substrate of antagonistic raced-religious cultures. He instigates diplomatic gift economies that build commonality in the midst of war and establish possibilities for accord (Boccaccio 2013: Day 10, Tale 9). He can even retrope the Chanson de Roland from tragedy to comedy by generously sparing a Frankish rearguard in a narrow pass (Pas Saladin in Lodeman 1897). Saladin often educates those he encounters and can be educated in turn by Jews and Christian knights (Boccaccio 2013 Day 1, Tale 3; ‘The Ordene de Chevalerie’ in Busby 1983). In his gallantry, he actually becomes a locus of desire to Eleanor of Aquitaine who almost elopes with him (Wailly 1876). These are not simply fantasies, however. In most of these stories, the implicit threat Saladin poses walks closely beside him, and the educative exchanges often occur under duress. Saladin may be affiliated with European nobility (La Fille du Compt de Ponthieu) and may even assimilate into a wanna-be Christian (the fifteenth-century romance of Saladin), but he usually retains his difference and threat. He is rarely wholly assimilated or Europeanized by either shared blood or chivalric custom. He allures so forcibly because he indexes the histories of complex transcultural enrichment that crusade fantasies and racing try to erase. Furthermore, he is not as singular as an exception ought to be. He bleeds over into other threatening/admirable Muslims such as Fierembras in Fierabras et Floripas (Lupack 1990), the Turk in Rauf Coilyear (Lupack 1990), Palomedes from the Lancelot-Grail cycle (Lacy 2010) and Malory’s Morte D’Arthur (Malory 2004), and Morien. He even echoes through John Mandeville’s master, the Sultan of Egypt (one of Saladin’s actual titles), who lectures Mandeville on Latin Christian devotional failure (see below). Thus exceptionalizing can, in some pre-modern European texts, come to interrogate racing rather than proving its rule. As tactics that race, both generalizing and exceptionalizing require the constant movement from the abstract to the particular – and they enact the unnerving ways that racism maintains itself by extrapolating from interpersonal relations to cultural mythologies. Their virtual discursivity, however, sometimes craves substance beyond what new narrative case studies can offer. That is where the next family of gestures can come in, for they are based on bodies and the feelings, intimacies and modes of cultural reproduction they generate.

BODIES AND THEIR NETWORKS: CORPOREALIZATION, FAMILIARIZATION AND CULTURAL REPRODUCTION Corporealizing as a racing strategy fixes and naturalizes human difference by ingraining it within a body, thereby giving difference a local habitation and a name, both of which can be oppressed to exact a reckoning. Corporealizing is a racing mainstay, encompassing whole genres of denigration based in the body, from pathologizing (Sontag 1978) to torture (Scarry 1987), enslavement (Block 2018) and mortality itself. If the sociocultural works in tandem with the biopolitical, as Heng suggests (Heng 2018b: 27), corporealizing is a powerful two-way translator. Corporealizing someone – say by torture, expropriated labour or rape – entraps them, often objectifies them, renders their body into a tool for their subjugation. We see this in the parodic corporealization of Archisynogogus in the Benedictbeuern Christmas Play. Archisynogogus – literally, chief/excess of the synagogue – distils and races Judaism into a body that the Christmas Play can manipulate. In his opening debate with Saint Augustine, Archisynogogus is given elliptical and fascinating acting directions;

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he is to clamour, scoff and shove his comrade forward, ‘movendo caput suum et totum corpus et percutiendo terram pede, baculo etiam imitando gestus Juaei in omnibus’ (agitating his head and his entire body and striking the ground with his foot, and imitating with his scepter the mannerisms of a Jew in all ways) (Bevington 1975: 183; Tomasch 2018). Archisynogogus’s dramatically unruly body is coupled with but distracts from his use of Aristotelian logic and rational scepticism about miracles such as the Virgin Birth. By contrast, Archisynogogus’s opponent, Saint Augustine, sports a much more decorous body and argues through music and scripture, both of which distract from his illogical, emotional, analogic arguments for the Virgin Birth. Their debate is a clatter of bodies and voices, discordant vs harmonic, shouting vs singing, agitated vs serene. While elsewhere corporeal excess can breed giants, monsters and other portents of extreme alterity and wickedness, here Archisynogogus’s hyperkinetic, clamorous body races Judaism into a carnal motor for stage-managing doctrinal difference to Christian advantage. The Christmas Play actualizes a widespread discourse on Jews as a carnal other to Christianity’s spiritualizing forces. This tactic emerges clearly in supersessional typologies that contrast ‘literal’ Jews (comprising at once Halakhic and Haggadic writings, Jewish practices of exegesis and actual Jewish people and communities) against ‘spiritual’ Christians (comprising the Gospels, Epistles, canon law, figurative-allegorical exegesis and actual Christian people and communities). The gains of such exegetical nimbleness become clear in book 2, chapter 6 of Saint Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, where he discusses the pleasure he takes in a figurative reading animated by the concrete vividness of the literal text, an exegetical brinksmanship that battens on the literal even as it claims emancipation from it. The gesture of corporealization does not result in a simple dichotomy between the bodily and the spiritual, rather it uses the dichotomy to trap an opponent. The repetition of these tropes gives them the force of a discourse able to do racecraft. It is no accident that Augustine’s book 3, chapters 5 and 6 move from the dangers of the literal to the servitude and neoteny of Jewish people. Yet this discourse can also be turned back on its wielder. An exchange in the Jewish scholar Joseph Kimhi’s twelfth-century manual for debating hostile Christians, The Book of the Covenant (Sefer ha-Berit), caricatures this tactic, while providing strategies for defending against it: The min [infidel/Christian] said: You understand most of the Torah literally, while we understand it figuratively. Your whole reading of the Bible is erroneous for you resemble him who gnaws at the bone, while we suck at the marrow within. You are like the beast that eats the chaff, while we eat the wheat. The ma’amin [man of belief] said: Know that the Torah is not [to be taken] altogether literally or altogether figuratively… Some commandments may be understood both literally and figuratively. Circumcise your selves to the Lord and take away the foreskins of your heart (Jeremiah 4:4) is to be taken figuratively, but at the age of eight days every male among you shall be cirucumcised (Gen 17:12) is to be taken literally. Both the circumcision of the flesh and of the heart are obligatory. (Kimhi 1972: 47–8) Kimhi’s min is a knowing parody of Christian corporealizing discourse. The images – bone and marrow, wheat and chaff – cut in two ways. First, dead bone contrasts with life-giving marrow, discarded chaff with the kernel of the wheat, a glib restatement of a

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Christian topos. Jews are doomed to the abject side of the equation that the min creates through an impossible dichotomy between literal–carnal and figurative–spiritual reading. However, the Christian min is also, subtly, corporealized, cracking, gnawing and sucking away at scriptural truth. Thus, the Book of the Covenant depicts Christians as gluttonously carnalizing the spiritual itself. The parody allows the ma’amin not only to point out the false division between carnal and spiritual but also to claim an exegetical authority that remains interpretively mobile. Christians become unsightly marrow-chompers while Jews step lithely in the scripture’s dance of literal and figural. While casting shade on carnal modes of exegesis may enable clerical racings both broadly and subtly, embodiment can be levied in gale-force racings in medieval romances informed by ideologies of crusade and haunted by cannibalism. Cannibalism puts corporealization into overdrive, reducing subjects not just to bodies but to meat. Yet cannibalism’s extremity exerts such powerful metaphoric pulls, that it drives embodiment into crisis. By destroying boundaries between bodies, it shoves identities into new shapes (Blurton 2007). As a violent crucible of embodied identities, cannibalism both enacts and complicates racing. For instance, in The Siege of Jerusalem, cannibalism’s extremity breeds ambiguity. Cannibalism in the poem’s doomed city is an appallingly effective terror tactic for dominating non-Christians. However it simultaneously provokes extradiegetic questions about the ethics of a Latin Christian crusading heroism that literally feeds on violence. In The Siege of Jerusalem, the Jews in the barricaded city undergo a range of imaginative and vicious corporealizations: torture, dismemberment, defenestration, infection by their own dead, all of which race them by reducing them to bodies than can suffer ever crueller Christian sequestrations. At one point they are cut off for months from supplies and famine reduces them to shoe-gnawing skeletons. In an affectively ambiguous scene, a young mother (sometimes called Mary, sometimes nameless) is provoked into roasting and eating her child: ‘“Therfor yeld that I thee gaf, and agen tourne / And entre ther thou cam out,” and etyth a schouldere’ (‘Therefore, yield to me what I gave to you, and return again / And enter where you came out from,’ and she ate a shoulder) (Livingston 2004: lines 1087–8). Her act at once (1) reverses birth as a natural process, (2) makes her monstrous by forcing her into a monstrous typological opposition to Christian Eucharist and Virgin Birth, (3) destroys the future of Judaism by destroying its children, foreshadowing the loss of Jerusalem as the centre of a Jewish nation, and (4) demonstrates the pitiable bodily extremity that the siege has imposed, implicating the cruel Roman-Christian army in the process. The other Jews in the city underscore the ambiguity by first racing hungrily towards the smell of the cooking flesh, then, on discovering Mary’s act, turn away weeping and praying to die soon. Reduction to corporeal extremes thus works at racial cross-purposes, inciting both horror and pity while also implicating the racial managers who perpetrate the violent denigrations. It is no accident that the Siege focuses on familiar relations and the death of children as it pursues a racial revenge fantasy. From corpse to corpus to corps to corporation: bodies resonate at individual, familial, institutional and cultural scales. That is where the next gesture – the racing of families – comes in. Sometimes this gesture subjugates by domestication, reducing the abject to everyday banality where ‘familiarity must lead to devaluation’ (Fyler 1988: 6). More often, it is a hostile takeover of family lineages that would otherwise connect to the past and assure the future. While ‘race’ is not a Middle English word, its links to Old French and Anglo-Norman racine (connoting ‘root’, ‘stock’, ‘line’ and ‘lineage’) made it a handy choice as the word that eventually was used. Pre-modern Latin Christian societies were not equipped to

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enlist genetics in the service of race theory as nineteenth-century scientists later would. Nevertheless, they were obsessed by the workings of lineage and the metaphorical reach of blood within kin groups, families and genealogies (Stahuljak 2005). Pre-modern texts therefore can race by organizing subjects into either protective or threatening kinship networks. For instance, the legendary fertility of the Gog and Magog tribes, pent up and ready to burst forth, can be hyped to induce an apocalyptic race-fear attachable to Jews, Mongols and Asians in turn, depending on the text. In a similar way, Milton’s Paradise Lost has Satan begin the creation of Pandemonium from his despairing scatter of fellow exiles, when he ‘gently rais’d’ the exiles’ ‘fainting courage, and dispel’d thir fears’ (2004: lines 529, 530). The word rais’d is a homophone that does enormous work: Satan raises their spirits, erases their autonomy and races them into a demonic family legion who can organize and unite to destroy the earth.1 Racial familiarizing can also organize people for future genocide or forced assimilation; denigrated peoples can be shorn of their futures by being shorn of their children. This can clearly be seen in the Middle English Sowdan of Babylon (Lupack 1990), a version of the Charlemagne romance Fierbras et Floripas (Newth 2010). Laban begins the romance’s narrative as its eponymous hero. He organizes strong networks of love and loyalty, exerting feudal authority through his family and his noble council, glorying especially in his strong son and wise daughter, both of whom he loves and values. When Latin Christians raid his ships, he revenges himself by conquering Rome. By the romance’s end, however, the family that buttressed his authority and secured his future lineage have deserted him, the daughter for love of one of Charlemagne’s peers, and the son through a bloody battlefield wound that transforms him into a Christian convert. So intense are the romance’s family dynamics that the Christian crusade is effectively rewritten into a coercive adoption of Muslim children and seizure of Muslim futurity. By destroying Laban’s feudal and family networks, Charlemagne isolates Laban and races him as a ‘Saracen’, rendering him less than human as he dies a railing laughing stock, beheaded at the instruction of his son. The Sultan’s domestication, even as it renders him vulnerable, underscores the generative power of his lineage. His name in Arabic can mean ‘milk’, a food of nurture; in Hebrew it means ‘white’, suggesting purity. It also echoes the biblical Laban, a shiftier version of Abraham, whose strategic marriages of his two daughters made him the fatherin-law of Isaac, grandfather of Jacob and Esau, and thus a forefather of multiple lineages. This generative power does not transfer back to Charlemagne. If Laban is a good father saddled with bad children, Charlemagne is a bad father with good children whom he cannot nurture, a parental failure underscored when Charlemagne attempts to foster two orphaned infant giants (their border-guarding parents killed as Charlemagne crossed into Spain to rescue his besieged peers) who die in his care. Charlemagne is also a bad leader to his people, valuing his own authority more than his peers’ lives, making them needlessly vulnerable. Charlemagne escapes disaster only through the support of the Sultan’s adopted children. Floripas and Fierabras’s defections ultimately sanctify Charlemagne’s victories, when Floripas transfers to him the relics that her father had torn from Rome, and when Fierabras becomes a Christian renunciate. Thus the Sowdan of Babylon makes discourses of family so resonant that racing through family becomes a double-edged sword, endowing value on the lineages it rapes away. Moreover, Charlemagne’s racializing theft of lineal futures yields a kind of affective backlash. The familiarized victims of this racing are underhandedly rehumanized. Laban cannot contain his fury at his son’s and daughter’s betrayals, and it is hard not to agree with him, as they jeer at his pain and advocate for his death. Their brutal callousness

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underscores his emotional isolation. It also teaches that Christians cannot feel for Muslims: baptism ushers a rebirth into callous violence. Because the poem makes the affective costs of racism so brutally visible in Laban’s hate-bifurcated family, the affective dynamics of race and family in this romance become difficult to handle. This emotional dissonance suggests that racing by familiarizing can activate what Ezra Tawil calls ‘racial sentiment’: the sense that ‘that different races feel different things, and feel things differently’ (Tawil 2006: 2). If so, and because Charlemagne’s irascible presence turns loving children into hateful ones, the poem is racing Christians as strenuously (and in astoundingly unattractive ways) as it is racing Muslims. Families are corporations that require distinctive roles (fathers, mothers, children) – and these also can be mobilized for racing. Being raced as a father or paterfamilias to warriors and counsellors, like Laban, can be the setup for a subsequent stripping of patriarchal or feudal authority: racing becomes emasculation. Being raced as a wife, a mother or future mother, such as Horable in the Prise d’Orange or Brammimond/Juliana in Roland, can be the preparation for rape, translation or transfer of sovereignty over foreign lands (de Weever 1998): racing that profits from trafficking women. Even more sinister racings accompany the role of child. Infantilizing a people can configure them as both immature and primitive, thereby providing a pretext for ‘civilizing’ conquest or exploitative de-development. Raced childishness can be signalled by naivete or by unregulated emotions: the emotional immaturity of the racialized Herod raging in the streets of the Corpus Christi cycles, or the hysterics of Marsile in Roland when battles do not go his way. We can see infantilizing racing in the pervasive legend of the Old Man of the Mountain and the naïve young Assassins, beguiled and drugged into subservience, in the narratives of Orderic of Pordenone, Mandeville and many others (Heng 2012). Family racial sentiment also modulates in the Aboriginal naked philosophers of the Alexander romances, or the stubbornly rural Irish of Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica, bold and well-endowed by nature, but impoverished and retrograde in relation to colonizing, ‘civilizing’ forces like the Normans. However, because childhood is also associated with purity, these racings also can turn into a social critique of the supposedly mature fathers whom their subjections authorize. For instance, Mandeville’s virtuous Brahmans hold up a refracting mirror that implicates the pride of conquerors, who become increasingly distorted and sinful in the light of their interrogations.

CONFIGURING RELATIONS: OTHERING, MAPPING AND ETHNOGRAPHY Where biological racings veer on bodies and families, the final set of tactics target relationships between people and places. This group of racings verges on Edward Said’s definitions of Orientalism, and it is the power-playground par excellence of analogues of the white gaze, which in pre-modern texts can be any self-universalizing and hegemonic gaze. The problem of the white gaze (Yancy 2017) traces an aversive thread through the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (1986: 359), Ralph Ellison (1947), bell hooks (2014: 115–32) and Toni Morrison (Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am 2019), among many others. It also links to foundational problems of ethnography as a discipline especially since the rise of European hegemony (Wolf 2010). However, as Sharon Kinoshita observes: ‘Medieval constructions of alterity are trickier than they first appear’ (Kinoshita 2006: 16). Shirin Khanmohamadi has recently argued that pre-modern ethnographies are distinct from post-Cartesian ethnographies

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operating across an assumed split between subject and objects, observer and observed (Khanmohamadi 2014: 11–36). Pre-modern ethnographies often blur those lines, and allow the observed to gaze back, inviting observers to see themselves ‘in the light of another’s word’ (Khanmohamadi 2014: 5–8). Thus the pre-modern Orientalist gaze, the white gaze or the ethnographic gaze, far from omniscient, supervalent, impersonal points of view, are frequently gambits, deictically present and thus vulnerable to interruption. They may operate with or without colonialist infrastructure, with or without supportive epistemological regimes. Their epistemologies may grasp at global or even cosmic constative authority, but their claims – situated, inconsistent, variable, interruptible and open to reciprocal judgements – often openly declare their performative conditionality. The various descriptions of the paiens and Muslims in the national epic of France, the Chanson de Roland, for instance, show a stunning representational variety: some exotic and demonic, some indistinguishable from the Franks (Brault 1978). Even as the poem tries to solidify lines denigrating difference and to transform Muslims into futureless dead bodies, its structure creates transcultural mirroring that gives the Franks worthy opponents. This structural mirroring often fractures the poem’s Muslims into both admirable and demonized adversaries. Thus the twelve peers of France are countered by twelve peers of al-Andalus: from the traitorous Esturgant (Brault 1978: lines 940– 2), to the brave King Corsalis (who dabbles in black arts but speaks like a good knight [lines 885–8]), to the dapper cavalier Margariz (lines 955–60), who is so beautiful that ladies who look at him are filled with love-longing. The narrator seems enamoured with Margariz because, alone of all the Muslim captains, he survives combat with a peer (Oliver no less), breaking his spear and riding off unscathed (lines 1311–19). Religion is wheeled in to carve biopolitical lines between otherwise indistinguishable cultures, cultures that had previously adhered to the same passionate feudalism, embraced the same family and dynastic structures, and spoke each other’s languages (Kinoshita 2001: 83). Thus the Muslims may not be raced at the poem’s beginning, but they are by the end: laved in Roland’s martyr’s blood, hedged with Charlemagne’s relics, othered and doomed ultimately by not being God’s choice. By the end of the poem, France has been produced and passionately familiarized as a nation configured for everlasting war, complete with martyrs (Roland and the peers), abject scapegoats (Ganelon and kin), token conversions (Bramimonde/Juliana) and the exhausted attrition of white man’s burden (Charles). It is not a triumphal picture: Charles’s last words as the angel dispatches him on a new assignment are: ‘How painful is my life!’ (‘Si penuse est ma vie’; line 4000). The costs of producing France are underscored in the poem’s terrible translation of the non-Christian world: from a lively, lambent, world-system (Brault 1978: lines 2632–7) to a global cemetery. French othering thus takes on the impossible, ongoing labour of subjecting the entire world to its exhausted and exhausting regimes. Less absolute regimes of difference than othering can conduce to more subtle and sustainable forms of racing. Mapping a world of multiple relative differences and infinite trajectories can undo the us/them-ness of Said’s bifurcated world, decentring everyone alike from absolute cultural hegemony. Thus, the tactics of ethnographic mapping open a rich arena for both racing operations and their resistance. Many premodern descriptions of the world and its peoples race not through zero-sum boundaries of absolute difference between peoples, but rather along a comparative continuum of modulating difference that extends internally and externally across the world. This is equivalent to a form of mapping.

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Racial mapping can organize the world for more efficient racisms. For instance, many Latin Christian writers promulgated the biblical myth of Noah’s three sons to apportion the world into a hierarchy of continents, with Japheth’s Europe on the top and Ham’s Africa on the bottom. However, mapping can also complicate racisms and Eurocentric privilege: (1) by tracking homologies across geographical distances and racial differences, (2) by unearthing shared ethical substrates between widely separated peoples (for instance the way that Mandeville’s Brahmans’ virtuous abstinence approximates an imitatio Christi) and (3) by decentring any single perspective. Crucial to mapping are the epistemological forms of cultural survey so trenchantly described by Said in Orientalism (1979) and modulated in later works; nevertheless, as many subsequent critiques of Said have noted, such surveying epistemologies cannot be limited as forms of Eurocentric domination, especially in pre-modern societies before European hegemony (Abu-Lughod 1989). For one thing pre-modern ethnographies are seldom singular. They modulate through a competitive motley of classical, antique, scholastic, eyewitness and encyclopedic sources. Even supposed eyewitness accounts, such as William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium or Jean de Joinville’s Vie de St. Louis, can stage self-questioning encounters subjecting Eurocentric perspectives to ‘the light of another’s word’ (Khanmohamadi 2014). Simon Gaunt and Sharon Kinoshita have argued for Marco Polo’s Divisement du Monde as a text that stages such competing ethnographies (Gaunt 2013; Kinoshita 2019), while Matthew Boyd Goldie and Shirin Khanmohamadi have found vertiginous decentring in the Book of John Mandeville (Goldie 2010; Khanmohamadi 2014). Accounts of the Muslims, such as the Anglo-Norman Terre des Sarrazins, can offer ethnographies riddled with fascination and cultural admiration, highlighting such cultural contact points as filial piety and feudal strength. By contrast, He’tum of Armenia’s Flower of Histories of the East can survey Eurasia’s Mongols and Muslims with the brisk facticity of reliable espionage, while urging Latin Christian sovereigns towards conquest and domination (He’tum of Corycus 2004). Such surveys can use strategic essentialisms to foment solidarities or create useful enemies, or they can demonstrate the powers of adaptation and alliance. For instance, on the one hand, Benjamin of Tudela surveys a rich world-network of Jewish communities, some integrated into surrounding cultures and some at war with their neighbours. On the other hand, Rabbi Petachia of Regensburg complicates his survey of the oppressions of Eurasian Jewry by noting the powerful influence of the Jewish holy dead in each community, thus literally en-graving and en-shrining a preternatural Jewish mastery beneath the tracework of Jewish diaspora (E. N. Adler 1987). These racings thus turn religio-cultural difference to many purposes, at times constituting an authoritative perspective and at other times interrogating its possibility. As a consequence, worlds that initially fall into a clash-of-civilizations agon can be mapped into intricate networks that allow us to trace transcultural relationships where racings are strategic and mutable rather than entrenched.

THREE TACTICS OF RACIAL MANAGEMENT: TOLERATION, ASSIMILATION AND SELF-REFLECTION Not all racial regimes need be quickly genocidal. Once bodies are raced, what can be done with them that allows for the sustaining of racial regimes? I’ll explore three tactics that define and further develop racings in medieval texts: (1) tolerating/exploiting, (2) assimilating/co-opting and (3) self-interrogating.

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Tolerating/Exploiting Toleration is sometimes imagined as an alternative to persecution: for years the choices in Mediterranean studies seemed to be an either/or proposition of violence or convivençia between intersecting Mediterranean cultures. However, this dichotomy raises more questions than it settles, including the impossible one of how to quantify ‘tolerance’ or ‘intolerance’ in complex societies. Brian Catlos (2014) has recently proposed a way to acknowledge that multiethnic, multireligious societies could be both tolerating and persecuting at the same time, depending on the demographic structures examined, at macro, meso and micro levels. For instance, on the macro level of nation or transnational confessional groups, religious difference can race powerfully and intransigently, producing regimes such as Latin Christendom, Greek Christendom, ‘Saracen lands’ and ‘Tartary’. By contrast, at the meso level, which features large institutions, corporations and organizations, absolute difference is modulated by other imperatives such as institutional self-maintenance, opportunism and profit. The micro level features smaller local groups and individuals, and it is the most volatile of all. Here relationships between provocative individuals and groups can veer from collusion to genocide, with mutual toleration most prevalent in everyday activities bearing low ritual content, such as agriculture, trade, hospitality and cuisine. Cultural areas that are most policed at the micro level have high ritual content that channels ecumenical and macrocosmic concerns; and these can include intermarriage and conversion (Catlos 2014: 515–35). Thinking about toleration as a non-zero-sum complex of relations at different social levels allows us to see that it can be a form of racing. To tolerate something is to assume the power to dictate its terms of sociality. Thus the doctrine of toleration of the Jews, sanctioned by Saint Paul and theorized further by such patriarchs as Augustine, consigned Jews to a lower social and soteriological value – at least in the present because future conversions were imaginable. The Jews are marked as both different and ‘tolerated’, and this invites further managing of their difference. The long histories by which Christian doctrines of Jewish toleration became systematized, brutal exploitation are well documented (J. Cohen 1984). When ‘toleration’ at the ecumenical macro level creates a tactical and often temporary suspension of violence, much closer relations can develop at other social levels. There can be shared corporate enterprises at the meso level, such as business partnerships and strategic civic alliances; while at the micro level, friendships, family ties, gift economies and other affective or political rapprochements can bring individuals, neighbourhoods and households together. The Cantar de Mio Cid (c. 1140–1210), the earliest Spanish epic, gives us several examples of the peculiar racing of toleration (The Poem of the Cid 1975). El Cid largely discards macro level ecumenical hostility to explore the complex opportunisms operating at other levels. These possibilities are created by the tactical suspension of interconfessional violence, histories of strategic alliances between individuals and the need for personal allies. Mio Cid depicts the heroic exile of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar from the court of Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon. Set during the eleventh-century territorial expansions of Latin Christian Northern Spain with various Muslim rulers of the taifa kingdoms at their boundaries, one would expect a certain amount of crusading fervour. Nothing could be further from the poem’s interests. The poem is far more cathected upon the feudal lordship, monetary success and honorable self-justification of its hero than in his religious victories. El Cid – whose name derives from an Arabic word for ‘lord’, al-Sayyid – is a hybrid figure who enriches himself by working the

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alliance-mobilities of meso and micro levels described by Catlos (2014; see also Harney 2020). He fights his Castilian detractors and the North African Muslim invaders with equal verve and success. El Cid also maintains cordial relationships with neighbouring Spanish Muslim leaders, such as his ally Abengalbon, who offers him support in exile and helps protect El Cid’s wife and daughters, overseeing their welfare after a treacherous attack by his Castilian sons-in-law. El Cid’s transecumenical mobility reflects a level of historical accuracy: the historical figure Rodrigo Diaz had allied against Aragon with Yusuf al-Mu’taman ibn Ahmad ibn Hud and his successor al-Mustamain II, the Sultans of Saragossa. El Cid’s canny toleration of Abengalbon as ally never leaves his Christianity in doubt, a fact underscored by his cheerful liquidation of invading Almohad armies. However, Christianity is less the point than the economic potential El Cid enjoys as a kind of double-faced pirate on the Castilian frontiers. He can, with the one hand, seize Muslim cities, battle booty and valuables on a mass scale; with the other, he can prove his chivalric superiority over his better-born Christian superiors back in Castile and Leon, leveraging his gains for the self-advancement of his cause and family. Toleration thus becomes an open door to opportunistic exploitation. However, what makes El Cid attractive (despite his nonpartisan piracy) is the loving ebullience of his loyalty to family, allies and followers, in an economy that parlays military success into love.

Assimilating/Co-opting Assimilation in pre-modern texts negotiates marked differences against crucial commonalities – say in religious belief, chivalric excellence, fealty or shared ancestry – that extend across racial, ethnic, geographic and religious lines. Often a text will outline a process of encounter that modulates from an initial shock of difference and aversion to the recognition of shared community. This negotiation can hinge upon transformative conversions. Exemplary are the Spanish Crónica de Flores y Blancaflor and the Old French Floire and Blancheflor, with their aggressive boundary-marking final conversions of large swaths of Muslims to Christianity. Sometimes such conversions are not needed. Rauf Coilyear features both estate-based (a collier in Charlemagne’s court) and religiousbased (a Turk in Charlemagne’s court) assimilations. In the process it offsets chivalric crusader imperatives with more commonplace visions of Christian community through mutual generosities. In other texts intermarriage drives assimilative racing. In contrast to the Spanish and Old French version, the Middle English Floris and Blanchefleur ends with an intermarriage allowed and endowed by a generous Sultan, and a final conversion so offhand one doesn’t know how or even why it happens. Aucassin and Nicolette plays with tropes of assimilation (there’s even a late-breaking change of skin colour) while delighting in the self-determinations of orphans mishandled (by both French and African patresfamilias) and forced to make their own ways to happiness. However, I would like to concentrate on the romance of Moriaen, an interpolation into the Dutch version of the Lancelot-Grail cycle, as a particularly rich example of assimilative racing (‘Morien’ 1907). Moriaen goes out of its way to mark Moriaen’s racial difference as frightening and horrific, even as it enfolds his chivalric strength as crucial to the very survival of Arthur’s court. Morien’s mother is a Black princess and his father is Aglovale, Percival’s brother, who swore troth to the princess, but subsequently abandoned her, causing both her and Moriaen to lose their rightful inheritance. Moriaen is on quest to find his truant father and return him to his mother to keep the promise he made to her. The adventure is undertaken first in disastrously solitary parallel tracks

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by Moriaen, Gawain and Lancelot, and then, more effectively, in collaboration among all three. In the process, Moriaen is educated in chivalric decorum by Gawain, but also contributes his own ethical insight to the doings of the three knights and, ultimately, of his deadbeat father Aglovale. All three knights learn they must rely on each other and on a chivalric ethos of honour. Despite these similarities, Moriaen encounters more difficulty than Gawain or Lancelot. His black face is read as demonic by strangers, and he cannot get a ferry ride, a meal or a word before people flee. Arthurian racism thus effectively renders Britain a wasteland for Moriaen, condemning him to an asocial loneliness. He needs his allies, Gawain and Lancelot, to trap and forcibly raise the consciousness of strangers, including other Arthurian knights, that he is not only a human being and owed human hospitality, but also a great knight worthy of renown. Before returning his knighterrant father to his mother, Moriaen helps Gawain and Lancelot rescue Arthur and his court from an invading Irish king, Moriaen’s enormous strength at arms turning the battle in their favour. Thus, Arthur profits from Gawain’s educative assimilation of Moriaen into knightly fellowship, and British knights are taught a lesson in the utility of Black allies. However, the romance does not end there: there is a double assimilation. At the end, when Aglovale returns permanently to Muslim lands to marry Moriaen’s mother and restore Moriaen’s heritage, Moriaen returns with him, assimilated both to Arthurian chivalry and Muslim sovereignty. Moriaen, first, realistically depicts racecraft as a form of antisociality which can be ameliorated profitably by chivalry, mutual trust and education, and, second, goes out of its way to make Moriaen instrumental in the restoration of two kingdoms, one Black and one English.

Leveraging self-critique and reform Racing can be leveraged for self-scrutiny and self-reform, thereby forcing racial managers to rethink their cultural or religious claims to superiority.2 This kind of racing uses others like refracting mirrors; raced others are not interesting in their own right, but rather their outside perspectives are useful for administering shock to too-complacent familiars for a variety of ends. It can reinvigorate ideals that reinforce racing itself. We see this strategy when crusade propaganda tries to create Latin Christian solidarity by theatricalizing Muslim critiques of (or thankfulness for) the infighting of European leaders. Reform, however, can also decentre the racial manager’s worldview, creating a world of more nuanced and relativized relationships. For instance, in The Boke of John Mandeville, a fourteenth-century description of the world, the narrator stages a dialogue with the Sultan of Babylon, his employer, about whether Latin Christianity or Levantine Islam is the better faith. The Sultan readily admits that Christianity is a better creed than Islam but insists that Muslims are more devoted to God in practice. When the narrator tries to deny this claim, the Sultan reveals that he has sent unseen spies into France and England and thus denounces Christian corruption with eyewitness specificity (Mandeville 2007: lines 1302–11). At the narrative’s midpoint, this moment of otherrefracted perception critiques Christian behaviour while reasserting the superiority of Christian theology. The Boke’s description of Asian and African cultures will eventually unseat this temporary cultural security (Khanmohamadi 2014: 113–44). Here, however, the racework is clear: the Sultan is valuable as an interlocutor whose interests do not lie with his sovereignties, practices or self-determinations; instead his interests focus on being a catalyst in Latin Christian introspection. The Sultan’s criticisms are familiar: they might have been lifted from a Franciscan sermon. Paradoxically, putting such criticism in the Sultan’s mouth lends the speech an authority it would not otherwise

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have. This racing uses an antiracing truth. Racing is so ubiquitous that being anti-racist requires, as Ibram X. Kendi notes, ‘persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-inspection’ (Kendi 2019: 23). The onerous (and often dangerous) burden of educating racists creates a further form of oppression by often falling disproportionately upon their victims. However, once self-introspection is learned, it can open the door to antiracist tactics that destabilize racial definitions. Thus the Sultan’s critique in Mandeville, though a form of racing, points to the Boke’s later, less Eurocentric critiques. Mandeville’s Asia is open not only to European introspection but also genuinely destabilizing inter-spections, where it is difficult to tell whose point of view is being levied. One such moment is the description of the Brahmans, whose statement of their own practices of simplicity and purism gains a positive force that indistinguishably melds imitatio Christi with versions of Buddhist philosophy. Mandeville’s homologies between Asian and Latin-Christian practices (the Juggernaut, the Gymnosophists, the discussion of idols and simulacra) are not always reducible to a European perspective, but often function as genuinely uncanny intersubjective zones that yield multiple possible interpretations. Another Asian-traveller, Marco Polo, performs similar decentring gestures, in the descriptions of polyandry, Mongol good leadership and the life of the Buddha (M. Kim 2012; Gaunt 2013). That Buddhism could syncretize with various Muslim, Jewish, Eastern Christian and Latin Christian systems of value emerges in the complex textual meanderings of the versions of Life of the Buddha into the Arabic Bilawhar wa Budasaf, the Georgian Balavariani, and the Latin and Old French Barlaam and Josephat (Lopez and McCracken 2014). In sum, racing by leveraging other perspectives for the purposes of self-scrutiny can sometimes reinstantiate racing dynamics and at other times lead to their educative decentring.

CONCLUSION Deconstruction teaches us that what is forced to the margins drives and obsesses the centre; psychoanalytic theory teaches us to expect the return of what is repressed; race theory teaches us how very vigilant the white gaze has to be to maintain its racializing operations. Its constant violence is a corollary of its ontological fragility. Thus pre-modern racing produces ‘things’ in Sara Ahmed’s sense (Ahmed 2004): objects and signs that circulate in ‘structural relationships’ (Heng 2018b: 27) to manage differences. Looking at premodern racing can reveal the shifting iterations through which racing both gains purchase and transforms itself. This improvisational speed can look startling to readers accustomed to post-medieval demographic gellings that make racial boundaries look convincing and insurmountable, that turn racing’s strategic essentialisms into essentialisms. Pre-modern racing’s multiple, slippery definitions can contribute to debates about the history of race by focusing on this provisionality. This contribution does not decrease the violence or irrationality of racing, but it does underscore how fragile are its definitional boundaries, how insecure, exhausting and self-consuming are its operations, and how polymorphic it continues to be. Because the nouns and designations that seem to stabilize racing so effectively convince us they are natural and inevitable, they have enormous power over us. The pain of their violence stamps them with a further world-making authority (Scarry 1987). Beneath that realization, improvisational racing continues. By permuting race with blood, family, nation, religion, socio-economic status, residency, citizenship, criminality, phenotype, geography, ethnicity, racing marks and manages difference. It protects the mirage of a self-universalizing racist gaze that can never eschew

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its violent self-divisions and ongoing transformations as it takes ever new forms under old names (Uebel 2005; Whitaker 2019a). The shifting conglomerates of pre-modern racing can help us reckon (reken, racen) the operations of current anti-Semitisms, the racializing of Islam, of migrants, the homeless and the poor, irrespective of phenotype and skin tone. Racing is still a verb and to deny that fact is to accede to some of its most insidious current violence. Hadn’t we better define racing for what it does and goes on doing, as well as what it often, all too simply, seems to be? This chapter on the slipperiness of racing suggests ways in which acknowledging racing in pre-modern texts can avoid reducing pre-modern European texts to two opposed but equally flattening programmes. On the one hand, we need to correct the erasures by which pre-modern texts have been aligned with triumphal colonialisms, nationalisms and Eurocentricities, and thus allowed to do violent racing unchecked and unwitnessed (Warren 2011). On the other, we need to admit the complexity, fragility, processuality of racing, bearing witness to its power and realizing it can be intervened in, in ways that will erase its efficacy. Race is a collection of acts and habits that accretes into an insuperable cultural force that punishes some, advantages others and wrecks the whole culture by the violence it exerts – whether medieval or contemporary. Only by rendering its operations visible across all the scales they manipulate in order to interrupt them can less violent redefinitions become possible.

CHAPTER TWO

Race, Environment, Culture Medieval Indigeneity, Race and Racialization SUZANNE CONKLIN AKBARI

The study of the history of race and racialization is not complete without a full and thoughtful engagement with indigeneity, both as a concept and a term that has its own history; and, in turn, a full and thoughtful engagement with indigeneity would be fundamentally flawed if it were not attentive to the writings and other forms of teaching by Indigenous writers, scholars and artists working today. This chapter is an effort to think through the medieval practices of racialization and constructions of race, focusing particularly on the ways in which indigeneity was understood during the Middle Ages. This effort is informed by pre-modern critical race theory and is attentive to the work of Indigenous researchers and artists, through both the written and the spoken word, to whom I am grateful for sharing their knowledge. This chapter was difficult to write, in spite of the fact that I have been working for almost thirty years on the history of how medieval Christian Europeans thought about and described bodily difference and religious alterity. I foreground this difficulty as a way of making explicit the challenges that are posed by a respectful engagement with Indigenous epistemologies. Tarren Andrews addresses these challenges in the brilliant introduction to her co-edited special issue of English Language Notes, ‘Indigenous Futures and Medieval Pasts’: Recent Indigenous studies scholarship assumes an advanced degree of experience with contemporary Indigeneity that many readers simply do not have and cannot easily access. In general, scholars raised outside Indigenous communities and trained outside a dedicated Indigenous studies program lack the theoretical and epistemological foundations to engage with Indigenous studies in a way that does not essentialize and appropriate Indigenous knowledges. (Andrews 2020: 11)

An early version of this material was presented at the University of Southern California on 27 February 2020, and workshopped at the Institute for Advanced Study’s Medieval Studies seminar on 16 April 2020. I am very grateful to all those who offered suggestions on how to improve this work, especially Wallace Cleaves, Adam Miyashiro and Cord Whitaker.

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In other words, it is not enough to do the reading; learning to recognize the land one lives on, seeking to live in good relations that are characterized by generosity and a sense of kinship, and having a good heart and good mind are also fundamental. This is a long path, and I am aware of how few steps I have taken on it so far. Mindful, though, of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s words in her important article ‘Land as Pedagogy’, I am going to do my best in this chapter to ‘wear my teachings’ in a way that honours and expresses gratitude to those who have shared their knowledge:1 Although individuals have the responsibility to self-actualize within this system, intelligence in this context is not an individual’s property to own; once an individual has carried a particular teaching around to the point where they can easily embody that teaching, they, then, also become responsible for sharing it according to the ethics and protocols of the system. This is primarily done by modeling the teaching or, as Elder Edna Manitowabi says, ‘wearing your teachings’. (Simpson 2014: 11)

RACE, NATION, LAND The English term ‘indigenous’ is derived from the late Latin indigena, indigenus, meaning born in a particular country, or native to it. Already in the seventeenth century, the word was used to refer to newly colonized regions: Thomas Browne writes in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, ‘In many parts thereof it be confessed there bee at present swarmes of Negroes serving under the Spaniard, yet were they all transported from Africa, since the discovery of Columbus, and are not indigenous or proper natives of America’ (1646: 325). Here, the distinction is between enslaved Black people, brought from Africa to the Americas, and ‘proper natives’. The word ‘proper’ is used by Browne in the same sense it has in French, propre meaning ‘one’s own’ or ‘belonging to’, thus magnifying or doubling the sense. The use of the term ‘indigenous’ expanded substantially within the fields of ethnography and anthropology in the nineteenth century; only in the late twentieth century did it become a meaningful term in law, which is one reason it has become such an important term in North American usage (Oxford English Dictionary 1989).2 While the term appears in English only in the early modern period, the concept is already present in medieval texts, where an essential or ontological link is posited between the people and the land they live on. The widely disseminated medieval encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus provides an extended account of how the properties of various lands give rise to the properties – including anatomy, physiology and even habits of mind – found in the people who live in those lands. The following pages will provide some background on ancient and medieval climate theory that informs Bartholomaeus’s encyclopedia before turning to a comparison with some related passages appearing in The Book of John Mandeville.3 The second section of this chapter illustrates how the relationship of people and the land they inhabit is manifested in medieval ethnography and romance, drawing upon Gerald of Wales’s Descriptio Kambriae (Description of Wales) and Thomas of Kent’s Roman de toute chevalerie (Romance of All Chivalry), while the third section concludes by exploring some modern contexts for how indigeneity might be understood. With the reintroduction of the Aristotelian corpus during the thirteenth century, accompanied by the rich commentaries of Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), the view of natural diversity that had been inherited from

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Pliny, by way of Solinus and Isidore of Seville, was substantially altered. It was no longer sufficient to describe and label the heterogeneous range of monstrous races and fabulous animals; instead, it became necessary to categorize them, to account for how their unusual features had come to be and to explain how bodily differences such as skin colour shaded off into monstrosity, marking a significant epistemological shift.4 The importance of climate and, consequently, native land in determining the natural diversity of humankind is emphasized in both the astronomical and the medical tradition. In the De sphaera, a popular treatise based on Ptolemy’s cosmology, the astronomer Sacrobosco explains that Ethiopia must be located at the equator, that is, in the torrid zone, for (he writes) the inhabitants ‘would not be so black if they were born in the temperate habitable zone’ (Thorndike 1949: 107, 137). Sacrobosco’s commentators, influenced by Aristotelian explanations of causation and change, elaborated on this passage enthusiastically. One early thirteenth-century commentator took Sacrobosco’s words as an opportunity for a digression on the physiology of the people of Ethiopia: ‘An example of the blackening of Ethiopians is the cooking of golden honey. First it is golden, then reddish, and finally by long cooking it becomes black and bitter, and that which was at first sweet is now salty. And it is just this way all over Ethiopia’ (Thorndike 1949: 334; my translation). This anonymous commentator goes on to explain that the Ethiopians’ blood is drawn to the surface of the skin by the great heat, where it becomes ‘black and bitter, and in this way’, he concludes, ‘it can be clearly seen why the Ethiopian is black’ (334; my translation).5 In the mid-thirteenth century, the encyclopedist Bartholomaeus Anglicus took up the explanations of the effects of the climate on bodies found in the medical tradition and, influenced by the astronomy of Sacrobosco, integrated these views into his geographical survey of the world. In other words, he took medical theories that distinguished between northern and southern bodies in general and applied them to a range of specific countries. In doing this, he participates in a larger late medieval shift that saw a realignment of the properties associated with the four cardinal directions, and the consequent emergence of an idea of northern whiteness as not a peculiar extreme but rather a desirable ideal (Akbari 2000). Bartholomaeus’s encyclopedia was extremely popular both in its Latin original and in vernacular translations; the late fourteenth-century translation by John Trevisa was among the earliest texts printed by William Caxton. Bartholomaeus’s description of world geography, found in book 15 of his De proprietatibus rerum, follows the outline of world geography found in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, an encyclopedia of the seventh century. But by integrating medical and astronomical theories with the standard geography received from Isidore, Bartholomaeus is very different from his contemporary encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais, who largely just follows Isidore. Even though Vincent is clearly familiar with the theories of Ibn Sina and Constantinus Africanus, and even quotes the relevant passages from each of them elsewhere in his enormous encyclopedia, he does not draw out the implications of their work within the geographical sections. In his geography, by contrast, Bartholomaeus takes pains to note the correspondence of climate to the properties of the land, and then the correspondence of the land to the plants, animals and people that inhabit it. Those of the northern countries, such as Albania and ‘Almania’ (Germany), for example, are large-bodied and fair-skinned, with blond, straight hair (1975–88: 728; [1601] 1964: 15.7, 627; and 1975–88: 732; [1601] 1964: 15.15, 630).6 Those of the southern countries, such as Ethiopia and Libya, have smaller bodies, with dark skin and ‘crisp’ hair (754; 15.52, 649; and 779; 15.91, 671). Monstrosities – that is, bodies that are ‘wondirful and horribilche yshape’ – are found here, in the torrid regions, where excess of heat affects conception and digestion (754; 15.52, 649).

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Yet Bartholomaeus goes still further. In his geography, he repeatedly emphasizes not just the diversity of humanity, but its balance: each climatic extreme, each geographical location, has its opposite or its counterpart. Thus he writes of Gallia that ‘by the dyuersite of heuene, face and colour of men and hertes and witte and quantite of bodyes ben dyuers. Therefore Rome gendreth heuy men, Grece light men, Affrica gyleful men, and Fraunce kyndeliche fers men and sharpe of witte’ (763; 15.66, 657). In his entry on ‘Europe’, we can see the binary opposition that underlies this exuberant diversity, as well as the hierarchical relation that emerges from that binary: Yif this partie of the worlde be lesse than Asia, yitte is it pere therto in nombre and noblete of men, for as Plius seithe, he [the sun] fedeth men that ben more huge in bodie, more stronge in myghte and vertue, more bolde of herte, more faire and semeliche of shape, thanne men of the cuntres and londes of Asia other of Affrica. For the sonne abideth longe ouer the Affers, men of Affrica, and brennen and wasten humours and maken ham short of body, blacke of face, with crispe here. And for spirites passe outte atte pores that ben open, so they be more cowardes of herte. An the cuntrarye is of men of the northe londe: for coldenes that is withoute stoppeth the pores and breedeth humours of the bodye [that] maketh men more ful and huge; and coolde that is modir of whitnesse maketh hem the more white in face and in skynne, and vapoures and spirites ben ysmyten inward and maken hatter withinne and so the more bolde and hardy. (752–3; 15.50, 648) This binary opposition of northern and southern bodies, their qualities predicated on the land that these bodies emerge from, is not particularly innovative. It appears in the Pantegni of Constantinus Africanus, as well as the writings of Ibn Sina and Albertus Magnus. What is unusual, however, is Bartholomaeus’s praise of the ‘semeliche’ bodies of the ‘bolde and hardy’ northern men, and denigration of the southern men who are ‘cowardes of herte’. Here, not the temperate mean but the northern extreme is presented as the beautiful and desirable ideal. This marks an important transition in the process of racialization, the emergence of a new phase in ‘race-making’ or ‘race-thinking’, to use the terms that Geraldine Heng (2018b) and Cord Whitaker (2019a), respectively, have used to describe the process of racialization in pre-modern literature. Heng’s Invention of Race has made a crucial intervention into the study of racialization and has done more than any other work of scholarship to cause pre-modern critical race theory to become an essential element in the field of medieval studies. Heng argues that it is possible to observe the fundamental continuity of the process of ‘race-making’ over time while also historicizing particular instances of racialization: ‘This is not to claim … that race-making throughout the medieval period is in any way uniform, homogeneous, constant, stable, or free of contradiction or local differences …. Neither is it to concede, in reverse, that local differences … must always render it impossible to think translocally in the medieval period’ (Heng 2018b: 33). This is a difficult balance to maintain, at once recognizing the continuity of racialization over time while remaining attentive to the specificity of particular forms of racialization in different times and places. The balance is made more tenuous by the fact that Heng assimilates religious orientation to race, presenting Jewish identity as the foundational ‘case study’ for pre-modern racemaking, similar to yet distinct from ‘the racing of the Islamic Saracen’ (55).7 David Nirenberg, writing of the ways in which Jewish identity is inextricably bound up with the

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pre-modern history of racialization, signals the difficulty of recognizing both continuity and disjunction, and indicates that the choice of which to select in a given moment – continuity or disjunction – is necessarily ‘strategic’: There will always be strategic reasons for choosing to represent the relationship of ideas about the natural reproduction of culture that are scattered across time and space in terms of filiations or, conversely, in terms of disjuncture (or even to refuse the possibility of such an idea at all). Yet the choice can only be situational and polemical, in the sense that its recognition of significance springs from the needs and struggles (theological, political, philosophical, professional, etc.) of a specific moment. The polemics produced by such choices are invaluable when they stimulate us to comparison and self-consciousness. If, however, we treat them as anything but strategic, we simply exchange one lack of consciousness for another. (Nirenberg 2014: 189) Nirenberg’s insistence on the ‘situational’ nature of the choice, the ‘specific moment’ in which it takes place, is crucial. It illuminates not only Heng’s own work, where the expansive argument of The Invention of Race consists of a ‘strategic’ choice to disrupt earlier efforts to historicize race that failed to recognize the continuities that link premodern and modern racialization, but also the critiques of Heng’s work that have begun to appear. Sarah Pearce’s (2020) stern and restrictive critique, in particular, can be read as motivated by ‘strategic’ considerations that are deeply intertwined with disciplinary formations, not only the history versus literature divide that underlies much current scholarship on histories of race but also the particular roles of Jewish studies and Iberian studies (and, increasingly, Islamic studies) within the historiography of race.8 In his Black Metaphors, Whitaker is both more cautious and more nuanced than Heng with regard to the relationship of religion and race. At the same time, his choice of terminology – ‘race-thinking’, as opposed to Heng’s ‘race-making’ – subtly manifests the complicated way that racial and religious difference have been intertwined, both during the Middle Ages and in the present day. The term ‘race-thinking’ refers at once to the medieval past and to Hannah Arendt’s use of that same term in her important article ‘Race-Thinking Before Racism’. Published in January 1944, Arendt’s article identifies ‘race-thinking’ as the nineteenth-century precursor to the horrors of the twentieth; yet Arendt also makes room for the eighteenth-century ‘roots’ (1944: 36) of this phenomenon, recognizing that it has a deep history.9 While Whitaker does not write about Arendt in Black Metaphors, he does make the debt explicit in the dissertation that lies behind the book, in which the engagement with Arendt specifically evokes the historical moment when religion has been racialized in the most extreme way (Whitaker 2009: 8–21). This connection between medieval and modern manifestations of race-thinking is both powerful and moving, reminding us of the ways in which the present is always connected to multiple moments in the past, in a kind of intertemporal web. Nirenberg might call this a ‘strategic’ move. Whitaker’s Black Metaphors also provides a useful perspective on how we can historicize racialization. He suggests that medieval race is arguably different from modern race because it was not yet loaded with the history of early modern and modern chattel slavery and the ‘scientific’ racial taxonomies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nonetheless, it exposes what

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remains true about race today: in addition to biology and phenotype, race also engages culture and customs. At their cores, medieval and modern race are quite similar. (Whitaker 2019a: 76) The climate-based racialization we find in Bartholomaeus Anglicus and his precursors is not identical with modern ‘racial taxonomies’, not least in its primary focus on environment rather than heredity. It is, however, a scientific system for explaining the diversity of humankind, which posits an essential linkage between the land and the living creatures – plant, animal, human – that are proper to it. In some ways, this theory of how climate governs land and, consequently, governs all the things that grow from it seems ideal and even utopian in its harmonious diversity.10 On the other hand, we cannot forget that this theory also contains within it the elements of an intellectual system, based on the relationship of climate to human physiology, that could be used to justify the subjugation of peoples and would be used before long to justify the institution of slavery. As early as the sixteenth century, the philosopher Jean Bodin suggested that the principles of political administration should be tailored to match the predisposition of different national groups (Tooley 1953: 80–1). In other words, Bodin suggested that form of government would vary depending upon the tractability of each national group, whose behavioural characteristics were determined by the land that they emerged from, as affected by the climate. Here, Bodin uses Aristotelian notions concerning the role of climate in human development and applies them to the question of how to govern effectively (80–1). And even earlier, in the late fifteenth century, Aristotelian climatic theories were being applied to the Indigenous peoples of North America. These so-called Indians were, supposedly, identical to the Indians of India: they tended by virtue of their climate to be prone to disease, easily drunk (like the Ethiopians) and generally debauched. Their enslavement under European settler colonialism was thus rationalized as biological destiny.11 Finally, climatic theory was used to explain the suitability of Africans for enslavement, until climate-based explanations of their supposed natural inferiority were replaced, during the eighteenth century, by theories based primarily on heredity. Bartholomaeus’s encyclopedia was widely read, and we can see the impact of its account of how the properties of a land give rise to the properties of its people in another widely disseminated book: The Book of John Mandeville. Written (in French) just over a century after Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s encyclopedia and almost immediately translated into a wide range of vernaculars as well as into Latin, Mandeville’s Book builds upon its precursor by using climate theory to provide a sense of the underlying natural order of the world. Bodily diversity is accounted for both in terms of heredity and in terms of climatic influence, though climate continues to be the main focus. The existence of socalled monstrous races is explained as the consequence of the curse placed by Noah on the descendants of his son Ham following the Great Deluge; their monstrous features, however, are explained by the natural consequence of the climates they come to inhabit in exile, the torrid extremes of Ethiopia and India. For each land described, its climate – which gives each land its distinct properties – is identified as the cause that determines the anatomy and physiology of the inhabitants. For example, in Mandeville’s account of the land of the Pygmies, the people are said to be only a few spans in height, which is appropriate to their climate. But, the author adds, when men of normal stature come there to live, their offspring are also of

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a diminutive stature, like the Pygmies. The reason for this, he said, is that ‘the nature of the land is such’ (Mandeville 1967: 152; 2000: 22, 365).12 Here, climate governs not only the physiology of the native inhabitants of the land but also that of those who pass through. The land affects not only those who have been there for generations but also those who come to live upon its soil. This suggests that, for Mandeville, the effects of climate are mutable; in other words, the bodily diversity of humanity is not essential but changeable depending upon the environment. In this, Mandeville resembles Albertus Magnus, who in his De natura loci suggests that if Ethiopians were removed from the first climate to the fourth or fifth climate (that is, from the area of the equator to a more temperate climate), within a few generations they would be altered: their offspring would have white skin and all the other attributes of northern climates.13 Albertus is unusual, however, in his strict application of Aristotelian theory to human physiology; it’s more common to see a mixture of climate theory and genealogical descent. We can see this, for example, in Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s chapter on ‘Pictavia’. Even though Bartholomaeus usually sticks to a climate-based theory of human diversity, here he inserts heredity into his account of the properties of the inhabitants of this land. Their qualities appear to be a strange combination of what might be found in more northern and more southern climates. Bartholomaeus explains that this is ‘no wondir’ because the men of Pictavia are of mixed descent, a combination of ‘Pictes’ and ‘Frenshe men’. They have the qualities of each nation, qualities that were first formed by ‘kynde of clymes’ (the nature of the climates) and subsequently combined through heredity (768; 15.22, 689). Here, two seemingly mutually exclusive theories of bodily diversity – climate and heredity – are linked together. Another apparently anomalous case appears in Bartholomaeus’s account of India, which is amplified further in the account of India that we find in The Book of John Mandeville. As noted above, northern and southern climates produce extremes: the effects of climate produce bodily diversity that is at its greatest at the far North and South, and more moderate and subtle at the in-between climates. As Bartholomaeus puts it, in keeping with medieval medical theory: In the north lond ben men hiye of stature and faire of shappe; by coldenesse of the owtwarde ayer the pores ben stopped and the kynde hete is holde withynne, and by virtue thereof the stature is hoge and the shappe of body faire and seemly. And … men of the south lond ben contrarie to men of the north londe in stature and in shappe. (694; 14.1, 593) Not just men but also animals of the North are naturally large in size and white in colour: in northern countries such as Albania and Almania, therefore, the land is populated with ‘huge’ dogs and ‘huge’ fair-skinned men (728; 15.7, 627; and 732; 15.15, 630), whereas southern countries such as Ethiopia and Libya have dark inhabitants who are short in stature, with both men and beasts ‘wondirful and horribleche yshape’ (754; 15.52, 649). India, however, is even more wonderful than these torrid regions of Libya and Ethiopia, because it contains not only those monstrous races whose bodies are ‘wondirliche yshape’, along with ‘beestes wondirliche yshape’, but also another kind of wonderful sight: it contains men of ‘grete stature’, men whose appearance would be perfectly normal in the colder climes of the North, but which is dramatically out of place in the far south. ‘Huge beestes’ and ‘grete houndes’ are found not in the far North, as climatic theory would

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dictate, but ‘in longe space toward Ethiopia’ (770–1; 15.73, 661–2). It is natural to find ‘gret houndes’ in chilly Albania, and indeed they show up in that entry; the ‘grete houndes’ found in steamy India, however, are totally out of place (728; 15.7, 627). In The Book of John Mandeville, this anomaly appears again. The author describes India as a land that contains men and beasts that are extraordinary, owing not only to their unnatural stature but also to their white colour. In spite of the extreme heat, the narrator finds in India ‘huge’ snails, ‘gret white wormes’ and ‘lyouns alle white and as grete as oxen’ (142 and 145; 21, 349 and 353). In Bartholomaeus’s account of India and, still more, in Mandeville’s account, the experience of wonder is occasioned precisely by the fact that the climatic model is violated. This is something that we will see again shortly, when we see the travels of Alexander the Great into the far South, where he finds ‘white Ethiopians’. In Bartholomaeus’s encyclopedia and, more briefly, in The Book of John Mandeville, we have seen how climate theory accounts for the underlying order of the world. We have also seen, however, anomalies. One of these concerns the intertwined function of environment and heredity, in the case of the people of Pictavia, who arise from the combination of two peoples, each formed by a different land. The other anomaly we have seen concerns the appearance of features that violate the expectations of climate theory. In broader terms, we have seen the scientific underpinnings of pre-modern race theory. Before the eighteenth century, when theories of race based on the role of heredity came to be dominant, writers produced climate-based explanations of the causes of bodily diversity that bear a close resemblance to those found in thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury texts. From the thirteenth century to the late seventeenth, we find heredity and climate variously and inconsistently identified as the causes of bodily diversity. By the eighteenth century, however, we find a conception of bodily diversity that sees physical and behavioural differences as essential, fixed and immutable. Well before the period of the European slave trade in Africa, a system of knowledge had been developed that would facilitate and rationalize the process. Europeans were ready to enslave Africans and to attempt to exterminate Indigenous people long before these acts were underway. In this case at least, the discourse of race, and the process of racialization, came to exist before the exercise of power in the colonial setting.

CLIMATE IN ETHNOGRAPHY AND ROMANCE Even before the emergence of the systematic linkage of the properties of the land and its people that we find in Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s mid-thirteenth-century encyclopedia, we find a more general association of land and people in the Descriptio Kambriae or Description of Wales written by Gerald of Wales in the late twelfth century. As Coral Lumbley has shown, Gerald’s account of the distinctive qualities of the Welsh people can be seen as part of a longer history of racialization, extending from the Anglo-Saxon riddles of the Exeter Book to the late medieval Welsh romance Peredur (also Peredur son of Efrawg, preserved in four manuscripts dating to the fourteenth century) (Lumbley 2019: 5–7). While Lumbley emphasizes skin colour (or what she calls ‘epidermal race’ [2]) in Gerald’s account, it is also worth noting the ways in which the physiological and anatomical properties of the Welsh emerge from the land they inhabit – even while other, heredity-based models of descent are also invoked in the very same passage. Gerald explains that the ‘cold nature’ of the ‘frozen polar regions’ gives rise to the bodily nature of the Saxons and the Germans, as well as the English – even though they no longer live as far North as they formerly did, the English retain the properties conferred on

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them by their original frigid climate. Similarly, the Britons or Welsh retain the properties conferred on them by their own native land, ‘the hot and arid regions of the Trojan plain’. These include not only visible bodily traits, including ‘dark’ or earthy colour, but also physiological traits that give rise to features of character, such as ‘warmth of personality’, ‘hot temper’ and ‘confidence’: The Saxons and the Germans derive their cold nature from the frozen polar regions which lie adjacent to them. In the same way the English, although they now live elsewhere, still retain their outward fairness of complexion and their inward coldness of disposition from what nature had given them earlier on. The Britons, on the contrary, transplanted from the hot and arid regions of the Trojan plain, keep their dark coloring, which reminds one of the earth itself, their natural warmth of personality and their hot temper, all of which gives them confidence in themselves. (Gerald of Wales 1978: 245) Saxones igitur et Germani, a gelida poli regione cui subjacent, hanc contrahunt et naturae geliditatem. Angli quoque, quanquam olim a regione remoti, originali tamen natura tam exteriorem in candore qualitatem, quam etiam interiorem illam geliditatis, eadem ex causa, liquida scilicet et gelida complexionis natura, proprietatem inseparabiliter tenent. Britones autem e diverso ex calida et adusta Dardaniae plaga, quanquam in fines hos temperatos advecti, quia ‘Coelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt,’ tam exterius fuscum illum cognatumque terrae colorem, quam etiam naturalem interius ex adusto humore calorem, unde securitas, originaliter trahunt. (Gerald of Wales 1868: 193) Here, a cold climate produces one set of traits, a hot climate, another; in each case, however, those traits absorbed from and produced by the native land continue to be carried even long after its people have been transplanted into new soil. Gerald goes on to add a secondary explanation of the nature of the Welsh, this one based purely on heredity, without reference to climate. He explains that the Britons – that is, the Welsh – are one of three peoples descended from the Trojans after the fall of their city. This descent gives each of them ‘the great courage’ as well as ‘their magnanimity, their ancient blood, their quick-wittedness, and their ability to speak up for themselves’: After the fall of Troy three peoples managed to escape from Asia Minor to different parts of Europe, ‘Those left by pitiless Achilles and the Greeks’: the Romans under their leader Aeneas, the Franks under Antenor and the Britons under Brutus. From this line of descent comes the great courage of these three nations, their magnanimity, their ancient blood, their quick-wittedness and their ability to speak up for themselves. Of the three peoples left alive after the fall of Troy, the Britons alone kept the vocabulary of their race [gentis] and the grammatical properties of their original tongue. (Gerald of Wales 1978: 245–6) Tres etenim populi, Romani Enea duce, Franci Antenore, Britones Bruto, post Trojanum excidium, ‘Reliquiae Danaum atque immitis Achillis,’ab Asia in Europam varias ad partes profugerunt. Tribus igitur his nationibus hinc animositas, hinc nobilitas, et tanta generositas antiquitas; hinc perspicacis ingenii subtilitas, et loquendi securitas.

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Inter has autem gentes, quae Trojani reliquiae sunt excidii, soli Britones … primaeva gentis suae vocabula, et originalis linguae proprietatem abundantius retinuerent. (Gerald of Wales 1868: 193–4) From this brief look at Gerald’s Description of Wales, in the context of the more elaborate climate theory found in Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s encyclopedia and elaborated in Mandeville’s Book, we can draw the following conclusion. The necessary relationship of people to the land they inhabit is a scientific theory that emerges in antiquity (with Pliny) and develops over time, until in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it becomes localized. An optimal climate is identified and, ultimately, a discourse emerges that supports racialized categories. In the twelfth century, with Gerald of Wales, this system of thought – that is, ‘race-making’ or ‘race-thinking’ (to use Heng’s and Whitaker’s terms) predicated on climate theory – is still inchoate. In his thoughtful account of Gerald of Wales’s works, Matthew X. Vernon draws out the transhistorical implications of Gerald’s description of Irish and Welsh bodies in terms of the history of racialization. Referring specifically to Gerald’s Topographia Hibernica, Vernon writes: ‘there is a striking consonance between Gerald’s descriptions of the Irish living under English rule in the twelfth century and Fanon’s descriptions eight hundred years later of the colonized as seen through the eyes of the European colonist. Both writers center their attention on the subjects as incomplete humans, incapable of normative humanity’s achievements’ (2018: 174). He prefaces this comparison with a passage from Frantz Fanon’s Damnés de la Terre (Wretched of the Earth), stating that, for Fanon, ‘colonized subjects are transmogrified in the narratives of the colonizer: “In plain talk, [the colonized] is reduced to the state of an animal. And consequently, when the colonist speaks of the colonized he uses zoological terms”’ (Vernon 2018: 174; brackets in original). Interestingly, the passage from Fanon that Vernon quotes comes just a few pages after another where Fanon posits, not the binary opposition of colonizer and colonized, but rather that of European and ‘indigène’: ‘the colonial world is a compartmentalized world’, he writes, in which we can contrast ‘indigenous towns and European towns, schools for indigenous persons and schools for Europeans’.14 For Fanon, the binary opposition of Indigenous person and European is brought into being through the colonial relation, a structure of power that affects every aspect of culture and society.15 Vernon’s reading of Gerald of Wales through Fanon provides another way to recognize the evocation of something like the colonial relationship that produces the ‘indigene’, just below the surface of the twelfth-century text. With the Roman de toute chevalerie, we turn to another narrative of conquest and, accordingly, another evocation of Fanon’s ‘indigène’ as imagined within the discursive frameworks of the twelfth century. Here, however, we observe many of the same assumptions about the relationship of land and people, and the shaping influence of climate, expressed within the very different genre of romance. Thomas of Kent’s latetwelfth-century work centres on the itinerary of conquest followed by Alexander the Great, and emerges from a widespread tradition of narratives about the Macedonian ruler, in Greek and Latin as well as vernacular languages. The third-century Greek account of pseudo-Callisthenes gave rise to both the abundant European versions of the text and those found in Asia and Africa, the European ones mainly by way of the fourthcentury Latin adaptation attributed to Julius Valerius, and the ones in Asia and Africa primarily through the early Syriac translation. There are medieval Alexander narratives

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in Castilian, Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Icelandic, Italian and so on; and there are also Arabic, Ge‘ez, Hebrew and Persian versions – and many others. A recent collection of essays edited by Markus Stock includes contributions ranging from the Hebrew Alexander texts, by Shamma Boyarin (2016), to those of Southeast Asia, by Su Fang Ng (2016).16 The Roman de toute chevalerie stands out among the many Alexander narratives for the way in which it uses climate theory to describe the relationship between the lands the conqueror and his armies encounter and the people who inhabit them. As in the texts described above, the properties of the land give rise to the properties of the plants, animals and people who are native to them. The occasional wondrous exceptions we saw in Bartholomaeus Anglicus and Mandeville, however – especially in India – also appear in the Roman de toute chevalerie, this time in connection with a different land, but one often associated with India on medieval maps: that is, Ethiopia. The Roman de toute chevalerie differs from earlier accounts of Alexander the Great in several ways, including the way the text presents the path of Alexander’s conquests. While following the basic trajectory of conquest outlined in the Latin text of Julius Valerius’ Epitome, Thomas of Kent maps out the world brought under the yoke of Alexander in terms of the cardinal directions, within an elaborate quadripartite model of the world that is drawn mainly from the Cosmographia of Aethicus Ister. This allows Thomas to rationalize and explicate the nature of the wonders to be found as one approaches the limits of each cardinal direction in terms of climate theory. His account of the extreme southern climates, however, differs significantly from the writers discussed above. While Bartholomaeus Anglicus and the author of The Book of John Mandeville (and even Gerald of Wales, in a more limited way) all attribute the bodily diversity of the southern regions to the effects of the hot climate, Thomas instead attributes it to their unusual behaviour. He writes, ‘In Ethiopia there are people of diverse natures, of diverse lineages, of diverse languages, because everyone there is diversely engendered [sunt de diverse engendrure]’ (6702–4).17 Thomas explains that Ethiopians’ great diversity is due to their sexual promiscuity, such that no man knows his father, nor any father his sons: he writes, ‘Tuit sunt commun entr-els cum bestes en pasture’ (All is common among them, like beasts in the field [6708]). As in the regions of the remote East and North, the southern expanse contains a numerous, heterogeneous collection of peoples: some who have a dog for their king, others who have four eyes and worship Mercury; those who eat lions and have one eye; those who bark like dogs; those who ride elephants; those who have no mouths and communicate by sign language; and so on. As Alexander moves through Ethiopia, its resemblance to the Indian regions where he began his journey becomes more evident. The marvellous races, the wondrous animals and even the land itself recall the India he left behind, for there are said to be two Ethiopias (‘Deus Ethiopes sunt’ [6776]), just as there were two Indias (4601). After venturing into the remote East and paying a visit to the enigmatic and oracular Trees of the Sun and Moon, Alexander returns to Ethiopia where he encounters its queen, Candace. The elaborate account found in the Roman de toute chevalerie is based on that found in the Latin text of Julius Valerius’s Epitome. Thomas of Kent embellishes that account, however, making the land of Ethiopia into an ambiguous space that provides both the familiar comforts of home and the exotic and erotic excess of the Orient. Initially, Alexander’s encounter with Candace seems as though it could have taken place in the courts of France or England. This Oriental queen is ‘bele e blanche’ (6943; cf. 7751), as beautiful and fair-skinned as any European. Alexander does not approach her;

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instead, she approaches him, sending messengers bearing luxurious gifts ranging from camels loaded with baskets of emeralds to a thousand armed ‘white Ethiopians’ (6971). The inclusion of Ethiopian soldiers in the tribute offered by Candace is conventional; what is peculiar is their description as ‘blans’ or white. It is clear their skin colour is meant, because Thomas goes on to reiterate that ‘Il sunt plus blanc qe neif e plus qe lion fier’ (They are whiter than snow and fiercer than lions [6976]). This is remarkable precisely because Thomas has so elaborately embellished the text of his romance with references to how climate affects the flora and fauna of a land. As we saw, medieval scientific texts and encyclopedias point out that different climates give rise to different species: accordingly, creatures of the North tend to be larger and whiter, whereas creatures of the South tend to be smaller and darker. Those of the North have their spirits driven within them by the cold, producing fierce and bold temperaments; those of the South exude their spirits through their pores, producing lethargic, lascivious temperaments. White Ethiopians, then, are not just an anomaly but a paradox. They are the product of a land profoundly marked by the heat of the sun, but their bodies do not reflect the nature of that land. They are a wondrous exception to the conventional relationship of a land and its people. The reason for this exceptional wonder has much to do with the place of Ethiopia in the medieval European imagination. In theological terms, Ethiopia was understood as a place of special grace and apocalyptic expectation. In the Hebrew Bible, the story of Solomon and Sheba was interpreted in terms of a mystical union that brought the earthly Jerusalem into contact with the southern riches of Ethiopia; in the Acts of the Apostles, the queen of Ethiopia, named Candace (or Kandake), is identified as the ruler of the Ethiopian eunuch who converts to Christianity. Apocryphal stories of the Magi also associate one of the three wise men with Ethiopia, in a reassertion of the fundamentally tripartite division of the world found in the medieval world maps and medieval encyclopedias. These texts divide the world into three parts – Asia, Africa and Europe – to correspond to the three sons of Noah: Shem is associated with Asia, the biggest part; Ham, the outcast, with Africa; and Japheth, the youngest, with Europe. The three Magi recapitulate the sons of Noah, but while the sons of Noah are scattered outward into the wide world after the Flood, their descendants populating each of the three continents, the three Magi come inward towards the sacred centre of the nativity. This can be illustrated, for example, in a manuscript of Beatus of Liebana’s Apocalypse that depicts the Virgin and Child with the Magi, in a series of linked circles, plus the familiar form of the T-O world map at the top left (Figure 2.1).18 Interestingly, the T-O map includes not just the names of the three continents, but also the three sons of Noah, as a visible reminder of the Old Testament prefiguration of the three Magi, who appear at the right. Here, the economy of type and antitype is expressed in terms of word and image, with the names of the sons of Noah foreshadowing the vivid human forms of the three Magi. Depictions of the Magi vary in how they present the ethnic origins of each of the three kings. Some, such as the Beatus image described above, show exotic dress but only moderate differences of physiognomy, whereas others, such as in the Prayer Book of Albrecht of Brandenburg illuminated by Simon Bening (1525–30), show bodily diversity more vividly, with black skin. Like the Ethiopian magus, depictions of the Queen of Sheba also vary in how they portray ethnicity. While there was a rich medieval commentary tradition on the Song of Songs that interpreted the allegory of the beautiful and Black bride in historical terms, as the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba, pictorial depictions of the encounter of Solomon and Sheba often show the queen as fair-skinned, as in the illuminated page by Simon Bening that faces his image of the Magi (Figure 2.2). The

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FIGURE 2.1  Beatus of Liebana, Apocalypse (bifolium), New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art MS 1991.232.1, fol. 2b–c. © Heritage Images/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

queen is attended by two other women, her attendance on Solomon and offering of gifts appearing as a counterpart to the offerings of the three Magi. To put it another way, a chain of typological prefigurations links various moments in salvation history, with each one of them rooted in an essential notion of Ethiopian identity. In one typological relationship, the sons of Noah prefigure, and are fulfilled in, the three Magi. In a second typological relationship, the encounter of Solomon and Sheba, and the tribute offered by the Ethiopian queen to the king of Israel, is fulfilled in the tribute offered by the Ethiopian magus to the newborn king of the new Israel.19 The presence of Ethiopian identity as a key point of reference in salvation history was not limited to explicit citations from the Bible and apocrypha, such as Solomon and Sheba, the three Magi and the Ethiopian convert described in the Acts of the Apostles. It also appears in what we might call the ‘secular’ strands within salvation history, where typological relationships continue to be central. These include the legend of Alexander the Great, which for medieval Europeans (especially in the twelfth century) was central to crusading ideologies, and the fantasy of Prester John, the mythical king of a remote region who would, one day, come to the rescue of the crusader armies in the Holy Land. As in the medieval scientific texts described above, as well as the encyclopedia of Bartholomaeus Anglicus and The Book of John Mandeville, the Alexander romances use Ethiopia as a way to name the geographical limit case, the remote place of extremes. The Pillars of Hercules, marking the borders of the known world, are said to be located in this region, and the exotic queen of the Ethiopians, Candace, has an encounter with

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FIGURE 2.2  The Adoration of the Magi; the Queen of Sheba visits King Solomon. From Simon Bening (Flemish), The Prayer Book of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg (c. 1525–30). Getty MS Ludwig IX 10, fols. 36v and 37r. © Getty Museum (open content program).

Alexander the Great. In some versions, but not all, their relation is an amorous one. The erotic encounter of Alexander and Candace found in Roman de toute chevalerie bears a startling resemblance to the Ethiopian narrative of the early fourteenth-century Kebra Nagast (Book of the Glory of Kings), which centres on the relationship of Solomon and the queen of Ethiopia. Several Alexander narratives explicitly associate Candace with the Queen of Sheba, following an account by Josephus (37–c. 100 ce) that identifies her as the ruler of Ethiopia; moreover, the name appears in the Acts of the Apostles (8.27) to refer to the ruler of the Ethiopian eunuch who converts to Christianity. This intertwined lineage of encounters with Ethiopians – first, in the biblical account of Solomon, also recounted in Josephus’s history; second, in the Acts of the Apostles and commentaries on it; and, finally, in the many versions of the Alexander romance – served to provide an image of Ethiopia that was paradoxically ancient and novel, with each encounter repeating a narrative of spiritual and material exchange. This was a geographical location, but one almost as deeply enmeshed in salvation history as Jerusalem itself.

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We have seen how medieval indigeneity works in a range of pre-modern texts, including the encyclopedia of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the travel narrative of Mandeville, the ethnographic description of Wales by Gerald of Wales and the romance in Thomas of Kent’s Roman de toute chevalerie. In each of these, every land has its own specific properties, and these give rise to the qualities of the plants, animals and people who inhabit that land. These qualities are both exterior, including anatomy and other visible traits such as skin colour, and interior, including properties of spirit affected by humoral complexion. At the same time, as Gerald of Wales makes clear and Bartholomaeus also indicates, traits acquired from the land can be carried by a people when they move from one climate to another. Indigeneity is, so to speak, portable. In addition, wondrous exceptions are possible, whether in the torrid India of Mandeville’s Book or the southern expanses of Candace’s Ethiopia in the Roman de toute chevalerie. This is a vision of the natural world that is underpinned by the effect of religious orientation not just at the level of the individual but as the fundamental ordering principle of historical time and human geography. The notion of indigeneity that we see in twelfth-century texts such as Thomas of Kent’s Roman de toute chevalerie and Gerald of Wales’s Description of Wales inhabits that diffuse space of ‘race-thinking’ or ‘race-making’ that we see in the period when racialization is taking place, but the system – or, in Foucauldian terms, the discourse – is not yet fully operational, as it will become in the thirteenth and fourteenth century. Religion – understood, as suggested above, not merely as the confessional orientation of the individual person, but rather as an underlying template that provides a fundamental order and teleology to history at large – was deeply intertwined with this emergent discourse of race. Medieval indigeneity, understood as an essential linkage of people to the land, is in some ways at cross-purposes with pre-modern racialization, which is often linked to religious orientation, and which makes room for the role of heredity, so that people can carry their ‘natural’ traits with them into exile – or conquest. Moreover, while medieval indigeneity overlaps with but also can be distinguished from medieval discourses of racial difference and practices of racialization, it is also the case that modern conceptions of Indigenous identity also distinguish it from race, while noting the overlap and potential synergies. This is pointed out by Adam Miyashiro (2019), in his masterful account of the intertwined nature of race, settler colonialism and ‘medieval heritage politics’. Miyashiro emphasizes that modern concepts of indigeneity cannot simply be conflated with race, drawing on the work of J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, who offers a way to distinguish race from indigeneity: Just as critical race studies scholars insist that race is a useful category that is a distinct social formation rather than a derivative category emerging from class and/or ethnicity, indigeneity is a category of analysis that is distinct from race, ethnicity, and nationality – even as it entails elements of all three of these …. Like race, indigeneity is a socially constructed category rather than one based on the notion of immutable biological characteristics. (Kauanui 2016: 4) Miyashiro goes on to enlarge on Kauanui’s point, asserting that ‘Race, nation, and ethnicity are all categories that white supremacist ideologies conflate, and the emergent idea of “white ethnostate” [em]bodies the confluence of settler colonialism and white supremacist racism built on ethno-racial imaginings. The inclusion of “Indigeneity” is a

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new category among neo-fascists in Europe and the Americas but has been in use since Nazi Germany’ (Miyashiro 2019: 5). In other words, Miyashiro makes it clear how white ethnonationalism deploys ‘indigeneity’ as yet another flavour of ethnic identity. In sum, both medieval indigeneity and modern indigeneity are distinct from and overlap with race; but the ways in which they do so are distinct. Medieval indigeneity differs from medieval race in being cut off from the role of religious orientation, which plays a key role in the articulation of medieval racial identities. Modern indigeneity differs from modern race in refusing to make room for biological essentialism – at least, this is the case in the work of Indigenous scholars.20 White supremacists, who also take on the mantle of ‘indigeneity’, are a different matter. In the remaining pages of this chapter, I will offer a brief account of some modern expressions of indigeneity in the service of white ethnonationalism, before turning to a more positive and even hopeful account of how Indigenous perspectives on the medieval past might offer a way forward.

INDIGENEITY AND THE MEDIEVAL It is an unfortunate fact that the extreme right has adopted the notion of ‘indigeneity’ in order to justify what is sometimes called ‘white pride’, and which, as Miyashiro makes clear, can be more accurately described as ethnonationalism (Miyashiro 2019: 5). This practice lays claim to ‘indigenous’ European identities, as on the homepage of the ‘NativeEuropean’ Twitter account, which reads ‘Interested in European indigenous beliefs as part of my heritage. All cultures should look back to their indigenous traditions as an antidote to modernity.’21 Yet white supremacists simultaneously lay claim to North American indigenous traditions, in concert with the claim of ‘European’ indigeneity: this is particularly vivid in the figure of the so-called ‘Q Shaman’ (Jake Angeli), whose horned headgear could be read alternatively as ‘Viking’ or as Native American. As Cherokee scholar Joseph M. Pierce puts it, ‘White supremacists like Angeli pose as Indians in order to create an image of themselves as inseparable from the land itself. They imitate Indigenous people and they justify their actions by imagining themselves as the natural heirs to a land retroactively emptied of Native Americans.’ The Norse runes of Angeli’s Odinist tattoos evoke ‘European’ indigeneity, while his clothing participates in ‘a long tradition of what scholar Philip Deloria (Standing Rock Sioux) described as “playing Indian” – mimicking stereotypical imagery of Native Americans in a quest to assert a US national identity while also denigrating contemporary Indigenous people’ (Pierce 2021). In the same way that so-called ‘white pride’ is put forth as a meaningful counterpart to ‘Black pride’, ‘European indigeneity’ is put forth as a meaningful counterpart to other kinds of – or, we might more accurately say, actual – indigeneity. ‘Tribal’ identity is also part of this language of European indigeneity, as we can see in a tweet by NativeEuropean showing a map of ‘ancient Germanic and Celtic tribes’.22 NativeEuropean also follows unabashed white supremacists, including one that simply names itself with the Othala rune, used formerly by two units in the Waffen SS and now a white supremacist emblem. NativeEuropean says that ‘there is no indigenous remaining in Europe’, and that the land has been ‘wipe[d] … of its indigenous beliefs and traditions’.23 NativeEuropean is in favour of essential gender differences, opposed to trans identities and scornful of climate change. But the main focus of NativeEuropean is ‘indigeneity’, understood in terms of genetic make-up. Presumably using something like the ‘23andMe’ genetic testing

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kit, NativeEuropean has determined that they are ‘75% “Germanic”’.24 (A better term than ‘Aryan’, perhaps.) NativeEuropean is excited by @SurvivetheJive’s video on ‘White mummies in China’, presumably for what this can tell us about the pre-modern diffusion of white people in East Asia.25 NativeEuropean retweets @SurvivetheJive’s other efforts to provide access to ‘the medieval mind’, and shares a reminder from @EchoesofthePas1 (‘Echoes of the Past’) to ‘not forget’ where you came from and maintain your fundamental ‘connection to Soil and Blood!’26 I share this, unpleasant but (I think) necessary, brief overview to provide some sense of how the term ‘indigenous’ and related concepts are being mobilized within ethnonationalist discourse today. It goes without saying that this connection of ‘blood and soil’, an essential link between people and the land they come from, is very different from the relationship of people and land as it is articulated within Indigenous communities. There the relationship is one of stewardship, of layered history, of story that both emerge from and teach reciprocity with the land and with all those that inhabit it. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson puts it, speaking of Nishnaabeg knowledge: Like governance, leadership and every other aspect of reciprocated life, education comes from the roots up. It comes from being enveloped by land …. You can’t graduate from Nishnaabewin; it is a gift to be practiced and reproduced. And while each individual must have the skills and knowledge to ensure their own safety, survival and prosperity in both the physical and spiritual realm, their existence is ultimately dependent upon intimate relationships of reciprocity, humility, honesty and respect with all elements of creation, including plants and animals. (Simpson 2014: 9–10) Joanne Barker anchors her teaching in the Lenape story ‘Woman Who Fell from the Sky’, which ‘outlines our individual and collective responsibilities to and between multispecies beings and the land on which we live together [and] requires that we begin with a purposeful attention to where we are’ (2018: 34). Simpson and Barker ground their epistemology in different Indigenous traditions, Nishnaabeg and Lenape, and in different storylines, ‘Kwezens makes a lovely discovery’ and ‘Woman Who Fell from the Sky’. Both, however, return to the fundamental ground of the land itself, the living things who inhabit it, and the kinship relation they all share, articulated through reciprocity and grounded in respect. It is in the light of Simpson’s and Barker’s teachings that I would like to illustrate Indigenous responses to the medieval past, and to Eurocentric history in general, using the beautiful work of Kent Monkman. Monkman is a member of the Cree nation, whose work draws upon the trickster figure of ‘Miss Chief’ to enter into historical moments and recreate them with a focus on the experience of Indigenous people. Monkman and his studio team created two monumental historical paintings in 2019 as part of a commission from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. During 2019 and 2020, the twinned paintings were displayed in the Great Hall on each side of the primary entrance to the museum. The visitor does not see the paintings immediately upon entering; instead, they look back at the main gateway to see the two paintings to the left and right. The pair is collectively called mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People), and the image depicted in Figure 2.3, titled Welcoming the Newcomers, is mounted on the left. The other, titled Resurgence of the People, is mounted on the right.

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Monkman’s main frame of reference, in iconographic terms, is historical paintings, such as Washington Crossing the Delaware, painted by Emanuel Leutze in 1851. Miss Chief stands in the place of Washington in Resurgence of the People, while the painting also alludes to Delacroix’s 1830 work Liberty Leading the People. In this visual intertext, Miss Chief stands in the place of Liberty, personified as a woman bearing a tricoloured banner. Miss Chief instead bears an eagle feather. If we turn to the first of the two paintings that together make up mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People), we see a different historical referent. Welcoming the Newcomers (Figure 2.3) alludes to Géricault’s 1818–19 painting Raft of the Medusa (Figure 2.4) both in the gathering of native people on the landmass at left and in the cluster of settler people clinging to the overturned boat at upper right, in the background. The native people are endangered – just at the point of being invaded – by the settlers, who appear at once to be helpless supplicants and loathsome predators. Note, for example, the extended hand of the man in the white shirt, who reaches towards the newborn baby in its father’s arms. In all three cases, the iconographic reference is to, first, the founding myths of the nations and, second, revolution. Space does not permit a full analysis of Monkman’s mistikôsiwak, rich as that analysis would be. Instead, I will just briefly point out an aspect of the paintings that has not been noted previously: Monkman’s evocation of the medieval. In Welcoming the Newcomers, on the right side of the image, we see Miss Chief extending her hand downward to aid the three figures in the water. The figure in the foreground is white, wearing the helmet of a Spanish conquistador; the one to his right is Black, wearing the chains of an enslaved person; and the one to his left, slightly behind the other two, appears to be Asian, wearing an exotic turban-like headdress. Miss Chief reaches her hand out in what Monkman, in a video about the paintings, describes as a gesture of ‘generosity’, expressing the way in which the first people welcomed the settlers to the so-called ‘New World’.27 But she also looks outward at us, across time, with the

FIGURE 2.3  Kent Monkman (Cree, b. 1965), mistikôsiwak: Welcoming the Newcomers, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 335.28 × 670.6 cm (132 × 264 in). New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Donald R. Sobey Foundation CAF Canada Project Gift, 2020. © Kent Monkman/ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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FIGURE 2.4  Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–19. © Heritage Images/Getty Images.

knowledge of the harm to her people that will accompany these three apparently helpless victims – purposefully, in the case of the European settler, but also through the African bearing the chains that signal his forced diaspora.28 Looking at these three figures, it is difficult not to be reminded of other templates for dividing the world into three. For example, we might compare the three continents of Asia, Europe and Africa, as seen on schematic T-O maps of the world. Or we might compare Heinrich Bünting’s image of ‘the whole world in a cloverleaf’, included in his 1581 Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae (Travel through Holy Scripture). Bünting’s map shows the three usual continents of Asia, Europe and Africa, along with (in the lower left) ‘die neue Welt’, the New World. We might even recall the Magi attending the Christ Child, depicted in Simon Bening’s painting of the early sixteenth century, or in an anonymous late twelfth-century painting from northern England, showing the Magi on the road to Bethlehem (Journey of the Magi 1190–1200). This sacred geography, this vision of history and this pre-modern conception of racial difference, grounded on the correspondence of land and people, are all called into question in Monkman’s powerful historical painting. In closing, I would like to suggest some future directions inspired by Tarren Andrews’s thoughtful and powerful words. In the shared dialogue with Wallace Cleaves that concludes the special issue of English Language Notes edited by Andrews together with Tiffany Beachy, she identifies the motivation for the volume: ‘one of my concerns – the reason I really wanted to do this special issue – is my own sense of worry about appropriation’ (Andrews and Cleaves 2020: 170). The ensuing dialogue recognizes the importance of intention (‘the intention still matters’ [170]), and the challenge in

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negotiating the range of Indigenous epistemologies, where one is ‘always in danger of being appropriative’ (171). If this is true even for an Indigenous person who draws upon a knowledge system that emerges from a nation other than their own, it is an infinitely greater danger for a non-Indigenous person. Cleaves believes that this challenge can be met, although ‘it is only possible with a great deal of commitment, energy, time, understanding, and humility’ – the last of these, ‘the idea of humility’, seconded by Andrews (171). In her introduction, Andrews explicitly cautions non-Indigenous scholars to ‘recognize the limitations of Western epistemologies and methodologies’, which ‘all too often result in good intentions that are fundamentally appropriative and complicit in ongoing Indigenous erasure’ (Andrews 2020: 12). The solution, Andrews suggests, is to take it slowly – ‘to slow down medievalist engagement with Indigenous studies, to ask us all to be more deliberate, to be thoughtful, and to consider first the ethics of kinship and reciprocity’ (2). In this spirit, taking it slowly, I would encourage medievalists to begin the long process of unsettling and then relearning patterns of thought and methods of research. In using these words, I am following Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang who ground their foundational article, ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’, on the urgency – and necessary discomfort – of ‘unsettling’: ‘Our goal in this essay is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization –  what is unsettling and what should be unsettling’ (2012: 3). In the histories of race and racialization we recount, we need to think carefully and deliberately about the nature of indigeneity, both as it is reflected in pre-modern sources and as it is understood today, remaining consistently attentive to the voices of Indigenous writers, researchers and artists. As Andrews puts it, non-Indigenous medievalists need ‘to ask what it might look like to “extend an invitation”, rather than “engage with”, Indigenous studies scholars’ (2020: 2). Only by extending an invitation and then in turn being invited in does it become possible to participate in doing the necessary work – and, in time, to attain what Stó:lō writer Lee Maracle describes as ‘the good mind’ (2015: 11) or, in Bitterroot Salish scholar Andrews’s words, ‘a good heart’ (xẹst spúʔus [2020: 2]).

CHAPTER THREE

Race and Religion DAVID NIRENBERG

It may be true, as a great pioneer of ‘world history’ imagined, that any historical event or idea in any time and place is in some way connected to every other event or idea in every other time and place: ‘There are no isolated fields of history; everything is interinvolved’ (Hodgson 1967: 6–7). But even if that is the case, only an omniscient being would be capable of chronicling all those connections: perhaps a deity who marks every sparrow’s fall and keeps strict count of all things (as the Gospel – Mt. 10.29 – and Qurʾān – 72.78 – have it). So long as historians are human, provincialism will be an inevitable aspect of our being.1 It is not for this inevitable particularism that we historians deserve blame, but for our tendency to forget it. On the one hand, we speak of ‘human nature’ on the basis of our own limited experience, confusing the customs of our tribe with the laws of the cosmos. On the other hand, we isolate aspects of culture that in fact are widespread, locating them in particular histories for purposes of praise or blame, or simply because that history is the one we happen to know. A history that speaks of the invention of ‘rationality’ in a particular time or place, for example, is culpably provincial. So, I submit, is a history that speaks of the invention of ‘racism’. Such histories are today common, perhaps even the norm. ‘Racism so often appears as new to historians, as if each had discovered its uniquely originary moment,’ as Ann Laura Stoler puts it (Stoler 1997: 189; emphasis in the original). ‘What is striking is how committed critics of racism remain to such originary quests and what political investments we might have in them’ (189). The historians she refers to were above all modernists. After the Second World War historians more and more often insisted that race, racism and associated concepts are the product of a modern episteme, impossible to conceive of without nation states or colonialism or the transatlantic slave trade, Darwinian theories of evolution or some other necessary condition setting Euro-American modernity apart from other periods and places (Foucault 1997: 65). The tendency extends to many related concepts. To pick a recent example: ‘The roots of the knowledge regime from

This article is dedicated to my teacher William Chester Jordan. Earlier versions were presented at UCLA in October 2018, and at the CSIC, Madrid, in February 2019. I thank audiences at both venues for their questions. Mercedes García-Arenal, Felipe Pereda and Mohamad Ballan pushed me to sharpen the argument, as did Alexandra Dunietz, who additionally and repeatedly lent me her expertise in working through the Arabic sources. I am also grateful to Thomas Hahn, for his invitation to participate in this project and his editorial supervision.

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which the concept of heredity emerged extend … to the early modern period … This was the period in which Europeans began to conquer the globe, discovering at the same time that they were not its sole inhabitants’ (Müller-Wille and Rheinberger 2012: 3). A ‘pre-modernist’ could rightly object that humans have been discovering difference through travel and migration long before Columbus, indeed for as long as we can know.2 In any case, humans are quite capable of creating difference without discovering new worlds, even while remaining entirely at home. Ancient and medieval peoples were constantly constructing differences in order to imagine and represent their own communities (for example, differences between Greek and barbarian; woman and man; slave and free; gentile, Christian and Jew). Moreover, millennia before Darwin, humans were cultivating plants and mating animals, seeking to explain the transmission of desirable and undesirable characteristics across generations, theorizing the heritability of similarity and difference, and applying those explanations to whatever similarities and differences they found it useful to perceive or imagine among themselves.3 Strong analogies between the reproduction of organisms and the reproduction of culture are in fact ancient and widespread. Our word culture is itself a product of that analogy, as is our word race, which entered the Romance languages in the fourteenth century from the world of horse breeding. We could, if we wished, treat the imaginings this analogy has made possible, wherever and whenever they have manifested, as part of a vast and interconnected world history of racism. This approach has the advantage of avoiding arguments that by definition either set the aperture so wide that distinctions become meaningless (e.g. all persistent differences in power constitute racism) or so narrow that it fails to make sense of many modern phenomena that we have historically understood as racism (e.g. racism requires belief in immutable characteristics tied to skin colour). Whether we connect or separate the imaginings of disparate times and places, whether we choose to emphasize the similarities or the differences between their various reproductive analogies as we create our own particular histories: these are choices that historians are entitled, indeed called upon, to make. We can choose to link Aristotle and Kant, for example, in order to suggest that reproductive analogies are shared across a philosophical tradition we take to be Western, or we could choose to compare the classifications of Aristotle with those of Pāṇini (an Indian grammarian of the fourth century bce) in order to argue for commonalities across cultures.4 As we make our choices, however, we are also called upon to remember that they are contingent and not necessary, made within the framework of our particular interests and the peculiar shape and limits of our own knowledge. When we forget that, our histories turn from critical engagements into blunt instruments of polemics. Today there is an increasing tendency to reclaim the racist potential of the pre-modern, and to locate it in the discriminations produced by religious difference. I say reclaim, because before the Second World War arguments about the racist nature of religious discriminations were common. In the context of Nazi anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s, historians debated whether or not medieval Spanish Christian discriminations against converts from Judaism had been racial. Medievalists writing in the decolonizing 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, tended to agree that race was a modern, colonial concept, alien to the Middle Ages, part of the cognitive toolkit with which European power had set out to conquer the world. That consensus began to be questioned again in the twenty-first century, by those urging attention to deep and persistent structures of persecution and discrimination in western Europe and its former colonies (Nirenberg

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2003, 2007). Among scholars in the United States today, one can detect a sharpening conviction that discovering the racism of the medieval Christian world is an important part of the struggle against racism in our own polities. Thus Geraldine Heng, for example, explores the Christian treatment of Jews and converts from Judaism in medieval England in order to characterize that land as ‘the first racial state known to Europe’ (2018b: 58). Is racism the invention of fifteenth-century Iberian Christians, or of thirteenth-century British ones? What are the risks in locating the origins of racism in one time, place, polity and religion? We can embrace the view that the pre-modern work of differencemaking can fruitfully be compared to modern concepts of race and still be concerned that claiming to locate the origins of race risks producing partial and provincial histories that replicate the genealogical errors they claim to criticize. What then are we historians to do if we wish to use the study of ‘religious’ discriminations from the distant past in order to gain a critical understanding of ‘racial’ discriminations in the present, or vice versa? There may be as many answers to that question as there are critical historians. This chapter will propose one approach – that of simultaneously constructive and destructive comparison. I will offer historical sketches of two biocultural processes, one in Christianity and one in Islam, each of which can fruitfully be understood as ‘racializing’. Of each I will ask similar questions. First, how did episodes of mass conversion or spiritual migration affect thinking about the heritability of certain characteristics within these religions? In other words, did such episodes effect something that today we might call the racialization of religion? Second, how do these episodes relate to each other? Can we speak of their histories in terms of origins, or of a causal or genealogical relationship to each other? Can we say that any of the three religions involved in these episodes – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – ‘invented race’ or practiced race-making? I offer both sketches as plausible historical accounts of how these religions generated concepts that lie within the semantic field of race. In treating the sketches side by side, I hope to make clear why neither of these particular histories on their own, nor indeed any other no matter how detailed, can serve as a critical history of race, unless it simultaneously recognizes its own provincialism and its relation to other potential histories. The Almohad movement (1130–1269) imposed a distinctive vision of Islam across vast regions of Iberia and North Africa. Almohad derives from Arabic al-Muwaḥḥidūn (those professing the unicity of God). The Almohads conducted purges of other Islamic schools, and most importantly for our purposes, they also converted, killed or expelled many Jews and Christians in the regions that came under their control. Keeping our focus on Jews, we learn from contemporaries such as Abraham ibn Ezra (d. 1167) that entire communities were wiped out through killing or conversion. The events left a profound mark on the future of Jewish ideas about conversion. Both Moses ben Maimon (d. 1204) – Maimonides – and his father were among these forced converts, and their writings on the topic became important sources for later Jewish thought.5 But it is the Muslim side that interests us for our present purposes, for this migration of a large number of converts from Judaism into Islam seems to have catalyzed thinking about lineage in Western Islamic lands. The Almohad ruler Abū Yūsuf al-Manṣūr (r. 1184–98) and his successor imposed a number of distinctions and discriminations upon descendants of these converts. Regulations compelled the descendants to wear ‘degrading attire’, such as distinctive robes, skull caps rather than turbans (and later, yellow turbans) and a ‘distinguishing sign’. According to the description of these discriminations in al-Marrākushī’s chronicle of 1224, the rulers were motivated by doubt about the sincerity of the new Muslims’ belief:

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Were I sure that they were true Muslims, [the Caliph Abū Yūsuf] would say, I would allow them to merge with the Muslims through marriage or in their other affairs. If, however, I were sure that they were Infidels, I would have their men slain, their children enslaved and their property confiscated and distributed among the Believers. But I have doubts about their case. (Ibn Zikrī 2016: 19)6 We will avoid the temptation so often indulged by historians to hypothesize about the sincerity of converts or their descendants and focus instead on the discriminatory pressure imposed upon them and on the logic of lineage that came to justify that discrimination. The philosopher and exegete Joseph ben Judah ibn ʿAqnīn (c. 1150–c. 1220), who wrote around the time of Abū Yūsuf’s rule and was in all likelihood a coerced convert to Islam like Maimonides, describes this pressure in his Ṭibb al-nufūs (Hygiene of the Souls). He depicts a society in which ‘Jewishness’ served Muslims as a transposable sign of dishonour or stigma: When [a Muslim] wishes to exaggerate a state of scorn or humiliation that has befallen him or his fellows, he exclaims ‘My shame was like that of the Jews.’ Similarly if they seek to offend a neighbor, after having exhausted all other insults … they exclaim: ‘What a Jew!’ Likewise if they want to curse someone … they say: ‘May Allāh make you like them and count you among their number!’ (Fenton and Littman 2016: 53) ‘Jew’ here serves as an insult by analogy, one that dishonours by equating any Muslim to a people considered base and abject. Ibn ʿAqnīn describes yet another Jewish stigma, one applied not to all Muslims, but only to those descended from Jewish converts to Islam, a stigma that depends not on analogy but on lineage: The more we obey their instructions and comply with their doctrines and forsake our own, the more they burden our yoke and increase our travail … The proof can be seen in the afflictions suffered by the apostates of our land … Even the conversion of their fathers or grandfathers a century ago has been of no advantage to them. (Fenton and Littman 2016: 51) Not even intermarriage could erase the stigma. The children of an ‘old’ Muslim with a female Jewish captive or convert ‘are despised … so spurned that even the meanest [Muslim] will not contract an alliance with them’ (Fenton and Littman 2016: 53).7 According to Ibn ʿAqnīn, a century of Islam could not purge a lineage descended from converts of its ‘Jewishness’. With the benefit of greater hindsight, we can add that half a millennium would not suffice. In lands that had come under Almohad rule, especially the Maghreb (roughly equivalent to modern Morocco), Muslims belonging to lineages descended from converts from Judaism came to be known as muhājirūn (émigrés). The Arabic word had been used positively in the context of early Islam to describe those believers who emigrated from Mecca to Medina with the Prophet Muhammad. In parts of North Africa, however, it came to mean the descendants of converts from Judaism to Islam. (In Fez, members of these lineages were also known as bildī [Indigenous].8)

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We could follow the history of discrimination against the ‘émigrés’ across dynasties – Almohad, Marinid (1244–1465), Saadian (1549–1659), Alaouite (b. 1666) – all the way into the twentieth century. That history produced a great debate between, on the one hand, those who argued that the Islamic tradition justified and even required the stigmatization and segregation of the Muslim ‘émigrés’ from Judaism because of their lineage, and on the other, those who argued that the tradition forbade any such discriminations among believers. The debate left its traces in many different registers of North African culture and society: in genealogies, of course, shaped as they were by taboos on intermarriage; but also in mysticism and politics; in market regulations and Qurʾān interpretation. Great Sufi masters were caught up in the question. When Ibn ʿAbbād al-Rundī (d.  1390) proclaimed it blasphemy to say that the prophecy of Moses was superior to that of Muhammad, he was presumably attacking the ‘émigrés’ and their defenders, who were sometimes caricatured as upholding the law of Moses. His disciple Muhammad Ibn al-Sakkāk (d. 1415) followed in his master’s footsteps when he declared that the city of Fez pleased him because the muhājirūn were despised there (al-Rundī 1986: 53–4; 2005: 235–41).9 More than a century later, the Moroccan Sufi Sīdī Riḍwān al-Januwī (d. 1583) compared his own ritual status to carrion and refused any invitation to lead prayers, knowing that his lineage would prove a source of controversy should he assume such an honoured role.10 Sīdī Riḍwān is an unusual figure, his father apparently was a convert from Christianity and his mother a convert from Judaism. But he was typical in that although his descendance from converts did not bar him from a reputation for piety, it did bar him from the acquisition and performance of institutional power based on that piety. In this sense, the discriminations against the ‘émigrés’ were deeply political. In fact, in the politics of the Maghreb after the Almohads, insisting on one’s family’s distance from lineages of ‘Jewish’ Muslims became a key strategy in struggles for power and privilege. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the claims to power of the shurafāʾ (sing. sharīf) that emerged with increasing stridency beginning in the twelfth century: that is, of lineages that claimed direct descent from the family of the Prophet Muhammad, and who argued that both political and prophetic power should be restricted to members of the Prophet’s lineage.11 In post-Almohad North Africa, the privileges of the shurafāʾ were often articulated by arguing for the exclusion of the muhājirūn. Over time the two groups, shurafāʾ and muhājirūn, descendants of Muhammad and descendants of Jews, came to stand in stark antithesis. On the one hand, the shurafāʾ were ‘a blood aristocracy … that implicitly – and sometimes explicitly – carried with it the notion that some of the gifts of the Prophet (and even prophecy itself, a most heterodox belief) were hereditary’ (García-Arenal 2012: 162). On the other stood the muhājirūn, presented by their critics as an anti-prophetic lineage of descendants from Jews, whose blood transmitted the spiritual disabilities heaped upon that people. As one example of this politics of discrimination, consider the centuries of conflict over whether or not Muslims descended from Jews could sell goods in the great market of Fez, known as the Qaysārīya. Descendants of Jewish converts were repeatedly and violently evicted from and readmitted to this prime property for commerce in luxury goods. According to their critics, this was because they preserved the deceitful, fraudulent business practices of their ancestors, and could not be trusted to sell to ‘old’ Muslims. The discovery at the market site in 1437 of the tomb of Mulay Idris II (d. 828), greatgreat-great-great-grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, ‘founder’ of the Islamic Maghreb and genealogical touchstone of the shurafāʾ, should be understood as itself a product of

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that conflict. The ‘discovery’ converted the market into a shrine to the political, religious and economic claims of the shurafāʾ, a monument that performed its truth through condemnation and exclusion of the muhājirūn. Later shurafāʾ historians would even use that exclusion as a barometer of the piety and legitimacy of past monarchs.12 This debate over the legitimacy of discrimination was not one-sided. In 1641 the scholar Maḥammad b. Aḥmad Mayyāra (d. 1662) collected seventeen fatwas and several administrative decrees, all from the sixteenth century, and all condemning the exclusion of ‘Muslims of Jewish descent’ from the Fez market. He also penned his own critique of the discriminatory measures of his day. If the descendants of converts are to be excluded, writes Mayyāra (2013), then no Muslim could shop in the market, for are not all Muslims descendants of converts?13 Mayyāra knows that it is only the descendants of converts from Judaism who are targeted (Mayyāra 2013: 142). Yet he does not hesitate to widen the issue to genealogies more generally, pointing out that they and the claims based upon them are often invented, and that this applies as much to the shurafāʾ as it does to the muhājirūn. Mayyāra even suggests that the ‘old’ Muslims attack the ‘new’ Muslims so viciously because they are covering up anxieties about their own lineage. He points out that many of the shurafāʾ of Fez are immigrants from Iberia, refugees from the collapse of Islamic Andalucia. Perhaps they boast in order to conceal the likelihood that their own ancestors were converts from Christianity? (143–4). In any event, they forget that the Prophet Muhammad disapproved of boastfulness about one’s origins (121, 143, 168–70). Mayyāra draws repeatedly on early Islamic traditions in which the Prophet forbade any discrimination against converts on occasions when Arab Muslims asserted the perceived inferiority of Persian, Jewish and African converts. In this he was following the previous scholars whose fatwas he collects, such as Ibn Ḥarzūz (d. 1554), who had quoted Muhammad’s ‘Farewell Address’, in which the Prophet was said to have reiterated that all Muslims are brothers and that it is only in piety that one Muslim is superior to another. After citing this and other Quranic verses and hadiths about all converts being equal except in the degree of their piety, Ibn Ḥarzūz had gone so far as to single out the virtues of the Jewish converts in Fez, ‘who hasten to do God’s will’ (Mayyāra 2013: 106–7).14 Mayyāra does not single out the descendants of Jews for praise. He does, however, insist that to the extent that the Prophet’s descendants, the shurafāʾ, forget that it is only in piety that Muslims are superior to one another, they fall into blasphemy and will be punished for it in the afterlife, for God cares more about good behaviour than family ties to Muhammad (Mayyāra 2013: 132). Nor can custom or long tradition suffice to justify the shurafāʾ in their discrimination. On the contrary, says Mayyāra, legitimations self-interestedly based on tradition are no different than the arguments of the Jews, who say they are following their rabbis and forefathers in denying the prophethood of Muhammad. The twist is clever: now it is the shurafāʾ who are acting like Jews (161). Not surprisingly, the traditions of discrimination continued to flourish despite Mayyāra’s efforts. Almost a century later, another learned inhabitant of Fez and descendant of Jewish converts, Maḥammad Ibn Zikrī (d. 1731), directed yet another treatise against those traditions (Ibn Zikrī 2016). A Sip of Honey on the Eminence of Israelites and Arabs – the title is probably not the author’s (Ibn Zikrī 2016: 77–8) – is less concerned with discrimination in commerce and more with the exclusion of Muslims of Jewish descent from official scholarly positions and the refusal of ‘old’ Muslims to marry into ‘new’ Muslim families. Like Mayyāra and many authors before him, Ibn Zikrī draws heavily on

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an egalitarian strand of Islam that stresses the equality of all believers before God. Unlike Mayyāra, who had taken aim at genealogical pretensions generally, Ibn Zikrī took the very different approach of seeking to destigmatize Jewish lineage by ennobling it. Are not the Jews descended from prophets? Ibn Zikrī deploys classical hadith, as well as later commentaries (such as Ibn Taymīya’s), in order to grant that the descendants of Ismael are the best of Abraham’s line, but claim simultaneously that Isaac’s descendants – that is, the Banū Isrāʾīl – are the best among the non-Arabs because as a people they were given both prophethood and the revelation of scripture. Muslims of Jewish descent therefore combine in their person not only the truths of Islam but also the prophetic lineage of Israel, and should be honoured rather than scorned.15 Thanks to an anonymous commentator on Ibn Zikrī’s treatise, we know something of the outrage that this argument about the nobility of Israelite lineage could produce. In any event, neither the argument nor opposition to it was new. We have already provided a fourteenth-century example of the latter, in the Sufi master Ibn ʿAbbād al-Rundī. As for the argument that Israelite lineage ennobles, it could be attributed to the Prophet himself. One of Muhammad’s early biographers wrote that after the Prophet conquered Khaybar, he ‘left married to the daughter of their king’ (Ibn Isḥāq and Ibn Hishām 1955: 520). The bride, Ṣafīya, converted to Islam after her capture in the conquest of the Jewish fortifications of Khaybar in 629. An Islamic tradition recounts that one day Muhammad found his new wife weeping bitterly. When he asked her why she wept, she replied, ‘I heard ʿĀʾysha and Ḥafṣa jeering at me saying, “We are superior to Ṣafīya for, not only are we the prophet’s wives, we are also his cousins!”’ Muhammad’s reply was variously reported, with the most widespread version having him exclaim, ‘Why did you not reply to them saying, “How can you be nobler than I whose father is Aaron, whose uncle is Moses and whose spouse is Muhammad?”’ (Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih 1982: 6.128). Ibn Zikrī, Mayyāra and many writers before them draw on stories such as these about Muhammad’s marriage to Ṣafīya to argue that the Prophet did not discriminate against converts from Judaism.16 This quick sketch of more than half a millennium of debate about the debasement transmitted through the lineages of the muhājirūn, and about the special claims to prophecy and authority transmitted through lineage of the shurafāʾ, may suffice to allow a provisional and general conclusion. Across these eight hundred or so years, from the twelfth century to the twentieth, biocultural discourses about ‘Jewish’ lineages did important work within the North African Islamic community. They provided it with powerful tools of inter-Muslim discrimination, exclusion and hierarchalization that we may, for certain purposes and questions, usefully understand as analogous to race and racism. Now let us cross the Straits of Gibraltar, whose scant 7.7 nautical miles of salt water mark a now millennial religious, cultural and political divide, and focus on an Iberian Peninsula under Christian rule. Iberian history has long served as a focal point for arguments about pre-modern race because, as is well known, the peninsular kingdoms were among the most religiously diverse in medieval Western Europe. By the end of the thirteenth century, the peninsula was largely ruled by Christian sovereigns (even the Muslim rulers of Granada were officially vassals of Christian kings), but its kingdoms still retained large populations of Muslims and Jews. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, those lands underwent massive attempts to eliminate that religious diversity through massacre, segregation, conversion, Inquisition and expulsion. In one sense these efforts towards homogeneity were successful. Over the course of the hundred years that

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stretched from the massacre and forced conversion of Jews in 1391 to the expulsion of all Jews from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in 1492 and from Portugal in 1496–7, virtually all the Jews of the peninsula were either converted or expelled. (The conversion and expulsion of the peninsula’s Muslims would follow a related but different and later chronology.) The conversion of a large number of people whom Christians had perceived as profoundly different did not abolish the old boundaries and systems of discrimination but rather transformed them. The migration of tens of thousands of Jews into Christianity proved to be a powerful catalyst of thought about the relationship between genealogy and religion in modernity: a revolution in both Christian and Jewish understanding of the relationship between flesh and spirit.17 It produced an enormous debate about the relationship between fleshly lineage and spiritual attributes, as well as new institutions (such as the Inquisition) and qualifications for power (such as ‘purity of blood’), all devised to discriminate between Christians descended from Jewish converts (Cristianos nuevos, confessos, conversos, marranos) and those who were ‘old Christians’, ‘clean Christians’, ‘Christians by nature’ (Cristianos viejos, limpios, de natura). That the ideological underpinning of these new discriminations claimed explicitly to be rooted in natural realities is evident in what came to be called the doctrine of limpieza de sangre. According to this doctrine, Jewish (and later Muslim) blood was inferior to Christian. The possession of any amount of such blood made one liable to heresy and moral corruption; therefore, any descendant of Jews (and later Muslims), no matter how distant, should be barred from church and secular office, from any number of guilds and professions, and especially from marrying Old Christians. It is precisely in the context of this time, place and problem that the Romance word raza, whence our English term race, migrated from the vocabulary of horse breeding to that of human reproduction, where it was applied to those Christians whose lineage carried taint of Judaism (and eventually, of Islam).18 By 1611, when Sebastian de Covarrubias published his famous dictionary, the ambivalence of the word raza was long established: ‘the caste of purebred horses, which are marked by a brand so that they can be recognized … Race in [human] lineages is meant negatively, as in having some race of Moor or Jew’ (Covarrubias 1611: s.v. ‘raza’).19 The word seems to have come into broad usage as a term in the animal and the human sciences more or less simultaneously. The earliest use I know of in Castilian, from a translation of a Latin veterinary manual made in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, uses the term to refer to an equine hoof disease. In the world of horse breeding it came to mean something like ‘pedigree’ by the first quarter of the fifteenth century (Borgognoni 1999).20 Thus Manuel Dies’s popular manual on equine care (c. 1430) admonished breeders to be careful in their selection of stock: For there is no animal that so resembles or takes after the father in virtues and beauties, nor in size, or coat, and similarly for their contraries. So that it is advised that he who wishes to have good race and caste of horses that above all he seek out the horse or stallion that he be good and beautiful and of good coat, and the mare that she be large and well formed and of good coat. (Dies 1424–36: 1.1)21 At more or less the same time, in Castilian poetry raza emerged as a way of describing a variety of defects linked to poetic speech, to sexuality, and especially to Judaism. By 1470

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the word race was so common in poetry that it was included, along with other useful words such as marrano (a word that meant pig and descendant of converts from Judaism), in handbooks of rhymes for poets.22 As the defects encoded in raza became more ‘Jewish’, they were enriched with meanings drawn from the more agricultural corners of the word’s semantic field. Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, writing around 1438 in the midst of an evolving conflict over converso officeholding in the Castilian city of Toledo, provides a clear example of the developing logic. You can always tell a person’s roots, he explains, for those who descend from good stock are incapable of deviating from it, whereas those of base stock cannot transcend their origins, regardless of whatever money, wealth or power they may obtain. The reasons for this, he asserts, are natural: ‘Nature procures this.’ Thus you will see every day in the places where you live, that the good man of good raça always returns to his origins, whereas the miserable man, of bad raça or lineage, no matter how powerful or how rich, will always return to the villainy from which he descends … That is why when such men or women have power they do not use it as they should. (Martínez de Toledo 1992: 108–9) In these early applications of raza to the political fitness of humans, the word is already saturated with contemporary ‘common sense’ knowledge about the reproductive systems of the natural world.23 The application of the word to human lineages coincides perfectly with efforts to bar converts from Judaism and their descendants from power. In 1433 Queen María ruled on behalf of the converts of Barcelona that no legal distinction should be made between ‘natural’ Christians, on the one hand, and neophytes and their descendants, on the other (Colegio Notarial de Barcelona 1965: Archive of the Crown of Aragon, Chancery register 3124, 157r–v).24 The following year the ecumenical Council of Basel included among its many conciliar decrees a prohibition on such discrimination, ‘since [the converts] became by the grace of baptism fellow citizens of the saints and members of the house of God, and since regeneration of the spirit is much more important than birth in the flesh’ (Mansi [1759] 1961: 29.100). It is because many were making precisely those distinctions that the highest authorities of Church and kingdom found it necessary to issue such decrees.25 By 1449 the logic of discrimination was powerful enough to animate a civil war. When the city of Toledo joined others in revolt against the monarchy, it claimed that the rebellion was a defensive act against the iniquities of converso officeholders. The rebels and their sympathizers claimed that ‘baptised Jews and those proceeding from their damaged line’ were waging an implacable war against Christianity and seeking power partly in order to stain the ‘clean blood’ of ‘old’ Christians through intermarriage (Benito Ruano [1957] 1976: 103, 111, 118). Hence the Toledans issued a Sentencia-Estatuto banning descendants of converts from holding public office for at least four generations. This was the first of the Castilian statutes of ‘purity of blood’ that would shape the reproductive imagination not only of the Iberian Peninsula but also of much of the New World for the next five hundred years.26 These claims did not go unanswered. The texts produced by the defenders of the conversos – important churchmen, such as Alonso de Cartagena, Juan de Torquemada and Lope de Barrientos, as well as royal officials, for instance Fernán Diáz de Toledo – constitute a corpus of powerful arguments against discriminations of faith amongst

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Christians on the basis of descent, much like the works of Mayyāra, Ibn Zikrī and others in Islamic North Africa. The arguments are often strikingly similar. Like their Muslim counterparts, these authors combed early Christian texts in order to demonstrate that the discriminations were un-Christian and heretical. And like their Muslim counterparts, they sometimes found themselves proposing their own logic of lineage in order to preserve the possibility of political and religious power for descendants of converts. Circa 1441, for example, as the claim that raza barred conversos from nobility gained strength, the great Castilian expert on chivalry Diego de Valera suggested that descent from the ‘chosen people’ ennobled rather than debased the ‘New Christians’ (Valera 1959: 102–3). In 1449, responding directly to the Toledan rebels in his Defense of the Unity of Christendom, Bishop Alonso de Cartagena did not entirely reject his opponents’ theses about the biological reproduction of culture. He argued instead for a different starting point. True, Jews are ruinous and cowardly, but this is because they were enslaved in unbelief after the coming of Christ. The Old Testament had famously chronicled the courage of the ancient Israelites: As Aristotle would have it, among dispositions toward virtue none is more derived among descendants through propagation of the blood than the disposition that tends toward fortitude … Therefore since, considering their small number, proportionally more from among these [descendants of Jews] rise to investiture in the orders of knighthood, than from among those who descend from some rustic family of ignoble commoners … it follows that we should presume that the nobility that some of them had in ancient times, lies latent enclosed within their breasts. (Cartagena 1943: 217) Once baptized, the fortitude encoded in ancient Jewish blood would be free to shine once more, like a bright light whose concealing bushel basket is removed.27 It should not be surprising that such pro-converso arguments share a logic of lineage with the discriminations against which they tilt, since they are a reaction to new mappings of reproductive logic from the sphere of nobility onto that of religion. As those new mappings gained exclusionary power, their targets sometimes stressed countergenealogies. In Inquisition files of the 1480s we find accusations of a converso proverb: ‘Cristianos de natura, cristianos de mala ventura’ (Christians by nature are Christians of bad fortune). In their defence, the accused testified that they had meant that conversos shared the lineage of the Virgin Mary, whereas old Christians were descended from idol-worshipping gentiles (Marín Padilla 1988: 60–7). Much like Ibn ʿAbbād al-Rundī confronting similar claims of the muhājirūn in the 1390s, or Ibn Zikrī’s anonymous reader reacting with scorn to A Sip of Honey in mid-eighteenth-century Fez, the inquisitors treated such claims as evidence of Judaizing and blasphemy, themselves symptoms of the ruinous effects of Jewish blood. I have offered two parallel histories of biocultural logics emerging from mass conversion, one very well known (who has not heard of the Spanish Inquisition?), the other virtually undiscovered, the domain of two or three specialists. What questions can the historian ask with this comparison in hand? A searcher after the ‘origins’ of race might now be tempted to shift those origins from the forced conversions of Jews in Christian Spain to the earlier Almohad conversions of Jews to Islam that may have influenced them. Another, interested in transatlantic futures, might grant that the histories of Islam and

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Christianity were intimately intertwined in the Western Mediterranean, but insist that only the biocultural fantasies minted in Christian Spain really matter, because it was the Spaniards who went on to colonize the New World. Still another, aware of the important role that Maghrebi centres of learning played in the Islamization of sub-Saharan West Africa, might ask how North African ideas about conversion and lineage contributed to the willingness of Muslims to sell other Muslims into transatlantic slavery. Yet another might focus on the comparison itself: what was shared and what was different in the intertwined histories of North Africa and Iberia that catalyzed these mappings of lineage onto faith? From the comparison, can we deduce key social, political, theological or intellectual variables in that catalysis of ‘racism’?28 We are free to choose between these and many other instructive paths, each of which may be useful for a particular purpose and history. We should recognize, however, that every path is partial and provincial. And we should not imagine that anyone will ‘discover’ the ‘origins’ of race or racism in Christianity or Islam. After all, the biocultural imagination of these religions was not invented with the appearance of conversos or muhājirūn. On the contrary, in both traditions, the medieval debates we have explored were already deeply marked by earlier products of that imagination. The arguments about purity of blood in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Toledo, for example, frequently invoked the actions of the seventh-century Visigothic kings and bishops of the Peninsula, imagined as founders both of Spain’s aristocratic lineages and of its Catholicism. King Sisebut had ordered his Jewish subjects baptized by force around 615, and in the years following both his bishops and his successors to the throne codified legislation placing those converts and their descendants under certain ongoing disabilities.29 Those texts were frequently invoked in Castilian debates over purity of blood nine centuries later. But the texts and their effects were not merely Iberian. The seventhcentury canons regarding converted Jews in Visigothic kingdoms made their way into Gratian’s Decretum in the twelfth century, becoming law for the universal Church. They thereby shaped the possibilities of existence not only for converts from Judaism and their descendants, but also for sixteenth-century moriscos in Iberia, for the cruelly evangelized in Africa and the ‘New World’, for the kidnapped and baptized Edgardo Mortara in the nineteenth century and for so many other converts to Christianity and their descendants across time and space.30 Should we then search for the ‘origins’ of Christian racial thought among the Visigoths and their treatment of forced converts from Judaism in the early seventh century? Similarly, in the Muslim debates over the muhājirūn, the sources deployed by both sides had been shaped by centuries of earlier arguments about the reproduction of piety. In their struggles against discrimination, Mayyāra (2013: 95–7, 101, 111, 120, 163, 171, 186–7) and Ibn Zikrī (2016: 13, 85–6, 102, 110, 141 [Arabic pagination]) redeployed arguments from the so-called shuʿūbīyah controversies of the third Islamic century (c. 800–900 ce), whose name derived from a word in a verse of the Qurʾān: Oh mankind! Truly We created you from a male and a female, and We made you peoples (shu’ūb) and tribes (qabāʾil) that you may come to know one another. Surely the most noble (akram) of you before God are the most reverent (atqā) of you. Truly God is the Knowing, Aware. (al-Ḥujūrāt 49.10–13)

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There is a tension within this verse, which on the one hand emphasizes God’s creation of social and kin categories – a creation that is explicitly presented as generating useful knowledge about people on the basis of those categories – and on the other stresses differences in piety as the only ones relevant to nobility before God.31 The shuʿūbīyah serves as an inexact name for the controversies that engaged multiple aspects of this tension in a period when the passage of time and the conversion of large numbers of non-Arabs to the faith had put pressure on the genealogical privileges of those who claimed descent from Arab conquerors. The controversy confronted those who defended the excellence of Arab lineages with those who elevated other lineages (such as the Persians) or who argued for the radical equality of all believers. The debate did not take long to reach Islam’s westernmost shores. In al-Andalus we find the descendants of Christian converts to Islam penning treatises attacking the genealogical claims of their Arab lords and asserting the superiority of their own Iberian lineages, treatises that evoked numerous and ferocious responses. Might these have influenced the later development of genealogical thought in the Iberian Peninsula? Should we then assert that racial thought in the Western Mediterranean, Islamic and Christian alike, was forged much earlier and farther to the East, in the Islamic shuʿūbīyah?32 It is tempting to declare this or that period or place as the wellspring of biocultural imaginaries in Christianity or Islam. But every foundation stone we might pick reveals others underneath. Ibn Qutayba (d. 889), one of the great polemicists of the shuʿūbīyah, points to the ancient philosophers and to the poets of the Arabs: The sages say: ‘Nature prevails.’ A poet has said as much: What one contrives against his nature, / will be abandoned as character prevails. Another poet has said: All return to their essence, / though they may affect different traits for a time. (Ibn Qutayba 2019: 145–6)33 (Compare this expression of ‘common wisdom’ about lineage to that of Alfonso Martínez de Toledo cited above.) As for prophetic forebearers, Ibn Qutayba mocks the Persian writers with their ‘claims of a relationship to Isaac, son of Abraham, and with their boast, aimed at the Arabs, that Isaac was born from Sarah, a free woman, whereas Ishmael, the father of the Arabs, was born from Hagar, a slave’ (Ibn Qutayba 2019: 47).34 According to him, the late eighth- to early ninth-century poet Abū Nuwās denigrates the Arabs for being descended from a slave, an ‘unclean’ or ‘putrid smelling’ woman. The Persians, counters Ibn Qutayba, were in no way related to Abraham, whereas the Arabs’ descent from his concubine is an honourable rather than a degrading status, as Ibn Qutayba then goes to some lengths to prove.35 Already in the earliest Christian and Islamic ‘Middle Ages’, amongst Germanic and Arab conquerors alike, we can find powerful flashes of the idea that lineage and the reproduction of the flesh condition proximity to prophecy and divine favour. Why is this potential to map religion and culture onto reproduction and the creaturely body (or vice versa) suddenly activated and put to work in certain times and places? How does a given activation transform the possible futures of this potential? And how do these activations compare to what we have learned to call racism in other times and places? These seem to me better questions for the historian of race than the question of ‘origins’.

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The word potential has the advantage of reminding us that within these religions (as in many other cultures) the conditions of possibility for this mapping of religion onto reproduction exist even when they are not actualized. The story of the family of Abraham we have just seen invoked by Ibn Qutayba is one of many bearers, within these traditions, of the potential to imagine that prophecy reproduces itself like the organism. That potential is already contained in the language of the promise God makes to Abraham in Genesis 17.7: ‘I shall maintain my covenant between myself and you, and your seed [Hb. ‫זרע‬, Gk. sperma, Lt. semen] after you, generation after generation’ (translation mine). Both New Testament and Qurʾan agree: ‘Now the promises were addressed to Abraham and to his seed [sperma]’ (Gal. 3.16). ‘Truly God chose Adam, Noah, the House of Abraham and the House of ʿImrān above the worlds, as progeny [dhurrīyah], one from another. And God is Hearing, Knowing’ (Qurʾan 3.33–4).36 Potential does not mean origin. There were many great cultures in the ancient world – Babylonian, Egyptian, Sasanian and so on – that imagined aspects of their reproduction in terms of nature and agriculture in ways that shaped the material collected in the Hebrew Bible. What makes this biblical example of the metaphor important is not its ‘originality’ but the prophetic work it would be put to by different cultures in the future. Already in Genesis, that work can focus on heightening the prophetic claims of a particular family or expand to encompass the entire world: ‘I will give to your seed all these lands, and in your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed’ (Gen. 26.4–5, 28.13–14, 22.16–18). At times across future centuries (as in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, heavily influenced by their Sasanian context) it will be used to heighten the claims of lineage and heritability. At others, as among some early rabbis and most famously by the apostle Paul, it will be used to efface those claims: ‘There can be neither Jew nor Greek … for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And simply by being Christ’s you are that seed [sperma] of Abraham, the heirs [klēronomoi] named in the promise’ (Gal. 4.28–9; see also Gal. 3.16, 3.26–9, 4.13 and Rom. 9.6–8). But at no point did the metaphor lose its potential to generate multiple imaginings of the relationship between reproduction and the potential for godliness. Not even Paul’s momentous spiritualization abolished from the movement that came to be called Christianity the possibility of imagining that the reproduction of godliness and the flesh are related. We can glimpse such possibilities in Paul’s own writings, as for example in his prohibition on mixed marriages (2 Cor. 6.14–7.1; Hayes 2002: 92–8). We can glimpse them in the genealogies of Jesus provided by the gospel authors (Mt. 1.1–17; Lk. 3.23–38). We can even see how the early Christian struggle over rights to Abraham’s lineage could potentially produce an alternate lineage for the Jews (‘You are from your father the devil’ [Jn 8.37–44]). And we can attempt to trace, if we wish, the biocultural imaginings that these passages potentiated across many Christian futures, including in our own times.37 In other words, we could write a history of the ‘racialization of religion’ that begins with the genealogical ideas that Muhammad and his muhājirūn brought with them in their migration from Mecca to Medina at the foundations of Islam. We could also write one that begins with Paul’s epistles (Buell 2004, 2005). We could join the long list of those who have looked back to Abraham’s migration from Ur in Genesis 12 and blamed the Israelites and their scriptures for attaching prophecy to the loins of lineage.38 Or we could seek to situate the earliest Israelite imaginings in the context of other Near Eastern ideas about lineage and prophecy (Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian/Zoroastrian, etc.) in which they arose and were repeatedly transformed, redacted and re-redacted.

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In every case we could claim that we had discovered within these religions the actualization of one potential among many: the potential to map the reproduction of culture onto the reproduction of the organism. We can and should compare that actualization to other mappings in other times and places, and ask how these relate to one another, and how they might contribute to a critical history and theory of race. But we should not imagine that the actualizations we discover constitute the origins of racism or the essence of those religions. For when we do so, we ourselves yield to a historical logic of lineage that is itself akin to that family of concepts we call race.

CHAPTER FOUR

Race and Science Black Skin in Medieval Medicine and Natural Philosophy MAAIKE VAN DER LUGT

After centuries of disengagement, the Latin West began, from the twelfth century, modestly to renew relations with Africa and Black Africans. The crusades, the Reconquest in Spain and the commercial ventures of the coastal cities bordering the Mediterranean Sea make up the central framework for this renewal of contact. Many Black people lived in Muslim territories, where they often functioned as slaves, servants or soldiers; as such westerners confronted Black troops within Muslim armies (Devisse 1979a: 2.1, 35, 86, and passim; Bindman and Gates 2010: 2.1.77–89 and passim).1 In addition, Black people were traded on the slave markets of Mediterranean port cities, even though, in contrast to the modern era but in conformity to antiquity, white slaves were more numerous.2 If the presence of Black people in the West remained unusual, artistic representations began during this period of Western expansion to reflect a genuine familiarity with sub-Saharan peoples, even in the northern regions of Europe, such as France and the Germanic lands. Lifelike portrayals of Black people, both negative (torturers of Christ) and positive (Saint Maurice or the Black Wise Man) demonstrate this new awareness (Devisse 1979a: 2.1.62 and passim; Bindman and Gates 2010: 2.1.119–20 and passim; see Figure 4.1).3 The figure of Maurice at the cathedral in Magdeburg (Figure 4.1) offers a striking instance of the new representational accuracy of Black Africans in Western Europe. To what extent did this emerging artistic interest in the physical appearance of Black people spread to natural philosophers and physicians?4 The issue is not a simple one. Medieval thinkers, who held Greek and Arabic intellectual traditions in highest regard, could not easily ignore Black peoples. The Latin translations of ancient and Arabic sources that became available beginning in the late eleventh century accorded them a distinctive place. This array of sources led medieval thinkers to discuss skin colour, the character and customs of Black peoples, and the link between climate and appearance. In deliberations about procreation, scholars interrogated the mechanism that transmitted skin colour from parents to children, mixed-race unions and the possibility that a white mother might bear a Black child solely through the force of imagination. Though dependence on Greek and Arabic traditions assured the presence of Black people in medieval natural philosophy and medicine, this same dependency can obscure the tenor and distinctive claims of medieval thinkers. The study of medieval discourses of skin colour requires that we attend to silences, subtle displacements and strategic choices.

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FIGURE 4.1  Statue of Saint Maurice as a Black African. Polychromed limestone; Magdeburg Cathedral, Germany, c. 1240–50. © Azoor Photo Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

We must also carefully assess whether scholastic treatises are theoretical in nature or reveal traces of direct contact with African people. When Albert the Great notes that the tongue and throat of Black people are excessively red ‘which appears when they open their mouths’, is he offering this observation based on personal experience, or at least on an eye-witness account? (De natura loci 2.3 [Albert the Great 1980b: 2.26]).5 We know that Albert’s scientific curiosity led him to personally examine all sorts of natural phenomena and to interview those with ‘experience’: women, physicians, workers and so on. Even if our conclusion must remain uncertain, it is worth raising the question. The investigation of medieval debates concerning black skin must also avoid all anachronism. Skin colour is a central criterion of classification in racial theories developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it remains in our own culture a crucial marker of social, political and cultural identities. Medieval culture was certainly not colour-blind, especially with regard to black skin, yet the latter did not inevitably possess the same connotations or

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valence as in later times (see Groebner 2003). Let us posit, then, that skin colour did not loom as a major concern for medieval thinkers. Physiognomy, a fully developed field of thought from the thirteenth century onwards, assigns just as much importance to roughness or smoothness, brightness or dullness, in the appearance of skin. Moreover, treatises on physiognomy concentrate on individual colour and not on colour as a marker of ethnicity. A final complication besetting the place and meaning of skin colour – and black skin in particular – lies in a technical lexicon that differs from ours. Before we can properly study medieval discussions about black skin, we must address the issue of terminology, a matter that reveals the ambiguities inherent in medieval classifications of skin colour.

ETHIOPS AND MAURUS Medieval sources deploy three main terms to designate Black people: ethiops, maurus and niger. The first of these terms presents no confusion. When a medieval author uses the term ethiops, one can be sure that he refers to an individual with dark skin, ‘African’ features and tightly coiled hair. In ancient and medieval geographical thought, Ethiopia refers to a region of Africa with indistinct borders. With the uptake of contacts with North Africa, certain portolan charts began, from the 1320s onwards, to situate the kingdom of Ethiopia correctly and to identify other parts of sub-Saharan Africa (cf. Bindman and Gates 2010: 2.2.120; Figure 4.2). Nonetheless, the term Ethiopian continued to convey the general sense of Black African. In his encyclopedia in the vernacular on the human body inspired by Aristotle’s Problemata, Girolamo Manfredi (d. 1492) underscores this generic denotation, glossing Ethiopians as ‘Black people’ (Girolamo Manfredi 1668: 252; ethiopi, cioè huomini negri).6 The other frequently used term of ethnicity, maurus (with its vernacular variations) is more ambiguous (Wartburg et al. 1922–2002: s.v. ‘maure’, 6.1.554). Its original meaning in classical Latin is ‘someone dwelling in Mauritania’, which takes on the general meaning of a Black African. Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) uses the word in this sense several

FIGURE 4.2  The King of Ghana sits on his throne, with sceptre. Catalan portolan chart (c. 1375), BNF MS Esp. 30. © BnF.

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times in his widely influential Etymologies, explaining that maurus comes from the Greek word for black (mauron). He sets the Moors, who possess horrid bodies like the night, against the Gauls, whose skin is white like milk (Isidore of Seville [1911] 1957: 19.23.7; see also 9.2.104, 110, 122). Nonetheless, Isidore also suggests another source for the term: maurus may be an adulterated form of Mede (9.2.122). In his Catholicon, a widely known encyclopedic dictionary, Giovanni Balbi of Genoa (d. 1298) brings both meanings together, expressly asserting that the second includes all the inhabitants of Mauritania, whether they have black skin or not (1496: s.v. ‘maurus’; sive sit niger sive non). The Dominican confines himself to the Isidorian tradition, but in the high Middle Ages the term maurus in addition took on the religious and cultural meaning of the Muslims who conquered Iberia, whose origins were in North Africa; in effect it served as a synonym of ‘Saracen’ or a kind of Saracen.7 If maurus could be meant to describe Black Muslims exclusively, the white Muslims of Spain could also be designated in this way. The term maurus is then ambiguous, and often only context determines its meaning. Thus around 1115 Guibert of Nogent describes a servant of the Bishop of Laon using ethiops and maurus interchangeably. The case likely involves a Black slave converted to Christianity: his first name is John (De vita sua 3.7 [Guibert of Nogent 1981: 328, 336]). Around 1200, the anonymous author of a collection of questions on medicine and natural philosophy also equates ethiops and maurus.8 On the other hand, in a political treatise written at the end of the thirteenth century, Alexander von Roes, a canon of Cologne, uses Mauri as a synonym for Hispani, clearly envisaging people whose skin is dark, but not black. Critiquing Isidore’s maurus-gallus binary, he avers that the French are clearly somewhat whiter than the Moors, but darker than northern peoples such as the Germans and the English.9 The ambiguity of the term no doubt explains why the Hispani vel Mauri have been replaced by the Greeks in a revised version of the Memoriale.10 Apparently driven by this same concern to avoid all uncertainty with respect to skin colour, Albert the Great refers to a maurus niger in a passage on mixed unions in his De Animalibus (see below).

NIGER: TWO MODELS FOR SKIN COLOUR The term niger, whether employed as a noun or an adjective, is still more difficult to interpret. It may designate a person with ‘African’ features, but that is not always the case. Every reference to black skin, even if it is set in contrast to white skin, cannot necessarily be deployed to recover medieval outlooks on Africans. The medieval scheme of skin colours is not the same as the one to which we are accustomed today. Moreover, in medieval learned sources, two systems of skin colour coexist, both of Greco-Arabic origin: one model that one may qualify as ‘medico-physiognomic’ and one that is ethnogeographic. It is not always clear which model an author has in mind, especially as the two systems often are mixed up in the sources. The Isagoge of Johannitius (Hunain ibn Ishaq) well represents the medico-physiognomic tradition. This Arabic introduction to Galenic medical thought, translated into Latin at the end of the eleventh century by Constantine the African, was at the core of the medical curriculum in the medieval West, but its influence transcended the framework of learned medicine (Johannitius 1978; see Jacquart 1986; O’Boyle 1998: 83–6). Vincent of Beauvais, for example, cites it extensively in the chapter on the colours of the body in his Speculum naturale (Vincent of Beauvais 1624: 31.111, 1.2382). Johannitius envisages five focal points for colour: black (niger), yellow (citrinus), red (rubeus), glaucus – a term

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difficult to translate, referring to pale, greenish skin – and white (albus) (Johannitius 1978: ch. 19, 155).11 In medieval discussions of skin such words are often weakened or modified (for example, subniger, subalbus), and other terms for in-between colours also appear, such as brunus (brown) or fuscus (dark, swarthy). According to Johannitius, skin colour is caused by the mixture of humours in the body. This mixture can be equal, corresponding to a colour composed of red and white, or unequal, corresponding to the five leading colours mentioned above. Each of the latter is associated with the domination of a particular humour, respectively black bile, red bile, blood, melancholy and phlegm. Medieval commentators explained that humours colour the skin because they are coloured substances, whereas the skin is white and translucent. Like their ancient and Arabic forebears, they ignored melanin as a factor. Instead, they based their understanding of skin colour on the model of paint or dye. In his Speculum medicine (c. 1308), Arnau de Vilanova, a prominent physician active at the university of Montpellier, likens the human skin to translucent plaster that can receive any colour (ch. 11 [Arnau de Vilanova 1520: fol. 4r]).12 Artisanal metaphors also provided an explanation for the difference between permanent and transitory colours. When the skin reddens in anger or shame, the colour is in the blood, but not in the skin, just like a clear glass panel only seems red when we hold a red cloth behind it (Van der Lugt 2018: 54). However, medieval physicians also qualified Johannitius’s account. The immediate cause of skin colour was not the mixture of humours, they noted, but the body’s ‘complexion’ or temperament, that is the proportion of elementary qualities, hot, cold, wet and dry. The humours endow skin with colour because every humour has a particular complexion (blood is hot and wet, phlegm cold and wet, red bile hot and dry, and black bile cold and dry). As such, they aligned themselves with Aristotle, Galen and Arabic physicians such as Haly Abbas (Ali ibn al-Abbas al-Majusi) and Avicenna (ibn Sina), who had mentioned colour in a list of external signs of complexion. For instance, cold and humid bodies are hairless, white, soft and fat.13 The two causal explanations are not incompatible and in medieval medicine complexion and humoral theory are imbricated. Humoral complexions (sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, etc.) are omnipresent and are sometimes conceived of as a mixture of humours rather than of elementary qualities.14 As a sign of complexion, colour can help the physician to establish the patient’s temperament in order to adapt regimen and treatment to every individual case. On the same basis, physiognomy posited a linkage between skin colour and character (Ziegler 2005), whereas astrology tied skin colour to the constellations. The Tetrabiblos of Ptolemy (translated for the first time into Latin in 1138 and known in the medieval West as the Quadripartitum) served as an important source for the idea that skin colour was determined by the dominant constellation at birth (Quadripartitum 3.11 [Ptolemy 1493: fol. 71v–73v]; Greek: Tetrabiblos 3.11.142–4 [Ptolemy 1940: 308– 10]). However, if skin colours reflect particular complexions these correspondences do not form a stable system. Johannitius assumed five leading colours, which allowed him to place red as a middle term between black and white, in accordance with medieval colour scales (Pastoureau 1989: 16–18), and to conceive of the sanguine complexion as the most favourable humoral temperament between two less healthy ones on either side. However, Hippocratico-Galenic medicine distinguished only four focal points of temperament. Johannitius resolved this difficulty by distinguishing between melancholy (melancholia) for pale and greenish skin and black bile (colera nigra) for black skin, whereas these two terms were often synonyms (Johannitius 1978: ch. 19, 155–6). Commentaries and other medieval texts on colour generally reduced the system to

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four colours in varying constellations, with white/phlegm and red/blood as the stable components, or avoided problems by not going into detail (see Van der Lugt 2018: 61–5). The crucial point for our purposes is to recognize that the medico-physiognomic model of skin colour pertained to the individual rather than collectivities, and that its purview was the inhabitants of the oikumene, which in our terms encompassed white peoples only. It has nothing to do with the classification of human beings into white, yellow, red and Black races.15 In the medieval medico-physiognomic model, the colour black does not refer to sub-Saharan peoples; it concerns instead a white person with swarthy skin. In his widely influential commentary on the Quadripartitum (translated into Latin in the mid-thirteenth century), Ali ibn Ridwan, an eleventh-century physician from Cairo known in the West as ‘Haly’, underscores that the physiognomic accounts of Ptolemy have to do only with the temperate zones. Of an Ethiopian born while Saturn was in the East (the astrological configuration causing pale skin, according to Ptolemy), one might say not that he is white but less black than other Ethiopians.16 Galen had already warned that signs of complexion did not apply outside the temperate zone (De complexionibus 2.6 [Galen 1976: 86]; Tegni 14.4 [Galen 2002: 316]). Recognizing this tension, Haly tried to reconcile the two colour systems. However, medieval thinkers often move from one system to the other without express acknowledgement. Johannitius, after locating the source of skin colour in the humours, professes that colour may also arise from external and circumstantial factors, such as the atmospheric cold among Scots or warmth among the Ethiopians.17 Perhaps on purpose, he does not use colour terms such as black and white here, but Latin commentators do (see references in Van der Lugt 2018: 57n34–5; 60n47–8). One notes this same slippage in treatises on physiognomy. In his Liber compilationis phisonomie (1295), the physician and philosopher Pietro d’Abano follows some individual interpretations of skin colour with ethnographic applications to particular peoples, without acknowledging that the meaning of the terms niger and albus are no longer the same.18

BLACK SKIN AND THE THEORY OF CLIMATES Neither Johannitius and his commentators, nor Pietro d’Abano acknowledge the problems that arise in passing from medico-physiognomic theory to the alternate system of colours rooted in the geographic tradition (Tooley 1953; Glacken 1967; Dalché 2009; Metzler [1997] 2009). Medieval learned cosmography organized the terrestrial globe, or the parts deemed climatically fit for human population, according to different schemes. The zonal system, which divided the world into five strips – two polar zones, two temperate zones and one torrid zone around the equator, between the tropics – had been known from the early Middle Ages onwards, particularly through Macrobius and Isidore of Seville. In this scheme, only the two temperate zones are considered inhabitable, while human population is thought to occupy the northern temperate zone, spread out over Europe, Asia and Africa. Translations from the Arabic and the Greek, notably Ptolemy’s Quadripartitum, introduced an alternative division, according to which the inhabitable and inhabited world can be divided into seven climates parallel to the equator. The outer and innermost climates are the extremes, the first being dominated by extreme heat, the seventh by extreme cold. A third system, also of ancient origin, divides the inhabited world into four quarters: North, South, East and West. Ancient and medieval authors often juxtapose these accounts, or use elements from them indiscriminately,

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without necessarily trying to work out a watertight synthesis. Beginning in the thirteenth century, several strains of thought combined to produce an extension (to the North, South and East) of the view of the world, and to loosen the link between the inhabitable and temperate zones; these included the recognition of discrepancies between traditional systems as these concerned the boundaries of the inhabitable world and knowledge derived from traditional geographic lore as well as from more recent commercial and missionary contacts. Medieval authors tended, moreover, to apply the idea of the world’s division into torrid, glacial and temperate zones rather loosely, specifically understanding these as referring to the entirety of the inhabited world, or simply to parts of it. According to climatic theory, the heat, cold and degree of humidity in various regions of the world determine the appearance and physical make-up of their inhabitants. Black skin characteristically arises in a warm and dry climate, white skin in a climate cold and humid, and the colour in between in a more mixed climate. Through the mechanism of complexion, place was, moreover, deemed to govern the character, intelligence, customs, laws and way of life of peoples living in different regions. The medieval West understood geographic theories and their relevance to skin colour through both ancient and Arabic works. An abbreviated version of Pliny’s account was available through Isidore of Seville,19 which remained influential throughout the Middle Ages. From the twelfth century onwards, parcels of classical thought about climatic determinism and skin colour spread through the translations of Ptolemy’s Quadripartitum, the Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, Places (De aere et aqua et regionibus), Galen’s De complexionibus as well as Haly Abbas’s medical encyclopedia, the Pantegni.20 To these are added in the thirteenth century (to mention only the most important sources) Aristotle’s De generatione animalium (which, however, mentions only tightly coiled or straight hair but not skin colour) and Problemata, as well as the pseudo-Aristotelian De proprietatibus elementorum and medical texts such as Avicenna’s Canon (1.2.2.1.11 [Avicenna 1507: fol. 32r]). Medieval authors attributed blackness of skin to the scorching effect of the sun. According to Isidore of Seville, Ethiopia takes its name from the skin colour of its inhabitants, the word being derived from the Greek words for ‘to burn’ and ‘face’ ([1911] 1957: 14.5.14; see also 9.2.122). Encyclopedists often stopped at this point, but authors of more theoretical and sophisticated works proposed more detailed explanations. Commentators on Johannitius theorized that the solar heat attracted blood to the area between the skin and the flesh, causing this blood to burn and thus darken the whole body. This is how the initial inhabitants of Ethiopia acquired their colour, some claimed; afterwards, with the strength of the sun, they passed this defect (vitium) on to their children (see references in Van der Lugt 2018: 57n34–5, 60n48). In the early fourteenth century, William of Mirica espoused similar ideas in his commentary on the pseudoAristotelian treatise on physiognomy dedicated to Pope Clement V.21 Other writers tried to clarify the role of the sun in the transmission of black skin from parents to children. Albert the Great offers by far the richest treatment in his De natura loci (1251–4) – among the most important and widely influential geographical treatises of the Middle Ages – as well as in his commentary on the De proprietatibus elementorum and his De animalibus. The Dominican reclaims from pseudo-Aristotle the idea that Ethiopians have black skin because the warm and dry uterus of Black women absorbs over-heated sperm. Its heat causes the liquid to evaporate, and the muddy residue dictates the colour of the child’s skin (De natura loci 2.3 [Albert the Great 1980b: 26] and De causis proprietatum elementorum 1.1.5 [Albert the Great 1980a: 57]). This dryness

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and heat also account for the sparse, dried out and textured hair of Black people (De natura loci 2.4 [Albert the Great 1980b: 27] and De causis proprietatum elementorum 1.1.5 [Albert the Great 1980a: 57]).22 Geographic determinism affects not only human creatures but also the animal and vegetable realms: bears and rabbits are brown or white depending on their native climate (De natura loci 2.4 [Albert the Great 1980b: 28]; De animalibus 22.2.1 [Albert the Great 1916–20: 1408]), and black peppercorns grow in hot zones (De natura loci 2.3 [Albert the Great 1980b: 26]). If, however, a hot and dry complexion causes blackness through over-heated sperm, that does not mean that the sperm itself is black. Aristotle had already rejected this idea, which he attributed to Herodotus (De historia animalium 3.22.523a). In his De animalibus Albert notes that all sperm is white due to its light, foamy nature, even among the most darkcoloured animals with dry and brownish skin, such as elephants (16.1.9 [Albert the Great 1916–20: 1088]).23 Albert expands his description of Black peoples to additional physical traits. Their flesh, which he likens to burning charcoal, is exceptionally reddish; the heat endows them with prominent lips and explains burst blood vessels in their eyes (De natura loci 2.3 [Albert the Great 1980b: 26]). But while the muddy residue of the sperm makes their skin conspicuously black, their bones and teeth – which are also earthly – are white; indeed, Albert maintains, they are even whiter than those of other peoples. The Dominican slips past this paradox which was the focus of one of the Problemata, translated into Latin in 1268 and unknown to Albert at this point (De natura loci 2.3 [Albert the Great 1980b: 26]). The Problemata account for the whiteness of the Ethiopians’ teeth through an analogy with wax, which becomes white in drying. Fingernails and toenails, on the other hand, are black because they grow from the skin (Aristotle, Problemata 10.66.898b [Aristotle 1991–4: 1.179]).24 Albert understands skin colour as one aspect of a general state, physical and physiological, which is bound to climate. Teeming with red bile and burned red bile, but lacking phlegm and natural black bile, the bodies of those living in torrid zones are light and agile, porous and dry because they continually lose moisture through evaporation, leaving a dry, muddy residue. They hardly suffer from fevers because fevers are caused by the putrefaction of humours, of which they have little, but with their vital spirit slipping away with the humidity so quickly, they barely live to thirty years (De natura loci 2.3 [Albert the Great 1980b: 26]).25 The lack of humidity leaves their sexual organs feeble and sterile; this same condition constricts the fertility of Black women, even though, once pregnant, they give birth with ease thanks to the suppleness of their uterine tissue. Among Nordic women just the opposite is true (De natura loci 2.3 [Albert the Great 1980b: 26]).26 In Albert’s account, the body’s complexion does not simply mirror the environment, however, it also reacts to it. People living in hot climates have cold hearts, he points out, because their humidity and spirit evaporate, whereas Nordic people have hot hearts and hot stomachs, because the external cold closes their pores and traps the heat inside their bodies (De natura loci 2.3 [Albert the Great 1980b: 26–7]). Here, Albert echoes the idea we encountered above that conventional signs of complexion only hold true in the temperate zone. Galen, followed by Haly Abbas, claims that peoples living in hot climates paradoxically have a cold rather than a hot complexion.27 Albert resorts to this idea to rationalize the supposed character traits of peoples living in extreme climates. Hot-hearted Northerners are naturally courageous, whereas coldhearted Ethiopians are naturally fearful. However, as far as intelligence and culture are concerned, he distinguishes between Ethiopians, on the one hand, whom he describes as stupid and savage, and Indians, on the other, who are experts in philosophy, mathematics

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and magic. Without naming them, Albert refers, more specifically, to the Brahmans or Gymnosophists. The notion that wisdom and the sciences originated with peoples in the East and the South, be they Indians, Egyptians, Babylonians or Greeks, was already a commonplace in the Ancient world, on a par with the idea that in war and conflict, southern peoples resort to ruses and poison, to compensate for their lack of courage and physical strength (Hahn 1978). Ptolemy had tried to account for the difference between Ethiopians and the wise people in the South without giving up climatic determinism, placing the latter in the southern part of the temperate zone rather than the torrid zone, which was the home of the savage Ethiopians (Quadripartitum 2.2 [Ptolemy 1493: fol. 30v and 31r]; Greek: Tetrabiblos 2.2.55–6 and 57 [Ptolemy 1940: 120–2 and 124]). Pietro d’Abano follows Ptolemy’s lead (Expositio in librum Problematum 14.15 [Pietro d’Abano 1482: no foliation]).28 Albert proposes for his part that the cultivated Indians live in the first climate, which is closer to the equator, and thus paradoxically more temperate, whereas the savage Ethiopians live in the hotter and less temperate second climate. He combines this with the astrological argument that the rays of the stars reach the Indians more directly.29 Arnau of Vilanova has no time for such complications and offers in just a couple of lines what may well be the most negative picture of people living in hot climates in medical and philosophical sources. Such people are short and black and look like apes. They are excitable, barbarous, quick to judge, jittery, yet fearful at the sight of blood, and more likely to fight their enemies through subterfuge than open battle. They eat little, but the heat drives them to excessive, even bestial sexual coupling, without respect for the gender, age or even the species of partners. Their only redeeming quality is their agility and swiftness of foot.30 Climate theory addresses collective groups living in the same geographic zone. Even if colour is a climatic contingency, it is also a permanent and shared physical attribute. To convey this tension, some medieval physicians mobilize the Hippocratic saying that ‘habit is like second nature’. As such, they separate ethnic colours from colours that are fleeting (emotions) or artificial (make-up), while bringing it closer to natural, individual colours (see Van der Lugt 2018: 59). What happens, however, if a Black person moves to the North? Despite the rarity of direct contact with Africa and the scant presence of Black people in medieval Europe, several medieval scholars raised this question. According to one twelfth-century physician, the force of habit is such that Ethiopians keep their colour in more northern regions. Their children are black also, because they have been engendered by burnt sperm and burnt menstrual blood and have nursed on burnt milk. Accidental colour has become natural and can be transmitted without the intervention of the sun. Others insist instead on the reversibility of this process. Blackened by the sun, the first inhabitants of Ethiopia transmitted this colour to their children, with the help of the sun. If Black people move north, they keep their colour and complexion, but their descendants will have lighter skin and will be almost white in three or four generations (Van der Lugt 2018: 60–1). Around 1300, an anonymous commentator on John of Sacrobosco’s Sphera also embraces the latter idea, which was already found in Haly’s commentary on the Quadripartitum,31 whereas Albert the Great espoused a combination of the two positions.32 They are not incompatible but, in fact, correspond to the medieval theory of generation and what would later be called the heredity of acquired characteristics. By the late thirteenth century, the reception of Avicenna’s Canon had led physicians to address the issue of adaptation to climate and Black people moving north also from a somewhat different angle. Avicenna stated that the complexions characteristic of peoples living in different climates are incompatible and seemed to suggest that Slavs who move

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to a warm climate or Indians who move to a cold climate would either fall ill or die (Canon 1.1.3.1 [Avicenna 1507: fol. 2v]). Medieval commentators qualify this account. Moving slowly is not dangerous, they opine, and Indians who follow health advice on the way could even end up healthier up north than in their country of origin. In the first half of the fifteenth century, one commentator called on facts of experience to further dissociate peoples from their climate of origin. Armies travel long distances, and the majority neither die nor fall sick; Black people (Ethiopes) who are brought to Europe as slaves do not all die or even fall ill, even though they do not follow the rules of slow adaptation either. Ugo Benzi’s meaning is clearly that Black people can adapt to new locations, even though their skin colour and other external characteristics defined in the process of generation remain the same (see Chandelier and Robert 2013: 496–9). By subscribing to the notion that ethnic complexions can change, medieval physicians neutralized the essentializing potential of Avicenna’s proposition (Ziegler 2009: 195–6), yet also implicitly neutralized possible reservations about conquest or the long-distance slave trade for reasons of health.

MIXED-RACE UNIONS Medieval authors present the gradual lightening of the descendants of Black people settled outside torrid zones as the result of the interaction of inborn complexion and climate rather than as the outcome of intermixing of individuals of different origin. One may imagine, however, that mixed-race unions were not unknown in the North African society where Haly lived or in late medieval Iberia.33 Elsewhere in Western Europe – and especially in England, in all likelihood the place of origin or residence of the anonymous commentator on the Sphera – such unions would, on the other hand, be extremely rare. Scholastic philosophers and physicians were nonetheless brought to reflect on mixed unions because of a brief allusion by Aristotle in his contentious discussion of the mechanism of generation. Supporters of the idea that sperm comes from all parts of the body cite as evidence the heredity of diseases and of other innate or acquired characteristics such as blemishes or scars. Aristotle retorts that the resemblance between parents and children is far too complex a phenomenon to be explained by pangenesis, if only because resemblances sometimes skip generations. As a case in point, he adduces a woman of Elis who had sexual relations with a Black man and gave birth to a white daughter, who later gave birth to a Black child (De generatione animalium 1.18.722a; see also De historia animalium 7.5.586a).34 For the theory of pangenesis Aristotle substitutes the idea that the sperm derives from food which is distributed throughout the body: passing through the heart it is first transformed into blood, and then circulating within the testicles, it becomes sperm by a process of coction and refinement.35 Resemblances and differences between parents and children depend on the vigour of the sperm and the passive resistance of the menses (Aristotle denied that women had active seed and maintained that menstrual blood was their sole means of participation in the process of generation). If the sperm is powerful, it imprints the form of the father; if less powerful, the form of the mother or that of other paternal or maternal ancestors more or less distant is imposed. If the sperm is especially weak, children will resemble no one in their family. Sperm may also be strong in one aspect and feeble in another; this explains daughters who resemble their fathers and sons who look like their mothers. The problem of the origin of the sperm, and of the causes of resemblances and disparities between parents and children, is equally at the heart of medieval controversies over

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generation. The case of the woman of Elis is cited as an example of atavism but scarcely examined in its own right. Some commentators on Aristotle’s zoological works neglect the case.36 In his De animalibus, Albert the Great offers hardly more than a paraphrase of the passage (15.2.10 [Albert the Great 1916–20: 1051]). Giles of Rome, the author of an extremely influential treatise on embryology produced between 1285 and 1295, is one of the rare scholastic authorities who attempts to shed light on the mechanism by which black skin recurs (De formatione humani corporis in utero ch. 19 [Giles of Rome 2008: 193– 205]).37 Clarifying Aristotle’s remarks on hereditary transmission, he explains that the sperm, in its role as the instrument of the formative power (virtus formativa) responsible for the formation of the embryo, possesses virtually (virtualiter) all the characteristics of the father. This allows the sperm to reproduce these characteristics in the embryo: this touches on essential resemblances (membership in the human race) as well as individual and particular features, such as sex, complexion, colour, size, shape and character, in as much as this last feature depends upon complexion. Furthermore, these different characteristics are independent. If the virtus formativa is strong for all characteristics, children will entirely resemble their father. In the opposite case, they can partially or totally resemble their mother or other ancestors. (Only inclusion in the species is inevitable, except for unusual cases of monstrous births.) The force of the sperm can be partially or totally inhibited by that which Galenic medicine terms the ‘non-naturals’ (non naturalia): these include external conditions that influence health, such as climate, the seasons, winds, exercise, the bath, diet, psychological states (of which imagination is one) or the influence of the stars. The fitness of the menses to receive this or that paternal form can also present an obstacle. Ever the faithful Aristotelian, Giles maintains that this explains not only the absence of resemblances to the father but likewise resemblances with the mother and her line, without unpacking how a purely passive resistance might have such an effect. On the other hand, he tries harder than Aristotle to describe the mechanism governing resemblances to other ancestors. The virtus formativa in the sperm contains not only virtually all the father’s traits but also, in some manner or other (quodammodo), the traits of the ancestors, to the extent that certain features of the ancestors are reflected (relucent) in the father (De formatione humani corporis ch. 19 [Giles of Rome 2008: 201]). These traits can be expressed again if the power of the paternal force is not sufficient, but that is rather rare, for the efficacy of the ancestors’ traits is only indirect, by reason of their latent presence in the father (De formatione humani corporis ch. 19 [Giles of Rome 2008: 201]). How one should imagine this presence in physical and physiological terms remains rather obscure, but Giles suggests that it is situated in the complexion of the heart. The daughter of the woman of Elis resembled her white mother externally, while she held her heart’s complexion and internal parts from her Black father. Thanks to this trace she was able to transmit her father’s colour to her own child, transforming an invisible resemblance into a visible one (De formatione humani corporis ch. 19 [Giles of Rome 2008: 204, 202]).38 Giles relies on the Aristotelian idea according to which the virtus formativa proceeds fundamentally from the heart insofar as nutrition is transformed into blood as it passes from the heart, before becoming sperm, but he glosses over the fact that colour is transmitted in the case of the woman of Elis by the mother and not by the father. For Giles of Rome and his contemporaries, as it had been for Aristotle, the woman of Elis is one example among others. On the whole, the interest of the scholastics in mixedrace births is limited. In repeating the Aristotelian anecdote, they nonetheless endorse the idea that for a child to be born Black, it would be enough to have a single Black ancestor, even far removed. However, these same authors often note almost in the same breath that

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it was possible for a white woman to give birth to a child of colour without any Black person in her lineage or that of her partner’s, through the force of her imagination.

BLACK SKIN AND MATERNAL IMPRESSION For learned medieval authors, the notion that vision and imagination could shape the appearance and in particular the colour of the foetus was scarcely in doubt. It is often introduced with expressions signalling low levels of credibility, such as ‘it is said’ (dicitur) or ‘it is reported’ (traditur), but Albert the Great articulates the common opinion, stating that maternal impression sounds amazing but is nonetheless a natural process (permirum sonat, licet sit physicum; Quaestiones 7.3 [Albert the Great 1955: 172]).39 In fact, the belief had a venerable history.40 One is able to follow its trajectory beginning with the Old Testament: Genesis recounts how Jacob made the lambs in Laban’s flock spotted by holding coloured branches before the eyes of the ewes in heat (Gen. 30.37–43). At the end of the fourth century ce Jerome associated this biblical episode with an anecdote drawn from Quintilian, a Roman rhetorician of the first century ce, which concerned humans, not livestock, and which was itself destined to become a celebrated example. It invested the idea of maternal impression with crucial social and juridical implications. A white woman gives birth to a Black child (aethiopem) and is accused of adultery. During the trial it is maintained in her defence, apparently successfully, that she had looked at or imagined a black image (Jerome, Hebraicae quaestiones in Genesim 30, 32–3 [Jerome 1958: 38]).41 Patristic authorities known in the Middle Ages provide little exposition on the phenomenon. Jerome simply says that it is ‘in the nature of women’ to beget infants who resemble what they have seen or imagined while in the throes of passion, an explanation reprised by Isidore of Seville. Augustine adds that the imagination, combined with passion, affects the foetus because the seeds are soft and malleable, in contrast to fully formed flesh which cannot be changed in this manner (De trinitate 11.2.5 [Augustine of Hippo 1955: 172–4]). In another instance, he cites (in error) Hippocrates as a source for the idea of maternal impression, making him the hero of a similar anecdote about a mother wrongly accused of adultery, adding medical authority to that of the Bible (Quaestionum in Heptateuchum libri VII, ‘Quaestiones in Genesim’ 93 [Augustine 1958: 35]).42 In their commentaries on Genesis, medieval exegetes hardly go beyond Jerome and Augustine. However, Jacob’s lambs and the Black newborn recur unceasingly in the debates of philosophers and physicians concerning the causes of variations in the resemblances between parents and children, and in discussions about psychosomatic phenomena. There are many variations to the story of the Black infant: the child can also be a dwarf, a monster or resemble the devil; the mother is sometimes a married woman, sometimes a noblewoman, sometimes a queen; accused of adultery, it is the expertise of a priest or a physician that acquits her. Sometimes, merely looking or imagining seems enough; more often, as in Augustine and Jerome, maternal impression also involves passion and desire. Radically reversing the perspective of the story, a version first found in late twelfth-century medical texts associated with the school of Salerno claims that the shameful imagination of two lovers can make their child resemble the woman’s cuckolded husband (Lawn 1979: B46, 22–3; see also P 34, 220 and W7, 268–9). ‘Many men have been deceived this way,’ notes Dino del Garbo, a North Italian physician, in the early fourteenth century.43 In line with these theories and anecdotes, later medieval legal thought and practice admitted neither resemblances nor their absence as sufficient evidence in paternity cases.44

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Not content with accepting the reality of maternal impression, and warning against images of Black men in the bedroom, some medieval physicians and philosophers tried to explain the mechanism of maternal impression. In the medieval West, physicians associated with the city of Salerno seem to be the first to have done so. It is worth noting that the Greco-Arabic medical sources available in Latin at that time seem to ignore maternal impression.45 Galen had not discussed it any more than Hippocrates, and this may explain why many Arabic medical texts said nothing on the matter either. These texts did, however, recognize the impact of emotions and other ‘accidents of the soul’ on the body. At the end of the twelfth century, Urso of Salerno suggests a parallel between maternal impression and the physical effects caused by emotions and the power of suggestion: horrifying thoughts make one vomit, to see someone yawn makes one yawn. His explanation rests on the Galenic psycho-physiology of the spirits, namely the flow made up of minute particles that maintain the vital functions. These spirits mediate the influence of vision and imagination to the foetus. At first the spirit receives the image, whether seen or imagined (formam rei visae vel imaginatae). The spirits then arrive at the place of generation and transform ‘the seed or the members’ (in the latter case, the embryo is apparently already formed) (De commixtionibus elementorum 4.4 [Urso of Salerno 1976: 124–5]).46 The anonymous author of another Salernitan question bolsters this explanation with the idea that the sperm originates in the brain, reflecting one theory of spermatogenesis current in the twelfth century (Lawn 1979: P34, 220). According to the model of Galenic psychology, the brain (or more precisely, its anterior ventricle) is also the seat of the imagination. From the thirteenth century onwards, the reception of Aristotelian natural philosophy and other new philosophical and medical sources changed the terms of the debate about maternal impression. Regarding the imagination essentially as a phase in the treatment of sense data, Aristotelian thought did not encourage in-depth reflections on the impact of the imagination on the body.47 Not by chance did Giles of Rome, a thoroughgoing Aristotelian, waste little time on maternal impression, considering it as very rare at most (De formatione humani corporis ch. 19 [Giles of Rome 2008: 204]). Medieval authors also had to determine their position with respect to Avicenna, who, on the contrary, accords an extensive scope of power to the imagination in his writings on the power of the soul. Following the Neoplatonic tradition, Avicenna considers the imagination as a link between the terrestrial and celestial sphere. He goes so far as to suggest that there are certain people possessed of a soul and imagination so noble that they can prophesy naturally and act on the bodies of others, as for example in the instance of the evil eye (see Michot 1986). In his Canon, Avicenna upholds the influence of the mother’s imagination on the colour and appearance of the foetus and he complains of uninformed people who deny the reality of the phenomenon (1.2.2.1.14 and 3.21.1.2 [Avicenna 1507: fol. 33r–v, 362ra]). The Avicennian theory of the imagination is difficult to reconcile with Christian orthodoxy and with the Aristotelian framework, since it poses a risk for Christian miracles and supposes distant action. It is rejected by the majority of scholastic authors and condemned on several occasions, but it nevertheless captivated and fuelled debate, making room for a range of hypotheses.48 To engage here in detail with the debates on the imagination’s corporeal effects would lead us too far from our main purpose. Suffice it to say that the topic of maternal impression comes up frequently and is accepted even by those most hostile to the Avicennian amplification of the imagination’s power. The foetus sometimes plays the role of limit case, establishing the conditions and limits of the imagination’s influence on the body. It could be considered a part of the woman’s

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body, its matter so malleable that it could receive impressions solid flesh could not. Some scholars did express doubts as to how the imagination could have lasting effects on the colour of the foetus, when the changes in skin colour under the influence of emotions were only fleeting (see Van der Lugt 2005: 466–8).49 Strikingly, however, uncertainty about the precise mechanism of maternal impression did not lead to outright denial of its reality. Instead, medieval scholars avow their ignorance or note that nature operates in hidden ways.

CONCLUSION Skin colour, we have seen, is the external manifestation of complexion. Complexion itself, however, is an extraordinarily pliant concept. On the one hand, it is an individual attribute, each person having a unique temperament that determines the state of their health, their physical appearance and even their character – in short, their identity. On the other hand, complexion is also a collective and ethnographic attribute which operates to mark out particular populations.50 The term niger refers to black skin only in this second sense. To complicate things further, complexion is at once stable and volatile. Innate complexion varies according to different factors: disease, age, emotional states, external causes such as nourishment, rest, the quality of the ambient air and the stars.51 Conception marks the crucial moment in determining the innate complexion. The seeds of the parents – or the sperm and the menstrual blood, according to the Galenic or Aristotelian bent of authors – do not in any way, however, constitute decisive principles in ways that resemble modern genetics. The notion of skin colour as a genetic marker transmitted from generation to generation by way of seeds is not completely absent, as the discussions on mixed-race births and atavism witness. This understanding of the causality of skin colour turns up paradoxically also in the anecdote about the newborn blackened through maternal impression, for the mother is immediately accused of adultery with an Ethiopian. The story and the theoretical discussions that follow upon it reveal unmistakably, however, the abyss that separates medieval theories of generation from our own. Children’s complexion and colour depend on the seeds of their parents, but these are subject to the influence of the same ‘non-natural’ factors that make innate complexion vary in the course of life: food and drink, the quality of the ambient air, mental states, the stars and so on.52 These external factors can be the cause of differences, but also of resemblances, between parents and children. According to the theory of climates, the transmission of skin colour within the same ethnic group is the rule, but it depends on the action of the sun. Black people who move to colder climates retain their colour and complexion and engender Black children, but over several generations a gradual whitening was thought to take place. Geographic determination is a subtle process of adaptation to climate and of interaction between the parents’ innate complexion and the environment. Even though medieval physicians tend to consider ethnic colour as more natural and intrinsic than their Greek and Arabic models had done, we remain very far from modern theories of heredity and race. Are medieval medical and natural philosophical theories of black skin colour then of no cultural consequence? It is striking that no value judgements accompany the discussions of the woman of Elis. It is merely a conspicuous case of atavism. Likewise, in the accounts of maternal impression, it is the mother’s presumed adultery and not the black colour of her conjectured lover that causes scandal. The belief plays on male insecurities, not anxieties about race.53 Maternal impression was not seriously questioned until the seventeenth and

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eighteenth centuries, without disappearing entirely from the realm of belief.54 In 1922, Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, still offered a distinct echo in discouraging white women from reading novels featuring Black characters (Negerromane) during their pregnancies (Steiner 1976: 185).55 In contrast to Steiner’s overtly racist use of the belief in maternal impression, medieval accounts present the dark skin of the infant as no more than particularly striking evidence of the mother’s supposed infidelity. Significantly, a monstrous or diabolical creature can be swapped for the Black child without changing the import of the story. The linkage of black skin, the devil and monstrous births is, of course, in no way positive; it reflects a long tradition of associating the colour black with sin, the devil and ugliness. In Christian exegesis the Black African is often a metaphor for sin.56 But the central point remains unchanged: the child’s appearance stands as an anomaly for the audience’s expectations. In other narratives, the theme of mixed-race unions and their offspring scarcely produces more of a stir. In romances, such matches intensify the marvellous and exotic elements in the story.57 Wolfram von Eschenbach thus features a character part-white, part-black in Parzival (early thirteenth century). Half-brother of the hero, born of a union between Parzival’s father and a Black woman, Queen Belakane of the land of Zazamanc, Feirefiz sets off for India in order to become the ancestor of Prester John (see Hahn 2001a: 16–18).58 For theology, the classic text concerning mixed-race unions occurs in a scriptural passage concerning the reproaches that Miriam and Aaron direct at Moses for his marriage to an Ethiopian woman (Num. 12). The Old Testament does not specify the reasons for Miriam’s and Aaron’s anger, and patristic, Jewish and medieval exegetes proposed a number of hypotheses; in none of these did the skin colour of the Ethiopissa play any role.59 A number of medieval authors adopt explicitly relativist positions. In a treatise on the nature of demons from 1268, the philosopher Witelo, who was born in Poland and studied at Paris and Padua, thus interprets the powerful association between the colour black and the devil as a cultural imposition. According to Witelo’s inventive demonology, apparitions of angels and devils are only mirages caused by a malfunction of the brain. When this organ is disturbed by phlegm, sick people see white phantasms; when black bile is the cause, they see Black figures. The meaning imposed on these apparitions depends, however, on the geographic origins of the patient: among us (apud nos) in the North (in homine septentrionali) people construe white figures as angels and Black figures as demons, whereas among the Moors (apud Mauros) the colours are reversed. This contrast derives from the fact that every human grouping believes itself the best and tends to set up its own physical appearance, its own mores and customs as the norm, and then to project this ideal onto the structure of the celestial hierarchy (Witelo 1979: 169–70; see also Paschetto 1978). Witelo is a deeply original spirit and his treatise remained little known outside scholastic circles. He is not, however, the only medieval author to relativize ideals of beauty. One finds similar ideas in medieval travel literature, such as Marco Polo’s Travels,60 the English and German translation of the Travels of John Mandeville61 and Jacques de Vitry’s Historia orientalis.62 Black people do not, however, evade negative value judgements presented as objective realities anchored in their physical being. One encounters them charged with savagery, turpitude, stupidity. The white peoples living in northern Europe are equally the object of unflattering judgements: their physical strength and natural courage come at the price of a sluggish intelligence. It is in the intermediate regions between north and south that we find the blessed owners of a skin mixed from white and black pigments. Combining the positive characteristics of the two extremes, they enjoy a long lifespan and optimal natural, intellectual and moral faculties. Accordingly, they practice justice, keep their word, respect

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peace and the rules of life in society. In marked contrast with the Aryan ideal, medieval ethnic categories rest not on a hierarchical scale with white at the top and Black at the bottom, but on an idea of a happy medium. Given that these theories originated in the Mediterranean, this region is defined as the physical, cultural and moral norm. Medieval scholars were directly inspired by ancient models, but insofar as they live and work in regions more northern and western, one notices at times displacements in the definition of the norm in those directions.63 On the other hand, the characterization of Black people in medieval writings is more negative than in ancient sources. Arnau of Vilanova, who assimilates Black people physically with apes while accusing them of bestial sexual practices, is particularly harsh. The portrait drawn by him of peoples in the North is not as virulent. One might ask if this deeply negative view of Black people is not explained in part by the fact that after growing up in Valencia – among a Muslim population that had recently been ‘reconquered’ – Arnau lived in Barcelona, one of the most important centres for the slave trade in the West. This propagation of negative stereotypes of Black people was by no means exclusive to the medieval West. Arab geographical writings contain degrading accounts of Black Africans, and Avicenna links Black people with Aristotle’s ‘slaves by nature’. The Jewish polymath Maimonides was steeped in Arab and Islamic philosophical and medical traditions; in his Guide for the Perplexed, translated from Hebrew into Latin before 1240, he maintained that Black people were not humans but animals, just above the level of apes, using the scheme of climatic determinism, mixed with the idea that these people have no religious belief.64 Even if the concept of hereditary transmission in the current sense of the term did not yet exist in the Middle Ages, negative stereotypes of Black people nonetheless found justification through a scientific framework. The theory of climates, physiognomy and the notion of complexion established an express relation of cause and effect between physical attributes, such as skin colour, and non-physical characteristics, such as customs and intelligence. The inferiority of Black people is presented as inherent in their physical constitution. It is true that their constitution depends on external factors such as climate and that even their innate complexion is sometimes thought of as subject to change. It is true as well that medieval physiognomic writings concentrate on the individual, and that the ethnic hierarchies of medieval geographic literature do not match the lines of difference that separate human groups in later writings. It is true, finally, that medieval scholars ultimately had little interest in skin colour. It is only the idea of a link between physical and non-physical difference that places medieval ethnic discourse in dialogue with theories of race from more recent times.

CHAPTER FIVE

Race and Politics GERALDINE HENG

A comprehensive and nuanced understanding of race and politics cannot develop without an adequate conception of what race is. Those of us cognizant of critical race theories have long recognized that the most common assumption – widespread in public discourse – that race is a system of differentiation based on somatic, bodily, or physiognomic differences, or DNA, is inadequate and specious. Countervailing formulations, however, such as the suggestion that race is primarily a social construct, have also met with critique and dissent (see e.g. Hacking 1999). In 2011, en route to completing my 2018 book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, I thus proposed a simple and stripped-down, minimum working hypothesis of race: Race is one of the primary names we have – a name we retain for the epistemological, ethical, and political commitments it recognizes – for a repeating tendency, of the gravest import, to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, so as to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups. (Heng 2018b: 3; italics in the original) With such a hypothesis, we can see race-making operating as historical occasions in which strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices and pressures, so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. My understanding, thus, is that race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences – a mechanism of sorting, for purposes of prioritizing and hierarchizing – rather than a substantive content. The understanding that race is a structural relationship for the management of human differences so as to prioritize among human groups allows for a recognition of how both a somatic, physiological base and a cultural, social or religious superstructure can be produced for purposes of race-making in the medieval period and beyond. Accordingly, the differences selected for essentialism will vary in the longue durée of human history from the pre-modern eras well into the twenty-first century – perhaps fastening on bodies, physiognomy and somatic differences in one instance; perhaps on social practices, religion or culture in another; and perhaps a multiplicity of interlocking discourses elsewhere.

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Thus it happens that medieval Jews – carefully distinguished by medieval Christianity from the biblical Hebrews who continued to remain admired and extolled – can be racialized for their putative somatic differences as well as their religio-cultural differences. Somatically, medieval Jews were said to have a special stench emanating from their bodies (the foetor Judaicus), to possess a peculiar facial physiology (the facies Judaica), even to have horns and a tail. Jewish men were said to bleed congenitally from their nether parts, like menstruating women: a fictional blood loss that conveniently fed another fiction, the popular lie that Jews needed the blood of Christian children, whom they supposedly mutilated and crucified in reenactments of the deicide of Christ.1 Simultaneously, Jews were also racialized by a species of Christian political theology representing them as God-killers, as tormentors of the consecrated host or the Virgin Mary, and as coconspirators of Satan and the Antichrist to come. At best, they were to be allowed to exist conditionally, according to the Augustinian tradition of relative tolerance, till the last days, at which point they would transform into Christians via conversion, and cease to exist as Jews, in a mass extinction of religio-racial identity. In England, Jews were forced to wear a badge on their chest to set them apart from the rest of the local population; forced to live in cities with a registry by which their livelihoods and economic endeavours could be monitored; forced to hew to a panoply of laws that circumscribed their movements, from the ability to walk in public during Holy Week and the ability to socialize in the homes of Christian neighbours, to the ability to pray at a permissible volume in synagogues. Imprisoned disproportionately for coinage offences, periodically slaughtered by mobs and judicially executed by the state for trumped-up charges of child murder, Jews also had conversionist sermons preached at them, were taxed to the edge of penury and, once impoverished, were manipulated in a final exploitation that produced their mass expulsion in 1290. An extraordinary surveillance system – an economic panopticon – was devised by the state to monitor their livelihoods, a panopticon that ramified into sociocultural control well beyond economic rationality, so that by the time of their expulsion, English Jews needed permission to establish or to change their residences and were forbidden to live among Christians in a segregation of urban geography that suggested the beginnings of the ghetto.2 With just one example – medieval Jews – before our eyes, we see how racial formation functioned both biopolitically and religio- and socio-culturally in the European Middle Ages: biologizing, essentializing and defining an entire community as fundamentally and absolutely different, in an interknotted cluster of ways. Nature and the sociocultural are thus not bifurcated spheres in race formation: they often criss-cross in the practices, institutions and laws operationalized on the bodies and lives of individuals and groups.

THE POLITICS OF RACE IN SIX EXAMPLES The politics of race in nation and state formation England has the well-earned distinction, I have argued, of constituting the first racial state in the history of the West. Racial politics in England, producing Jews as a raced internal minority via a variety of mechanisms, formal and informal, conduced to the emergence of England as an imagined political community, a medieval nation. At the same time, even as culture, art, literature and popular opinion functioned in the service of nation formation

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in a politics of race, state instruments and apparatuses devised for the surveillance and control of the Jewish population sped the intensification of English state formation. The realization of a totalizing edifice for the intensive sorting, manipulation and control of Jewish lives and bodies through a panoply of measures, cumulatively saw the de facto formation of an early racial state in the West.3 Medieval England is thus a striking, early example of how mechanisms of race-making that devolved from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries accrued political agency in securing nation formation and state formation. Badges that identified the target minority population at a glance; communally told stories of Jewish perfidy to Christian sacred figures and Christian children; economic resentment by all strata of society over their dependence on loans issued by Jewish financiers; and repeated reminders that an alien infidel nested in the heartlands of the Christian West, even as Christendom fought against an alien infidel in international war for centuries: this, and more, enabled the internal divides of England’s majority population –  divides of class, language, region and even free and unfree status – to be elided, as a community postulated its shared unity against the internal alien. The shifting focus of England’s stories about its Jewish minority over the course of a century and more registers well the purpose, trajectory and mechanics of race-making in the nation’s culture. In the thirteenth century, the story of young Hugh of Lincoln – one of seven famous boy-‘martyrs’ putatively killed by Jews, boys whose shrines attracted pilgrims and powerful emotions of Christian devotion and community – that was set down in an Anglo-French ballad sometime between 1255 and 1272, focuses fixedly on the malignity of a conspiracy of Jews who torture the pitiful child at excruciating length, and finally stab him to death. In the thirteenth century, nascent nationalist impulses based on a projective shared commonality as Christian victims of Jewish malignity within England’s borders required the production of the internal alien as a coordinated conspiracy of villains. By contrast, a century later, stories of Hugh’s ‘martyrdom’ and that of other vulnerable children, while still fingering Jews as culprits, increasingly shift their interest from the Jewish villains to focus in detail instead on the rituals, institutions and paraphernalia of Christian community. Jews, while remaining handy villains, see their role in these later stories attenuated, as the stories prefer to emphasize the triumphal coalescence of a community of Christians unified in their practices and celebrating themselves as a public, religious and national body. Christian rites, Christian sacraments, Christian leaders, Christian song, Christian Mass, Christian devotees, Christian catechism, even Christian architecture are celebrated and apotheosized. A century later, a medieval nation grounded in a shared Christian communal identity is busily glorifying itself and consolidating stability through the exhibition of its institutions and practices (see Heng 2018b: 81–96). Spontaneous community actions of this kind – from outbreaks of mob violence resulting in the massacre of Jews, to stories such as Hugh’s, which led to the judicial execution of nineteen Jews of Lincoln in 1255 – accounted for one aspect of the racial state. In their turn, Church and state actions devolved into ever more systematic, coordinated and organized mechanisms of raced control. The Exchequer of the Jews – that administrative panopticon devised in the 1190s out of the state’s recognition that it would be profitable to monitor Jewish assets systematically – saw the incremental elaboration of its functions, so that eventually ‘the whole framework of [Jewish] society passed under its review’ (Gross 1887: 38).

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Scholars have increasingly appreciated how wide-ranging this government agency’s purview has been. Its quotidian powers of oversight and intervention intersected at four of the principal powers of governmentality: collection, enforcement, administration and adjudication. Originally devised to oversee the network of registries established in cities and towns where Jews practiced their livelihoods, so as to track Jewish assets and economic activity for purposes of state taxation and special expropriations called tallages, the agency’s work eventually ramified far afield. The agency became responsible for rooting out, preventing, controlling and punishing a range of behaviours: concerning the establishment of synagogues, the appropriate auditory volume of Jewish worship, dues payable to parishes, Christian wet nurses of male Jewish infants, other Christian servants of Jews, Christians eating and tarrying in the homes of Jews, secret intercourse of an intimate nature between Christians and Jews, Jewish purchase and consumption of meat in Lent, display of the Jewish badge on the chest, hindrances to Jewish conversion to Christianity, Jewish debate or criticism of Christianity, conditions under which Jews were allowed to enter churches, not receiving Jews into various towns and so forth (Rigg 1902: xlviii). In 1232, Henry III created a Domus Conversorum, a house of converts, to serve as a residence for Jews who had converted to Christianity. By law, Jewish converts to Christianity were stripped of their assets, became penniless and had to be supported in the monastery-like environment of the Domus, which allowed for a spartan subsistence. In a cruel turn of economic efficiency, the Jewish community of England was made to finance the House of Converts in which the former members of their community were supported. In existence for three hundred years, the Domus eventually became the site of Rolls House, and then the Public Record Office, where Chancery business was conducted and the records of the nation were kept. With savage irony, this symbolic use of urban geography thus memorializes the purifying of national space by keeping the documentary records of the nation’s business sited where the nation’s minority community of Jews ceased to be Jews and were made to disappear (Heng [2003] 2012: 90). Visible in the myriad details of the panopticonic administration of Jews in medieval England is thus the agile machinery of a peculiarly persistent, energetic, inventive and invasive species of state racism at work. The Jewish Exchequer, the Domus Conversorum, the aggregate of laws and decrees ruling on Jewish lives, and the network of registries monitoring Jewish livelihoods organized the racial state’s most visible public institutions and infrastructure. This constituted the economic and political machinery of state racism at work. The tagging of Jewish people with a badge – whose features were prescribed, respecified, enlarged, recoloured, moved around into ever-more-prominent positions on the body and apparel, and extended to the bodies of children – and the herding of individuals and families, from 1275 on, into towns with registries, in urban spaces segregated from Christians, are part and parcel of the racial state’s signifying apparatus: the way state racism signs itself materially on the bodies and lives of Jews.4 Race in medieval England, however, was not initially a matter of centralized, consciously coordinated creation by the administrative state but the product and consequence of a series of local and contingent operations – improvisations of law, institutions and apparatuses responsive to opportunity or exigency. Aggregatively, these improvisations interlocked on the bodies, lives and livelihoods of England’s subalternized Jewish subjects in an incremental politics of race that amounted, in sum, to state racism.

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The politics of race and religion Religion, of course, constituted the foundational discourse of the European Middle Ages – as science has since constituted the foundational discourse of the post-Enlightenment eras – and was a prime crucible for the knowledge system of the medieval period. The role of religion and Christian political theology in medieval racial formation accordingly affords examples of race-making so numerous that they twist together a continuing thread winding its way through any discussion of medieval race, including this one. Constituting the intimate infidel ensconced in the heartlands of the Latin West, Jews burgeoned into an alien race by being stigmatized as God-killers, deniers of the Messiah, conspirators with Satan and the Antichrist, and the ultimate enemies of Christendom and Christians at home.5 The infidel with whom Christians contended overseas, in Outremer, and constituting the international foe in the killing fields of war – Muslims – were racialized also, like Jews, in terms of their religion. Religio-racial strategies exercised against Muslims, like those against Jews, assumed a variety of forms. One set of strategies with resonating consequences concentrated on herding a multiplicity of Near Eastern, Eurasian and Asian peoples into a single group collectivity defined solely by their religion, Islam, and then characterizing Islam as being founded on pernicious lies, with its founding figure of the Prophet as the ultimate liar and consummate heresiarch.6 Though a number of names existed for the international enemy that Latin Christendom fought in its holy wars – Ishmaelites or Ismaelites, Agarenes or Hagarenes, Moors, Turks, Arabs, Persians, Ottomans, Mohammedans or, more pejoratively, infidels, heathens, pagans and even heretics – the pre-eminent name by which the enemy was known in the Latin West for centuries was Saracens.7 A word of Greco-Roman origin that, in late antiquity, referred to pre-Islamic Arabs, Saracens streamlined a panorama of peoples – of diverse geographic origins, linguistic communities and ethnoracial affiliations – into a single demographic entity defined by its adherence to Islam alone. Such flattening out of all human identity attributes so that only their religion remained to name the multifarious populations of the world astonishes: clearly, to the Christian authors of the Latin West, Islam was an essence-imparting machine that conferred quintessential identity. Made over into an instrument of essentialism, Islam raced all Muslim believers into a singular, homogenous whole.8 At the same time, the naming of everyone in that miscellaneous, collective body as Saracens embedded a lie at the heart of the raced identity attributed to the collectivity. The name Saracens is first used by Saint Jerome (347–420 ce), the church father who tells us that Arabs took for themselves the name of Saracens in order to falsely claim a genealogy from Sarah, the legitimate wife of Abraham, ‘“to conceal the opprobrium of their origin” because their true mother, Hagar, was a slave’ (Jerome, Commentariorum in Ezechielem prohetam cited in Mastnak 2002: 105). The church historian, Sozomen (400–50 ce), roughly coterminous with Jerome, arrived at a similar conclusion (Fowden 1993: 147n33). Arabs (also known as Ishmaelites because they derived their lineage from Ishmael, the son of Sarah’s Egyptian bondwoman Hagar) were thus represented as acutely aware of, and highly sensitive to, Galatians 4.30 (ESV) – ‘Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman’ – a stigma they putatively tried to hide by fabricating a false genealogy for themselves that claimed they were the descendants of Abraham’s legitimate wife Sarah, not the concubine

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and slave, ‘because they were ashamed of their ancestor Ishmael’s real mother, Hagar’ (Fowden 1993: 147). Islam’s arrival in the seventh century and its rapid succession of territorial conquests then induced a ramification of the fake etymology. Spreading their empire like wildfire, Arab Muslims seemed, like their ancestor Ishmael in Genesis 16.12, to raise their hand against all, with the hand of all raised against them, living at odds with their brethren in the desert. Genesis 16.10, prophesying that Ishmael’s descendants would be an uncountable multitude, now seemed to describe a growing, dispersed population of all kinds of Muslims whose numbers were, indeed, becoming uncountable. Thus, continuing the logic of the lie, Isidore of Seville in the seventh century concluded that ‘Saraceni’ was a corruption that made it look as if Ishmaelites were descended from Sarah (Etymologiae 9.2.6). Others, like the continuator of the Chronicle of Fredegar, concurred: ‘Ismaelites … are called Saracens, by a corruption of the word’ (Daniel 1975: 53). But by whose corruption of the word did Ishmaelite Arabs and Muslims who were not Arabs transform into ‘Saracens’ – a word, in fact, with no Arabic equivalent, and never used by either Arabs or Muslims to describe themselves? Attributing the invention of the name ‘Saracens’ to the enemy, as a sly act of selfnaming by the enemy, is thus not only an ingenious lie but a lie that ingeniously names the enemy as wily liars, in the very act of naming them as enemies. Beginning with the identification of diverse populations as a single race characterized and defined, at its very origin, as the wily originators and disseminators of a collective lie, Christian ideological combat with Muslims turned on a panoply of lies that aggregated the racial character of Muslims as a collectivity of liars. What is this, if not a politics of race?

The politics of race and colonization Europe’s maritime empires of the early modern and high modern eras receive considerable scholarly scrutiny in the academy, because of the scale and impact of these colonial enterprises around the world. The European Middle Ages, however, was also an era that witnessed a range of colonial operations, from the failed settler colonization of the North American continent by Greenlanders and Icelanders to the colonization of the Levant via the crusades that sped the fiscal and technological ‘rise of the West’ through transfers of knowledge and technology to internal invasions and occupations within Christendom itself, like AngloNorman England’s colonization of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Indeed, medievalists have long argued that colonial experiments occurring during the medieval period helped devise templates that conduced to the ideological work of the later, modern, European colonial empires (see e.g. Muldoon 2003). One of the most important of medieval colonial strategies – the will of God, as the abbot of Nogent-sur-Coucy, Guibert and other crusade chroniclers and theologians put it – crucially creolized that older model of colonization, imperial Rome’s, by importing God and Christianity into the Latin West’s justification for invasion, occupation and colonial dominion in the Levant, when crusader colonies, ports and hinterlands were crafted out of that series of holy wars we call the crusades. The later ages of European colonial dominion – the much-studied maritime empires of Portugal, Spain, Holland, England, France, Belgium and others around the globe in the early modern and modern eras – thus had medieval Christendom’s template of

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colonization for a playbook and, unlike Rome but like medieval Christendom, came bearing both the sword and the Book to subjugate the races of the world. Understandably, perhaps the trickiest colonial enterprises to justify in the medieval period turned on internal colonization within Christendom itself. How might England justify its twelfth-century invasion and occupation of Ireland, when the Irish were neither ‘Saracen’ infidels, Jews, pagans nor heathen, and had become Christian a century and a half before England itself? Differences between Christianity and whatever the subject population’s infernal religion might be could not, here, serve as a racializing mechanism by which the target population could be defined and condemned, so as to justify invasion and occupation. Anglo-Norman England nonetheless proved resilient in crafting a politics of race based on religion. English colonial dominion of Ireland acquired a theological hermeneutic that insinuated differences of a fundamental kind between the Christianity of the Irish (rendered as inferior, defective and deviant) and the Christianity of the colonizers (rendered as superior and normative). The magisterial twelfth-century theologian Bernard of Clairvaux in his Vita Sancti Malachiae declared the Irish to be ‘uncivilized in their ways, godless in religion, barbarous in their law, obstinate as regards instruction, foul in their lives: Christians in name, pagans in fact’ (Bartlett 1982: 169; emphasis added). Given that Irish Christians were ‘pagans in fact’, Pope Adrian IV, writing to Henry II of England in 1155, could authorize the English monarch to occupy Catholic Ireland, ‘with a view to enlarging the boundaries of the church … and for the increase of the Christian religion’ (Muldoon 2003: 73). Exposition of a fundamental difference in Irish Christianity was accompanied, of course, by the elaboration of Irish socio-economic and cultural differences: layer upon layer of negative judgements were nested in such a way as to render the Irish savage and uncivilized, needing to be tutored by England in order that Ireland might one day attain civilized status. Ireland’s pastoralism was derided and condemned as laziness and moral laxity; Irish urbanism was deemed deficient and primitive. Irish culture – a key substitute for the role that physiological differences play in race-making – was mocked: Gerald of Wales, an instrumental apologist for the Anglo-Norman invaders, points risibly to the ‘flowing hair and beards’ of the Irish, whose clothing is ‘made up in a barbarous fashion’ and whose warriors ‘go naked and unarmed into battle’ (O’Meara 1982: 102, 101; Brewer 1861–91: 5.153, 5.151). Caricatured as a primitive land inhabited by savages – an undeveloped Global South lying to the west of England – Ireland was accordingly positioned as a colonized subject in need of evolutionary improvement and instruction, which their English colonial masters would furnish, so that the irrois savages (savage Irish; Lydon 1972: 283) might one day emerge from their barbaric cocoon into a state of enlightened civilization. Evolutionary racism is spawned from a colonial logic of tenacious duration, exercised in Europe across two thousand years: by the Roman Empire, Anglo-Norman England and the modern European colonial empires of the sixteenth through twentieth centuries. The logic of evolutionary progress by which colonizers justify their extraterritoriality and craft their right to rule is pronouncedly a racial logic, and exercises ‘the language of colonial racism’ (Bhabha 1994: 86). Racial logic of the evolutionary kind seems to promise, even mandate, the progress of the subject population. But the ostensible goal of a subject population’s achievement of civilizational maturity that will guarantee their

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equality with their colonial masters is never attained, but merely floats as a vaunted possibility on an ever-receding horizon. The politics of racial evolutionary logic thus ensure that the deferment of equality becomes a perpetual deferment, a ‘not yet forever’ (Ghosh and Chakrabarty 2002: 148, 152). Thus we find, four centuries later, England’s authors, such as Edmund Spenser (1992) in his A View of the Present State of Ireland, still derisively lamenting the backward, savage, uncivilized Irish race.

The politics of race in international war The international contest between medieval Christendom and Islamdom to determine military, spiritual, territorial, epistemological, political and commercial supremacy took place across multiple and overlapping battlefields. On the ideological battlefield, Islam was configured by church authors as a false religion, born in error and lies – a species of paganism at worst, a heretical, blasphemous distortion of Christianity at best – with its holy book carefully repudiated as erroneous and its Messenger caricatured as a licentious pseudoprophet prone to epileptic seizures disguised as visions.9 Muslims themselves, as we have seen, were collectively tarred as liars, thanks to the projection and attribution of a made-up name – fake news transmitted for centuries – that vilified them as liars. While enmity in and of itself need not be productive of race – in contact zones where Muslim or Christian rulers governed a heterogenous population of different confessions, day-to-day coexistence might well demand pragmatic accommodations – nevertheless holy war, as such, stews a matrix that is singularly conducive to the politics of race. Race is then likely a product of instrumentalizations that occur in war, as well as a product of instrumentalizations in theology that evolve to secure the success of holy war. One example of instrumental political theology is supplied by Bernard of Clairvaux, the energetic twelfth-century theologian of the crusades who co-wrote the Latin Rule of the Templars. Saint Bernard crafts an important distinction in his De laude novae militiae (In Praise of the New Knighthood) (Mastnak 2002) on the nature of the Islamic enemy, and how the enemy was to be fought in the killing fields of war. To any who might evince ambivalence towards the killing of fellow humans who comprised the enemy – an action so contrary to the commandments and teaching of Christ – the theologian assured combatants that to kill a Muslim was not, in fact, to kill a fellow human being. Rather than homicide – the murder of a person – slaughtering a Muslim was in fact malicide, the extermination of incarnated evil. Muslims were not only unspeakably vile, abominable and accursed, as Pope Urban II, the instigator of the First Crusade had said; they were not to be seen as human at all but as evil incarnated, personified. Saint Bernard thus saw no difficulty in calling for calculated genocide to extirpate from the earth these enemies of the Christian name (‘Extirpandos de terra christiani nominis inimicos’ [Epistola 457]; Mastnak 2002: 188). Reducing human beings to negative abstractions to facilitate their deaths is both a logic of war and a logic of racial politics. Additionally, Tomaz Mastnak shows how the shedding of blood itself draws tight a community of Christian blood brothers in fraternal love, who are authorized by their group identity – their blood fraternity – to enact the orgies of slaughter, torture and dismemberment that so nauseate modern scholars of the crusades, and that is witnessed so prominently at the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. The First Crusade, Mastnak urges, ‘was formulated in Blut und Boden’, and the unremitting orgies of bloodletting that followed the conquest of Jerusalem were a logical consequence of raced identity in a holy war in which religion is defined through categories of blood (2008: 36–7).

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Significantly, holy war did not only allow for the racing of the enemy alone. Again and again, as the eyewitness chronicles of the First Crusade report, the heterogenous Christian militia of armed pilgrims slogging their way towards Jerusalem found occasion to name themselves as a single demographic identified and defined by their religion – as a de facto race of Christians. Though this so-called exercitus Dei (army of God) was internally multifarious – Fulcher of Chartres (1913, 1969) in his eyewitness chronicle counts some twenty-one different linguistic, regional and ethnonational groups represented in the militia of the First Crusade – the abutting of internal European heterogeneity against an external foe saw the drawing tight of a boundary around the group identity of the armed pilgrims from the Latin West. The eyewitness chronicle of Raymond d’Aguilers, Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Iherusalem (History of the Franks Who Captured Jerusalem) reports the group’s name and identity when the priest, Stephen of Valence, is paid a visit by no less a figure than the Saviour himself. Christ comes in person and questions Stephen on who the occupation army at Antioch are: ‘Homo, quenam est hec gens que civitatem ingressa est?’ (‘Man, what race/people is this that has entered the city?’) Stephen’s reply presents the polyglot Latin forces as simply a single entity: ‘Christiani’ (Hill and Hill 1969: 72–3). Again and again, the eyewitness chronicles of the First Crusade attest that the heterogenous Christian militia reached across boundaries of country, region, ethnicity, tribe and class to constitute themselves as a people defined by their religion alone: gens Christiana, a Christian race. The racing of the internal alien – Jews – and the external alien – Muslims – thus conduced to a racial self-consciousness and collective self-naming, for the Latin Christians of the West, of their own religio-racial identity in an ethnopolitics of race.

The politics of race and colour If the Christians of the Latin West, despite their multifariousness, were able to see themselves as a single population group identified by their religion – thanks to the racemaking politics of holy war at the close of the eleventh century and after – by the middle of the thirteenth century, Latin Christian Europeans also began to associate a particular skin colour with their religion and their group identity. From the mid-thirteenth century, the art historian Madeline Caviness finds, white incrementally becomes the colour of sanctity, so that ‘saints in paradise gleam as white as their garments’ and, ‘[a]t some stage, Christians appropriated this sanctity by depicting their kind as truly white’ (2008: 18). The literature and art of the thirteenth century and after bear out Caviness’s arguments comprehensively and with precision. For Caviness, the shift that resulted in European flesh being depicted as white, and no longer flesh-coloured (unlike earlier depictions of Caucasian flesh tones), was an artistic response built up from accumulated contact between Latin Christian Europeans and non-white- and black-skinned peoples in the preceding centuries – yet another result of international encounters of the hostile kind (22). Correlatively, Jean Devisse, the editor of two volumes of The Image of the Black in Western Art that extend over the medieval period, shows how negative representations of blackness preceded the European preoccupation with whiteness. Devisse locates anti-blackness early, in the moralizing of Saint Jerome, the patristic exegete who both fashions the lie about ‘Saracens’ and also damns the collective population of Ethiopia as a land of sinners, because black, according to Jerome, was the colour of sin (1979b: 61). Medieval art accordingly displays a panorama of Black sinners, as well as black demons and devils, and Devisse offers examples across the

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countries of Europe of black demons possessing hapless humans, malign black devils and abject Black sinners (61). In Iberia, Cantiga 186 of Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, commissioned by Alfonso X (El Sabio, the Wise), has an illustration in six scenes in which a black-faced Moor is found in bed with his fair mistress. Both are condemned to the flames, but the fair lady is miraculously saved by the Virgin Mary herself. Black is damned, white is saved (61). We might call this kind of anti-Black racism hermeneutic blackness – a colour racism pivoting on religious figurations devised to separate, hold apart and define the opposition between sin and sanctity, the damned and the saved, devils/demons and saints/sacral personages.10 In medieval religious doctrine, then, white represented sanctity, purity and a state of salvation; black, its polar opposite, represented sin, damnation and the infernal.11 By the end of the twelfth century, however, ‘hermeneutic’ blackness is buttressed by example after example of lifelike artistic representations of black bodies that are purposefully situated in charged, negative contexts. Devisse tracks the phenomenon of anti-Black representations of this naturalistic kind, which dramatically staged physiognomic Black Africans as the torturers of Christ and the killers of John the Baptist in European medieval art from the late twelfth through the thirteenth centuries, a period of intense anti-Black virulence. ‘How many generations of Christians have been conditioned by looking at a grimacing black man torturing Christ or his saints’, an anguished Devisse asks (1979b: 80). If blackness is charged with negative meaning, and humans who possess black skin and black bodies are moralized, the range of meanings that white skin itself can bear is expanded through its relationship of bipolarity and opposition to black skin and African peoples. The thirteenth-century encyclopedia of Bartholomaeus Anglicus (Bartholomew the Englishman), De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things), offers a conventional theory of climate inherited from antiquity, in which cold lands produce white folk and hot lands produce black: but white, the encyclopedia tells us, is a mark of inner courage, while the men of Africa, possessing black faces, short bodies and crisp hair, are ‘cowards of heart’ and ‘guileful’ (Bartholomaeus Anglicus 1975–88: 2.752–3, 2.763). More than the colour of sanctity, white is the triumphant outward guarantor of hidden valour. More than the colour of sin, black is epidermal signage for the moral character defects of cowardice and guile. Colour thus defines the subjectivity and character of whole populations in extratheological terms too. Epidermal race in the European Middle Ages, moreover, intersects with and finds expression through class divides. The fourteenth-century Cursor mundi (Runner of the World) tells us that when four ‘Saracens’ who are ‘blac and bla als led’ (black and blueblack as lead) meet King David and are given three rods blessed by Moses to kiss, they transform from black to white on kissing the rods, thus taking on, we are told, the hue of those of noble blood: ‘Als milk thair hide bicom sa quite / And o fre blode thai had the hew’ (Their skin became as white as milk / And they had the hue of noble blood; [Morris 1879–93: lines 8072, 8120–1]). Elite human beings of the fourteenth century have a colour, and it is white. Unsurprisingly then, European recreational literature such as romances and chansons de geste abound with pagans, heathen, ‘Saracens’, giants and other antagonists whose blackness advertises them as monstrous and the foes of Christians. By contrast, male and female non-Christians in such literature who are narratively designated for conversion later in the plot are not described as black, but instead are admired for their valour, prowess or beauty: their colourlessness and lack of epidermal stigmata pointing towards and facilitating their eventual transformation into Christians.

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Colour designations can lead to sensational spectacles in recreational literature. A ‘loathly’, Black Muslim character, the Sultan of Damascus in the Middle English King of Tars, turns spotless white without taint upon his baptism and entry into Christianity (Heng [2003] 2012: ch. 4). In the opposite direction, in the Middle High German The King of Moorland, Christian European knights turn black when seduced by Black women and converted to heathenry (Tinsley 2011: 90–1). Intermediate positions also exist: Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, possibly the finest German romance of the European Middle Ages, has a famous character, Feirefiz, the son of a fair Arthurian knight and the Black queen of Zazamanc, who is literally piebald, bearing his parentage on his skin, which advertises both his genealogy and his moral ambiguity.12 Across a spectrum of registers, the medieval politics of colour thus announce racial identity as an epidermal performance. We see, for Latin Christian Europeans, specular forms of difference ascend to prominence when whiteness becomes increasingly central, from the mid-thirteenth century onwards, for the definition and stabilization of their group identity. Blackness then becomes the polar opposite of what it means to be Christian and European. There are a few notable exceptions to this calculus of epidermal race, which I discuss in the final section of this chapter.

The politics of race in commerce and mercantilism In the two extant Icelandic sagas which narrate the failed settler-colonization of North America by Greenlanders and Icelanders – Grœnlendinga saga (Greenlanders’ Saga) (Sveinsson and Þórđarson 1935) and Eiríks saga rauða (Eirik the Red’s Saga) (Jansson 1944) – striking episodes depict commercial relations between the colonists and the Native North Americans they encounter. In the barter trade that occurs between the representatives of two sets of raced peoples shown as meeting for the first time on the North American continent, we see the Norse portrayed as superior traders able easily to take advantage of the naïve and simple indigenes who are their trading partners (see my discussion in Heng 2018b: 261–2, 264). The Native Americans, we are told, are fascinated by the iron and metal weapons of the settlers, a synecdoche for the superior civilization of Europe, with its advances in metallurgy. By contrast, the natives only have stone-age weapons (though these prove more than adequate later in ousting the Norse from American shores). In the Greenlanders’ Saga, the shrewd leader of the colonists, Thorfinn Karlsefni, a professional merchant from Iceland, instructs the Norse women to bring out milk – a food unknown to the locals, which they instantly relish. Thus, we are told, the colonists garner valuable sables, grey furs and pelts – easily monetized in Europe’s markets and the international trading network beyond—while the naïve innocents are bilked into desiring foodstuff they had never seen before (and for which most would lack the genes to process), in an unequal exchange that the saga fully and satisfyingly understands to be exploitative. Eirik the Red’s Saga has its own version of trade where the commodity, instead of milk, is red cloth. The locals offer a pelt for each span of red cloth and tie the cloths they acquire around their heads. Eventually, the supply of red cloth diminishes, and Karlsefni and company then have the inspired idea of cutting the cloth into pieces no wider than a finger’s breadth; and the natives continue to pay as much, or more, for these diminished goods. The mercantile drama between two raced populations represented as sophisticated Europeans and innocent locals culminates, eventually, in profit for European mercantilism.

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At the close of Greenlanders’ Saga, the canny merchant, Karlsefni, makes his way to Norway, where he disposes of his cargo, and he and his wife are made much of by the elites of the land: the saga confides moreover that it is Karlsefni, more than anyone else, who is responsible for recounting the story of the voyages to the American continent. Thereafter, he proceeds to Iceland, where he buys land, builds a house and establishes a permanent family homestead and farm at Glaumbær, where his family’s distinguished history becomes firmly embedded in the historical record. Half a millennium before Columbus, we thus see a politics of race already active between settler-colonists and natives: in the register of commerce and mercantilism, Europeans were already congratulating themselves on bilking the native races of the Americas c. 1000 ce. But the most dramatic, ironic – though ultimately unsurprising – example of how a politics of race intersects with European mercantilism, lies in the extraordinary spectacle posed by the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria: dynasties of powerful Islamic rulers and elite military forged out of purchased slaves from the regions of the Baltic, the Caucasus and the Eurasian steppe. For nearly three centuries, the Mamluk dynasties of Sultans and military elites comprised slaves who had been transported to Egypt as boys of ten to fourteen years old, and there trained to become professional elite warriors from whose ranks alone the Sultan of Egypt could derive.13 For Latin Christendom and the crusader colonies of Outremer, the creation of the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt in 1250 had devastating consequences. Egypt’s Mamluk sultans completed what Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (‘Saladin’, to the West) had begun, by reconquering for Islam all remnant territories in Syria and Palestine under crusader rule. Baybars retook the principality of Antioch in 1269, and Qalawun the county of Tripoli in 1289. That last European foothold in the East, the port city of Acre (to which refugees flocked after each Mamluk reconquest of a once-crusader territory) vanished when Acre itself fell to the Mamluks in 1291, finalizing the extirpation of crusader Outremer. The Mamluk sultanate also successfully halted the advance of the Mongol Empire into the Near East after the decisive battle at Ain Jalut in 1260, and until defeated by the Ottomans in 1517, was the supreme Islamic power in the region. Under the Mamluks, Egypt’s economy and infrastructure – canals, bridges, irrigation, harbors, mosques, architecture – expanded; local agriculture and industries thrived; demographic growth increased; and culture and the arts flourished. The glittering Mamluk culture of the fourteenth century produced the famed Syrian manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa-Layla). Mamluks presided over the lucrative trade in the Mediterranean, profitable monopolies in the Indian Ocean and military expansionism over a vast swathe of the Near East. Islamdom thrived and prospered under Mamluk rule. For all this, historians give ample credit to Genoese human trafficking (Ehrenkreutz 1981: 342). Slavers from varied locales in Europe and especially the port cities of the Mediterranean participated in the trade of human commodities, of course, but scholars award the Italian republics and especially Genoa overwhelming responsibility for creating the most ruthlessly effective army in the Islamic world, even as their crusader brothersin-Christ were bloodily fighting that very Islamic army in the killing fields, often meeting with defeat at the Muslim enemy’s hands. The irony of Italian trafficking in human cargo was not lost on some in the Latin West, but despite the horrified responses of churchmen and attempts by popes to halt the sale

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of slave recruits and war materiel to Egypt by Europeans, business-as-usual continued undisturbed through the centuries of crusading holy war. The first dynasty of the Mamluks, the Bahri Dynasty, largely comprised Kipchak Turks who had been sold by slavers to Egypt, but the second dynasty of the Mamluks, the Burji, largely comprised Circassians plucked from the Caucasus: a white slave traffic of boys who had initially been Christian but became Islamized when they were raised and trained in Egypt as military recruits, with the Sultan of Egypt and Syria ascending from their ranks. The politics of race at home in European Christendom, as it happened, did not in this instance interrupt or in any way displace the profit motive of European mercantilism nor mitigate the greed of European slavers: whiteness of skin might symbolize sanctity and European group identity, and Christians might share a blood fraternity in Christ forged through holy war, but business-as-usual triumphed over all. Here, in the enterprise of international slavery, race intersected with commerce at the nexus of a profitable hypocrisy of unholy pragmatism that led to the defeat of Latin Christendom’s holy wars.

BRIDGES ACROSS RACE? THE POLITICS OF EXOTICISM, EROTICISM, CLASS AND ISLAMOPHILIA If the politics of race and mercantilism supply examples of human greed whose driving impetus arches over all ideological and theological imperatives for centuries of historical time, medieval European recreational literature also supplies examples of avidity that seem to arch over race, but in the medium of cultural production. Alongside the Islamophobia of the European Middle Ages exists a correlative strand of human impulse: Islamophilia – desire for the goods, the knowledges, the culture, beauty and wealth of the Islamic world. Ethnophilia is thus a phenomenon demonstrating that the racialization of the heathen in the European Middle Ages has more than a single face and allows fictional literature to imagine more flexible relations for racial formation. We thus see in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Middle High German Parzival heathen or ‘Saracen’ knowledge admired as superior, recondite knowledge of a coveted kind. In this romance, the courtly hag who is so ubiquitous in chivalric romance is Cundrie la Sorcière, an erudite visitor who speaks not only French, as a courtly maiden should, but also Sarazinois – Arabic, or perhaps Persian – the language in which the story of the Grail itself is written, and written by a Muslim, no less, who is able to read the future of the Grail in the stars, astrologically, and write it down in Arabic script (Heng 2018b: 199). Parzival is agog at Islamic languages, astronomy, knowledges and lore, and equally obsessed with the fabulous riches of the East. In the romance, Gahmuret, a landless younger son and Arthurian knight who journeys to the Orient to serve Islamic masters, transforms into the wealthy King of Zazamanc, accruing foreign treasure and royal status, as a consequence of his sojourn in heathen lands, and returns to Arthurian Europe gorgeously decked out in opulent silk fashioned in Islam’s iconic colour – green samite – precious Arabian stuff the narrative tells us is peerless. The boss of Gahmuret’s shield is made of Arabian gold, and a fabulous tent, jewels and gem-studded gold goblets travel back with him to Europe (Heng 2018b: 197–8). Gahmuret’s son, the piebald Feirifiz whose ethnoracial hybridity is emblazoned on his epidermis, is also swathed in costly, showy magnificence. Precious gemstones blaze on both father and son: the romance is mesmerized, entranced by their acquisition of

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Oriental wealth and treasure, the riches of heathendom and the prospect of ascension to royal status, puissance and material plentitude that heathendom offers as a vista that beckons to Europe’s knights. In Parzival – a romance so fully alive to the wealth, knowledges, pleasures and possibilities of the Orient – ethnophilia is seen to be the other face of ethnoracialization. We learn that racial form enacts not only demonization of the other but also desire for what the other may represent, possess or disclose. Medieval European literature even tells us that India, the domain of the legendary and always-awaited Prester John, has rivers teeming not with rocks but with glittering gemstones. Marco Polo’s and Rustichello of Pisa’s Divisament du Monde and Mandeville’s Travels are rapturous at the scented, luxurious, palatial gardens of Islam – iterations of the promised Islamic paradise to come. Polo-Rustichello are also spellbound at the magnificence of the Mongol Empire’s riches and the glories of Kublai Khan’s court and feasts. Ethnophobia towards the Mongols, in the mid-thirteenth century, barely requires fifty years before it transforms into ethnophilia, as the gaze of the West upon the East swerves from horror to desire when the wealth of the East is researched and confirmed. Where avidity surfaces into high visibility in a text, the politics of ethnophilia are not difficult to discern. But even where ethnophilia may seem more opaque – such as in the thirteenth-century sudden transformation of the statue of Saint Maurice in Magdeburg Cathedral in East Germany into a Black African knight – ethnophilia is readable as a species of racial form in service to the West. Maurice’s racialization, I have suggested, indicates how Africa can be made useful to a Holy Roman Emperor such as Frederick II or an Archbishop of Magdeburg such as Albert II of Käfernburg – one or the other of whom art historians believe to have commissioned the transformation of Saint Maurice’s figuration into a trans-Saharan saint – and determines what Africa will give to Europe (Heng 2018b: ch. 4). Whether it is an Africa of church fathers, and Christianity in its earliest, triumphant and most poignant phase – the Africa summoned by a Black Saint Maurice in a cathedral in East Germany – or an Africa where riches, knightly self-fashioning and delectable women are waiting to be had by a European knight – the Africa of a medieval romance such as Parzival – ethnophilia remains an instrumentally and dependably useful modality of racial form. Both Parzival and the Black Saint Maurice of Magdeburg also offer key examples of the allure and serviceability of race in epidermal form. In Parzival, Gahmuret, the Arthurian sojourner in the land of the Blacks, is irresistibly drawn to Belakane, the Black queen of Zazamanc, so that he swoons and is sleepless at night, writhing and twisting like a bundle of willow twigs, with his joints cracking, and the night feels interminable to him. The eroticism of a forbidden colour on feminine flesh gloriously yokes the appeal of taboo to the virtue and purity of Belakane, so that Gahmuret’s pleasure coincides with readerly pleasure in the figuration of this Black queen. A woman whose enticing skin bears a forbidden colour and who is also the epitome of feminine chastity, nobility and sweetness, Belakane embodies the most exciting contradictions, for Gahmuret and for readers. Blackness of skin can thus be enjoyed and savoured when embraced in feminine form, in a woman so pure, virtuous and chaste, that the taboo colour of sin, on her flesh, has its dangers neutralized and can afford pleasure. In like fashion, Saint Maurice, whose skin is also of the colour of sin and whose visage marks him as belonging to a populace

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of sinners, as Saint Jerome instructs, is able to comfort, reassure and shelter not despite but because of his skin colour. Epidermal blackness, laid on a holy figure such as a saint, has prophylactic properties: a penitent, acutely conscious of his own sin, the colour of which is black, can understand God’s infinite mercy to extend to him, since even a Black African, whose colour personifies sin itself, can be forgiven, indeed, can become a saint. But perhaps the most instructive lesson supplied by recreational literature as to what might bridge the divide of epidermal race is supplied by the Middle Dutch Roman van Moriaen, a romance in which a black-skinned knight from ‘Moorland’ (Moriaen) arrives in Arthurian Europe in search of his father, the Arthurian knight Acglavael (Agloval), a father who had sired him on a Black Moorish princess Acglavael promised to marry before he went missing twenty-four years ago.14 This Dutch romance from the second half of the thirteenth century (Wells 1971b: 46–7, 1971a: 260, 275; Claassens and Johnson 2000: 9) is extraordinary because its focus on blackness shows not only acute awareness of the anti-Black discourse of the cultural milieu of its time but also how that negative colour discourse can be bridged. Common folk flee from Moriaen, who endures keen hardship and suffering while seeking shelter, sustenance and transport in his urgent search for his missing father, a father whose presence is needed in Moorland to rectify a deep wrong and rescue son and mother from their status as social pariahs and restore Moriaen’s economic patrimony through marriage with Moriaen’s mother. As folk shun the large, Black knight dramatically depicted by the text in the stereotypic terms of anti-Black medieval literature, the romance curiously also offers sympathetic glimpses of this black knight’s subjectivity – Moriaen knows what he looks like to the denizens of Arthurian Europe and understands why they shun him – and readerly sympathy is elicited for the hardships and physical debility he endures, as well as for his despair: physical and psychological states that directly arise from the racism Moriaen encounters. More sympathy is elicited when Moriaen is shown to exceed Arthur’s best knights in chivalric prowess – knights who quickly become his companions and friends – and outperforms everyone in defence of Arthur and his queen, so that readerly admiration rapidly joins sympathy. Finally, the text with a touch of defiance asks its audience: ‘Though he was black, what harm was it? / Nothing about him was unbecoming’ (lines 771–2). The bridge across the divide posed by anti-Black racism, imagined by the Roman van Moriaen, is thus, simply, class – a class superiority that is bolstered by Christianity. Moriaen is an avowedly pious and devout Christian, as well as a superb knight, whose quest for his father is necessitated by his need to right an economic wrong under feudal chivalry, in order to restore the feudal rights of his mother and himself. Moreover, when Moriaen and his companions – Aglavael, Lanceloet (Lancelot), Walewein (Gawain) and Perchevael (Perceval) – all arrive in Moorland to see economic and social justice finally done, the romance shows us that the land of the Blacks is virtually identical to Arthurian Europe in chivalry, customs, values, feudalism and even Christianity: this is a virtual Europe with Black folk. We are thus shown that if race is produced through the positing of strategic essentialisms, so too is chivalry, here posited as a transnational and universal phenomenon. Epidermal race, it seems, can be bridged if Europe shares in common with the lands of black-skinned peoples the sine qua non of Christianity and chivalry combined. Global relations of this kind, between elite men who understand one another, have the same

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feudal values, and support one another’s rights, represent chivalry and knighthood as an international brotherhood of elite warrior men under universal Christendom. Together, the partnership of Christianity and class can imagine a world where race is bridged: a world in which an international fraternity of elite men share socio-economic interests and religion across skin colour. Such are the politics of race in the European Middle Ages.

CHAPTER SIX

Race and Ethnicity THOMAS HAHN

ETHIOPIANS, EXEGETICS AND ETHNOGRAPHY From its founding moment, in the account of Pentecost in Acts of the Apostles, Christianity announced its universalizing mission, and the Ethiopian eunuch, who rides into the story just a few chapters later (Acts 8:26–40) – an outsider by race and by distance – stands as one of the earliest proofs of this worldwide reach. Though the inclusion of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts may instance an ethnopolitical rhetoric, patristic writers from the second to the fourth centuries actively grappled with how to understand his presence (Byron 2002: 109–15). One of the most comprehensive and influential of the early exegetes, Origen (184–253), wrote extensively about Ethiopians mentioned in the Hebrew scriptures, frequently reading their skin colour allegorically as the blackness of a sinful soul (Johnson 2006: 170). Original sin determines that all souls, then, initially exist in a darkened ‘Ethiopian’ condition until infant baptism or conversion washes away the blackness. Origen equates Ethiopia with Hebrew Cush, connecting darkness to the curse of Ham, centralizing blackness as the identifying trait of Ethiopians and indeed of Africa more generally. The Ethiopians stand for those who are not nourished on the daily bread of the Lord’s Prayer, but who instead feed themselves upon serpents (Ps. 74:13–14) and so are beyond the point of redemption. The prophecy that Ethiopia along with other of the nations will fall by the sword (Ezek. 30:3–5) links them with the powers of darkness, or even identifies them as figures of demonic forces, and so makes their salvation seem unlikely (Johnson 2006: 174–5). Origen’s eventual successor in Caesarea, Eusebius (260–340), pursued a more emphatically historicist understanding of scriptural meaning. Forgoing extensive colour symbolism, he construed the Ethiopians as a people inhabiting a real if remote location in Africa, who might then exemplify those who come into the church from farthest away, as in Psalm 68:31: ‘Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God.’ Such verses provided the ultimate proof that Christianity was the ‘church of the nations’ – that all peoples, all races might find inclusion. Eusebius’ extensive and complex exegesis of the Ethiopians frames race rhetorically, and ‘represents the efforts of one who stood at the forefront of the production of Christian ethnographical and geographical knowledge in antiquity’ (Johnson 2006: 182). Competing ethnographies, documenting races other than Ethiopians, cropped up in the fourth and fifth centuries. A particularly sustained account (which survives in longer

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and shorter versions), On the Races of India, and the Brahmans, attached itself to Palladius, the scholarly to Bishop of Helenopolis in Bithynia (c. 365–425). The pamphlet begins with a general description of the Brahmans as ‘a race set apart by … the dispensation of God above, who has appointed them to live according to nature’ (Palladius 1994: 37). This section is ostensibly based on Palladius’s own visit to India in the company of Moses, the Bishop of Adulis, as well as on the eyewitness account the Bishop received from a traveller to India. The Indians’ racial identity depends largely on negation: they eschew herding, farming, cultivation, cooking, fire, housing, clothing – all artifice (37). They seek ‘to discover through nature the truth’ (41), and this leads them to the adage ‘desire nothing, and everything will be yours’ (45). They follow strict rules concerning bloodline, segregating women and men on separate islands, permitting sex only two months in the year and limiting live births to two among partners. Generically, On the Races of India provides a model for ethnographic description, endowing the Brahmans with a coherent set of beliefs and social practices as habitual ascetics. In reality, the treatise presents them as Christians avant le lettre (or sans le lettre), recasting and so aggrandizing a strain of monastic spirituality as a favourable exotic phenomenon in a text that remained influential throughout the Middle Ages. A crystalizing figure who emerged from the mixed discourses about the Ethiopian, and who remained a flashpoint for issues surrounding ethnic and racial identities, is the ascetic desert father Abbas Moses, or Ethiopian Moses. Among the exemplary lives recounted in the Sayings of the Fathers, Moses stands out as a spiritual leader who transformed his successive personas from slave, to robber, to murderer, to anointed monk and spiritual counsellor. In an anecdote from the Sayings, Moses attends a council, and the ‘Fathers wished to put Moses to the test. They treated him with contempt, saying “Why has this Ethiopian come into our midst?” He, upon hearing this, kept silent. After they were dismissed, they said to him, “Father, weren’t you troubled just now?” He said to them, “I was troubled but I did not say anything”’ (O’Brien Wicker 1990: 339). As one scholar has observed, ‘The Moses story itself, in whatever version, was not about a pious man who happened to be Black; it was about a Black man whose blackness alone was important’ (Wimbush 1992: 86; emphasis in the original). In an even more notorious exchange that has attracted much scholarly attention, at the very moment that he receives the ecclesiastical gown that signifies his consecration as priest, the archbishop says to him, ‘Behold, you have become completely white, Father Moses’ (O’Brien Wicker 1990: 340). The Ethiopian replies, ‘Indeed, the outside, O Lord Father; would that the inside were also white!’ From this distance, it’s impossible to fathom the range of valences one might attach to Moses’ reply, from sarcasm and mimicry to piousness, but it is clear that in any understanding race-making is actively at work. The episode continues when the archbishop decides to ‘put him to the test’ again and has his clerics drive Moses out of the sanctuary. They shout, ‘“Go away, Ethiopian.” He left and said to himself, “Rightly have they treated you, ash skin, black one. As you are not a man, why should you come among men?”’ In a framework borrowed from Bhabha, Moses proves ‘“too good to be true,” or rather too good to be Ethiopian, or perhaps too Ethiopian to be white’ (Brakke 2009: 178). This revelation of Moses’ racialized identity as a ‘floating signifier’ – his capacity to outperform the piety and sanctity of the nonEthiopian monks, even in humiliation and humility – may have been the very goad that drove these persecuting behaviours (Hall 1997: 6–9). The continuous refashioning of narratives concerning Moses, from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, provides a rich repository of how racial discourses operate in the Middle Ages.

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At this point I would like to turn to a self-contained episode from the First Crusade, an event that so far as I know has not received sustained scholarly attention. Albert of Aachen seems to have begun his Historia Ierosolimitana (Jerusalem History), a Latin chronicle of the First Crusade, early in the twelfth century, using oral accounts from those who had recently returned from the campaigns in the Middle East. The events considered here occurred just before Baldwin of Boulogne became the first king of the Latin Crusader state of Jerusalem, on 25 December 1100. Upon the death of his brother Godfrey in July 1100, Baldwin had ceded the title of Count of Edessa, and entered Jerusalem in midNovember. After negotiations with the city’s leaders about the distribution of power, Baldwin’s coronation was set for Christmas in Bethlehem. The last advice he received from his new constituents urged that he attend to his reputation among the vast array of non-Christian peoples hereabout (universe nationes gentilium in circuitu famam; Albert of Aachen 2007: vii.37.542). They insisted in particular that he must create an image that would leave them trembling (tremefacte) and stupefied (stupescant), and make them paralyzed with wonder (ammirari). In short, Baldwin was charged to create some stunning event (aliquid insigne) that will bring shock and awe to non-Christian lands (terre gentilium) (Figure 6.1). In this self-contained anecdote (one of the longest in Albert’s Historia), Baldwin immediately takes a small expeditionary force of two hundred knights and infantry to Muslim-held Ascalon, where he engages in two or three days of unproductive and entirely forgettable skirmishes with Egyptian cavalry (equites Arabite). He then hears of an outlaw band of Azoparts – a most loathsome race (gens fedissima) who dwell in subterranean caves and opportunistically prey upon Christian pilgrims. Albert had introduced the Azoparts to his readers in the previous book of his Historia, as part of a multiracial force

FIGURE 6.1  The Siege of Antioch (1097–8). White Christian and Black Muslim forces face off against one another in a significant battle of the First Crusade which Baldwin I supported. © Heritage Images/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

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sent from Egypt to besiege Jerusalem. He classifies them as the race with the blackest of skin from the land of Ethiopia, branded ‘Azoparts’ by the locals (gens nigerrime cutis de terra Ethiopie dicta vulgariter Azoparth; Albert of Aachen 2007: vi.41; 456). Fully aware of this ‘loathsome race’s’ depravity (hac gentis Azopart impietate cognita; vii.39; 544), Baldwin and his troop try to force the Azoparts out of their underground hideout with fire and smoke. When eventually only two Azoparts emerge – savage and filthy (horridos ac squalidos) – Baldwin speaks to them courteously and dresses them in splendid clothing. He then interrogates them concerning their race and bloodline (de gente et cognatione). Taken in by Baldwin’s devious civility and false generosity, they reveal all they know, and then plead with him that one of them should stay with him while the other returns to their impenetrable hideout and convinces his fellows to take advantage of Baldwin’s largesse. The king-to-be agrees, and as soon as the first Azopart departs with gifts, the second is summarily but secretly beheaded. The first Azopart returns with ten additional companions, and is sent off with nine of these, ostensibly for further rewards but in reality to be instantly beheaded by Baldwin’s youth brigade (a pueris Baldwini). Baldwin seduces (illexit) the tenth man with fine clothing and seemingly sincere speech, convincing him to return to the caves and persuade his fellow Azoparts that the king will give them gifts and enfeoff them with lands and income if they join him. He leads forth thirty additional Azoparts, and again one is singled out while all the remainder instantly suffer capital punishment (omnes capitalem subierunt sententiam; Albert of Aachen 2007: vii.40; 546). Baldwin dupes the survivor into urging still further Azoparts to surrender, and 220 (the entirety of the remaining males) present themselves and are executed on the spot. The king then orders his followers to force the women and children from the hideout with fire and smoke; they are immediately separated from one another and handed over to the soldiers as booty (in predam). Albert concludes with an understated final line: of these children, some were ransomed for a sum with their mothers, while some, also with their mothers, were beheaded (Quorum cum matribus alii precio redempti sunt, alii cum matribus decollati; Albert of Aachen 2007: vii.40; 546). None of the other half-dozen histories of the First Crusade recount the details that Albert offers for this episode, though they describe Baldwin’s opportunistic, punishing raids in the same area. Whether or not these events transpired matters, of course, for the historical record, but unpacking the components that drive the narrative provide insight into the assumptions and cultural paradigms that govern its meaning. This is precisely what Baldwin’s new subjects in Jerusalem demanded of him when they expressed concern for his famam: stories that would terrorize the enemy by dehumanizing them, and reassure the crusaders of their own superiority. The account that Albert offers emblazons and secures the rights and privileges, the supremacy, of the Franks among the mixed peoples of the Middle East and North Africa. Moreover, it works to butress Baldwin’s own unprecedented and hotly contested position as the first king of a Latin state, who possesses the power of life and death over inferior peoples who surround it – in this case, the Black Azoparts. The principle that makes Baldwin’s genocide comprehensible, even justified to a European audience partakes in what Isabel Wilkerson has called ‘caste’. It operates as ‘a fixed and embedded ranking of human value’, an ‘infrastructure’ that here allows colour and race to mark the visible differences between groups of people (Wilkerson 2020: 2–3).

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Albert wrote his Historia not for his informants, who had directly encountered the Azoparts, but for an elite Latin readership in Western Europe. Albert’s audience absorbs the force of caste which is here on display not in direct encounter but as a hierarchical assumption that unconsciously affirms the life-and-death superiority of white Christians over ‘peoples with the blackest skin’ (Albert of Aachen 2007: vi.41; 456). The conspicuous ‘ingenuity’ of this most Christian prince’s racial cleansing (noted by Albert: ingenio Christianissimi principis; vii.40; 546) stands as the implicit marker and express proof of the inferiority of the Azoparts. Wilkerson writes of the persistent dehumanization that underwrites the privilege of caste, and clearly the overwhelming sense that to the Christians these lives don’t matter, must not matter, saturates the entire event. Rendering the racialized other ‘an undifferentiated mass of nameless, faceless scapegoats’ (Wilkerson 2020: 142) stands as a crucial base for the imbalance of power that would be otherwise incomprehensible, and this is precisely the response this encounter draws from the reader. The episode, in which this group of five hundred or so Black Azoparts suffer virtual extinction, is not (only) about state-sponsored violence, just war or righteous punishment, but ultimately establishes Western European Christian ‘caste’ as the source of unconstrained power over this scarcely human collective. The projected impact of such stories generated in 1100 was to put local groups on notice, to stupefy them through the reputed power and ruthlessness of the new regime; even more, however, the story speaks back to the crusaders themselves, undergirding their unquestioned right to dispose of inferiors’ lives as they see fit. On the ground, Baldwin’s act of ethnic cleansing, liquidating non-combatant men, women and children, turned on his strategic use of deception and secrecy. The account in Albert, however, turns it into a spectacle akin to an American lynching for a western Latin readership. The chronicler refers to Azoparts more than ten times in the Historia, clearly repeating a spoken term that his informants must have understood as a racial slur; the noun is indeclinable in Latin, signalling in its every use its exclusion from Western systems of grammar and meaning. (In chansons de geste and French romances, the term often comes to function as a generic term for Black people, in particular as athletes or entertainers; in the legends of Beves of Hampton, Ascopart becomes the hero’s quasi-comic giant companion and adversary.) As a final consideration of the links between Ethiopians and ethnography in the Middle Ages, I would like to turn from Albert’s Latin Historia to the Middle High German history of the world by Rudolf von Ems (c. 1200–54), the Weltchronik (left unfinished at his death). Rudolf began his account with the creation in Genesis, and made use of several sources in crafting his version of biblical history, including the Vulgate, the Latin translation of Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities and the Historia Scholastica of Peter Comestor. In recounting the early life of Moses, he expands the Vulgate narrative with materials from the latter two sources: these include narratives of the patriarch’s birth and infancy, his childhood at Pharaoh’s court and his growth into an exceptionally handsome, knightly warrior. An entire chapter of Peter’s Historia then tells of Moses’ encounter with the Ethiopians. He borrows mainly from Josephus, but adds further materials, including perhaps details garnered from Hebrew scholars and students of the school of Rashi in his native Troyes. The chapter begins with the invasion and devastation of Egypt by the Ethiopians. In despair the Egyptians seek counsel from their gods, who reveal that they must solicit the help of a Hebrew man as their leader; Moses accepts this charge and ingeniously assaults the Ethiopians’ capitol, Saba, catching them unprepared. The

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king’s daughter, Tarbis, gazes at the courageous commander fighting before her castle and falls deeply in love with Moses. She secretly sends a messenger to him, offering to surrender Saba to him if he agrees to marry her; Moses accepts. He eventually wishes to return to Egypt, but Tarbis refuses to allow him to leave. Wise in celestial matters, Moses fashions two rings, one of memory, the other of forgetfulness (oblivionis annulum; Peter Comestor 2000: 25); he presents the latter to Tarbis, and when she forgets her love for him, he returns to Egypt, and begins his path towards the Exodus. The midrashic story of Moses’ marriage to Tarbis circulates widely in the Middle Ages and beyond: Ranulf Higden, Thomas Bradwardine, John Gower and Sir Walter Raleigh, among many others, retell versions of it. Rudolf von Ems threads Jewish, Latin Christian and vernacular narratives, and in many manuscripts these combine with visual traditions as well, creating a narrative the touches on religion, politics, fantasy and race. Rudolf’s account inevitably medievalizes the episode, attaching the trappings of romance, but it simultaneously racializes it. Moses appears unmistakably chivalric: he possesses youthful strength and is bold, clever, knowledgeable and brave (mannis kraft / vreh, kune, wise und ellinthaft; Rudolf von Ems 1915: lines 9206–7).1 His appearance alone guarantees conquest: he travelled with the Egyptian troops to the land of the Moors with such a valiant look that they immediately yielded to him (mit den egiptischen scharn / fur er inder Mœre lant / mit so werlichir hant / das si im entwichen da; lines 9215–19); Moses, great with courage, powerfully conquered the Moors (Moyses der ellens riche / die Mœre gewalecliche; lines 9222–3). The episode ends with Moses, young yet wise (do fůr der junge wigant / Moýses der wise man; lines 9267–8), returning to Egypt and scriptural history. Tarbis likewise transforms into a romance heroine: the Moorish princess (der Mœre kúnegis tohter; Rudolf von Ems 1915: line 9225) catches sight of the brave and worthy Moses, and as her eyes gaze upon him she falls madly in love, and begins to simmer and burn (dú gesach den degin wis / Moýsesin den werden man. / als in gesach mit ougin an, / si begunde insinin minnin / so hitzzen unde brinnen; lines 9227–31). Tarbis loves Moses more than her own life, and so honours him that she never wanted to let the wise and noble knight leave her (dú mintin fúrbaz danne ir lip / und trúg im also holden můt / das si den wisin degin gůt / nie wolte lazen von ir hein; lines 9243–6). The ring of oblivion that Moses devises causes her to forget that which was dearest to herself (swas ir allir liebeste was; line 9259). Though the reader may not forget the encounter, the effect is to bring closure to the episode and return to biblical narrative. Rudolf’s lengthy Weltchronik survives in a half dozen lavishly illustrated manuscripts. Almost all illustrate the exchange of the ring between Tarbis and Moses, and several provide an image for the struggle before Sabareia (as Rudolf calls Josephus’s Saba). Rudolf introduced a racial component in having Moses attack not the Ethiopians but the Moors, and the illustrators of Getty MS 33 (dated 1400–10) seem to have resituated the struggle to Northern Africa or Iberia, or at least to the visual register of medieval Christian-Muslim warfare (Figure 6.2). In Rudolf’s retelling, Moses heads up the Egyptian troops, but the warriors in the Getty 33 illustration (folio 66 verso) wear helmets shaped as high medieval Judenhuten, the distinctive headgear prescribed by Christian statute to stigmatize Jews. The ‘Moors’ on the other hand wear pointed or hooked helmets of the sort that occur in some manuscript images of Muslim fighters. The difference that strikes the viewer most immediately, however, is epidermal: neither side wears face guards, and the artist has rendered the Jewish complexions conventionally white, and the Moors’ countenances deep black. The half-page miniature forthrightly recasts the confrontation in Sabareia as

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FIGURE 6.2  Moses besieges the Ethiopians in Saba. From Rudolf von Ems, Weltchronik. Getty MS 33, fol. 66v, c. 1400–10. © The Getty Museum (open content program).

doubly-raced for a Christian viewership, by religion (the Jews as confessional other) and by religio-racial difference (the Black non-Christians of Ethiopia). Despite the differences in headgear and skin colour, the encounter appears remarkably symmetrical. Armour, weapons and garments are very much alike. The Jewish force on the left numbers seven, with an eighth pushing towards the castle entrance on the right. The Moors have fielded eight fighters, with two wounded or dead on the ground. As Peter’s Historia suggests, the confrontation has become a standoff. Apart from and above the hostilities, Tarbis, crowned, gazes on the action from the castle wall, and apparently points to Moses with her left hand. Next to her stands the banner of the Moors, bearing the image of her father, the king (who uniquely among all the Moors displays stereotyped ‘African’ features). The two crowns, real and represented, and the banner on display, affirm that the Moors exist as a polity, a self-consciously unified people bound by rules

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and race. Within this fiction, the same might be said for the Judenhuten, here chosen to signal an identity rather than imposed as stigmatization. (That the large blue banner of this ‘Jewish Egyptian’ force has been left blank perhaps underscores the confusions roiling politics and race in this visual retelling.) The miniature recasts the midrashic conflict between Ethiopians and Egyptians (here not merely led by a Jew but displaced by Jews) as a clash between Black and white, race-ing the narrative in a distinctively late medieval fashion, and deploying a visual idiom reminiscent of Iberian reconquista art. A second smaller image in Getty MS 33 (folio 67 verso) depicts Moses’ presentation of the ring of forgetfulness to Tarbis (Figure 6.3). Here she wears a crown similar to that in the battle scene, with a much more luxurious gown and a golden head-covering that conceals her hair and matches the trim on the gown. She appears young and serene,

FIGURE 6.3  Moses gives Tarbis the ring of forgetfulness. From Rudolf von Ems, Weltchronik. Getty MS 33, fol. 67v, Regensburg, Bavaria, Germany, c. 1400–10. Tempera colours and ink on parchment, 33.5 × 23.5 cm (approx. 13 × 9 in). © Sepia Times/UIG/Getty Images.

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while Moses seems old and filled with consternation as he prepares to slip the ring on Tarbis’s right index finger. Here at the dissolution of this mixed-race match there seems no rancour or hostility, but perhaps a trace of pathos. Among all surviving illustrated manuscripts of Rudolf’s Weltchronik, Getty MS 33 alone dramatizes the difference of skin colour as a central feature of the narrative. A near-contemporary copy of the work shows Moses with light curls, placing the ring on the left hand of Tarbis, who is light complexioned and wearing a headscarf (New York Public Library MS Spencer 38, folio 70 verso; 1402). The exchange of the ring in the Weltchronik of Heinrich von München (based in part on Rudolf) presents Moses with blond curly hair, and Tarbis as also lightskinned and wearing a headdress (Stockholm, Kungliga biblioteket MS Vu 74a, folio 81 verso; c. 1400). The responses of (presumably medieval) readers to representations of people of colour in this context also invites inquiry. Rudolf’s younger contemporary Jans Enikel composed a Weltchronik (c. 1272) that also included the story of Moses and Tarbis; in one manuscript, the princess’ countenance (which seems Black) has been defaced by a later user, perhaps suggesting conscious hostility to difference in skin colour (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek cgm 250, folio 64 verso; c. 1400–50; Bayerische Staatsbibliothek n.d.). In the Getty manuscript of Rudolf, an image of Abraham and Hagar in bed conceiving Ishmael has had the countenances (Hagar’s may have been Black) rubbed out (folio 29 recto). In one miniature showing the ‘Sarrazin’ from Honorat Bovet’s Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun the head, and in another, half the body have been defaced (BNF fonds français 811, folios 18 recto and 19 verso; 1398; see my comments at. pp. 124–8, and Steven Kruger’s discussion of related images below at pp. 166–9). All these material interventions into the text suggest such images drew strong responses. Perhaps the magical erasure of Tarbis’s memory may serve as a figure for both the acknowledgement of and the resistance to raced identity in the European Middle Ages.

RACE, ETHNICITY AND MEDIEVAL VERNACULAR CULTURES The motives, structures and effects of race-making played out in a variety of contexts in late medieval Western Europe, taking in religious, political, literary and domestic venues. Among the most memorable and provocative is the extra-Arthurian framework with which Wolfram von Eschenbach bookends his unsettling and unsettled romance, Parzival (c. 1210). The first book has Gahmuret, the hero’s father, leave Europe for the Near East and Africa, where he fathers Parzival’s half-brother Feirefiz. The last books have Feirefiz make his way to Europe, bond with Parzival and marry, only to set out with his Christian wife for India, even more remote than his native Africa, where he will become the ancestor of the world’s most powerful emperor, Prester John. Parzival holds as one of its central fantasies the Europeanization of the world. Gahmuret’s quest to encounter the best knights alive makes him the admired agent of the Baruch of Baghdad; he then travels to Morocco, Persia, Damascus, Aleppo and Arabia, finally being storm-swept to Zazamanc (presumably on the coast of Africa). ‘People dark as night were all those of Zazamanc’ (Wolfram 2006: 9), and initially interracial contact produces express discomfort in Gahmuret, who shies away from the public kiss of greeting offered by an official’s wife. Soon, however, he falls in love with Queen Belakane, whose complexion stands out like ‘black upon white samite’, and who is herself a ‘judge of fair complexions, for she had seen many a fair-skinned heathen before’. Gahmuret soon feels

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overwhelming love: ‘The black Mooress, that country’s queen, caused him to swoon again and again’ (16–17). They marry and, though ‘the black woman was dearer to him than his own life. Never was a woman better shaped’ (24), he sets out once again to seek adventure. Belakane bears their child, Feirefiz, who is miraculously ‘of two colors … both black and white was his appearance. The queen kissed him incessantly, very often on his white marks’ (25), fetishizing the father’s skin. In the penultimate book of the romance, Feirefiz arrives in Britain leading twentyfive troops, ‘none of which understood the others’ speech’, including ‘Moors, and other Saracens, of dissimilar aspect’ (Wolfram 2006: 308); Feirefiz himself literally embodies these unresolved constituents of racial difference. The half-brothers spontaneously engage in combat, which Wolfram describes as ‘an amply intimate estrangement’ and ‘one flesh and one blood … wreaking such hardship upon itself’ (309). Afterwards Feirefiz insists, ‘It is with your own self that you have fought here. It was to do battle against myself that I came riding here. My own self I would gladly have slain, but you … defended my own self against me’ (314–15). Wolfram has manipulated the plot so that (in Bhabha’s formulation) Feirefiz is the same, but not quite: bloodline and race bind the two siblings even as they delineate their difference (Bhabha 1984: 126–8). Feirefiz converts to Christianity and marries a European woman, but rather than becoming the Other who is absorbed into the Same, he immediately sets out for India, where through further intermarriage he will become the ancestor of Prester John. While these framing episodes possess remarkable internal density and complexity in themselves, they also exhibit striking intertextual links with the African–European, Black–white thematics of the Dido–Aeneas story in Virgil’s Aeneid, placing the West at the centre of a global empire. Jerold Frakes has recently made a pressing and cogent case that ‘to attribute to [Wolfram] racial, religious, humanitarian or humanistic tolerance, is … illegitimate …. In Wolfram’s texts Muslim subjects – nonconverted, nonmonstrous, and nonaggressive Muslim neighbors – are simply inconceivable’ (2011: 120–1; emphasis in the original). Wolfram, lacking any direct or objective knowledge of Islamic culture, was ‘writing a fictional text of a genre in which there was already a developed discourse of the Muslim Other that made empirical knowledge superfluous if not altogether irrelevant’ (74). Even fiction writers with informed and accurate sources inevitably and deliberately distort reality, however; they aim not at ethnographic accuracy but at the possibility of disrupting settled expectations and creating novel understandings of how skin colour, facial features, imputed dispositions operate within individual and group identities. Race and blackness in Parzival are effectually underdetermined – open to appropriation in multiple, even eccentric and fantastic ways, as compared to the overdetermined status of race in the last centuries – and the romance in this way demonstrates how a sustained narrative may deploy race as a crucial mechanism of cultural meaning. Moriaen, a Dutch romance of the late thirteenth century, perhaps began as a variation on a Parzival theme: the hero has come to Europe to seek the assistance of his uncle Perceval in finding his father Acglovael who (like their father Gahmuret) sired a son in Africa and then returned to Europe. Gawain and Lancelot test his mettle through combat, then recognize a shared bedrock of chivalric values beyond differences of colour or culture. Moriaen consciously and somewhat conventionally repurposes Arthurian tropes and patterns: the hero appears at first to be not a Bel Inconnu but a Noir Inconnu, and then turns out to be no less obviously a known quantity, in terms of the chivalric values of Christian Europe, than Gingalain, the Arthurian Fair Unknown. Set almost exclusively in an aristocratic masculine world, the plot suggests that fairness and charisma depend

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not on phenotype but on cultivated, shared cultural values that define identity, inclusion, acceptance and aspiration. Moriaen the Black knight turns out to be Other and always already Same, with only the faintest condition of ‘not quite’. The romance resolves the apparent disruption of Black and white binaries by effectively making him both: in the end, at least in this chivalric fantasy, epidermis and physiognomy matter less than code conformity. Sustained narratives such as Parzival and Moriaen possess the wherewithal to shape readers’ expectations through developed plots and repetitions. Much evidence suggests, however, that cultural experience at large equipped late medieval people to make conceptual sense of, or even to invent, stray encounters with racial others. Saint Bridget of Sweden was both a courtier and, after her husband’s death while she was in her forties, a member of a religious order, and the founder of her own order. Throughout her life she experienced spiritual visions, which she recorded in her Liber Celestis (translated into English c. 1410–20). Here she recounts a ‘merveylowse visione’ of a soul about to be judged, in a bright, shining palace with a throne: ‘Than was thare sene a blake Ethiope, ferdefull [fearful] to loke upon, full of envye and wreth [wrath]’, who demands to punish the soul (Saint Bridget 1987: 257). A knight intervenes, calling attention to the soul’s good works. ‘“Here is vice more than the vertew,” the Ethiope answerde, “tharefor be [by] right he suld be knyt [joined] wyth me.”’ Despite further defence of the soul, the Ethiope declares (258), ‘And tharfor is he noght worthi to come in heven. Wherefor I haske [ask] that he be wyth me in paynes of hell.’ An angel then parses the dream (259) and says ‘the Ethiope [bytokens] the fende’. Clearly this afterdeath confrontation with a demonic Ethiope and the triumph of grace seemed ordinary spiritual business to Bridget. Within a decade or less of the translation of Bridget’s account, the English poet Thomas Hoccleve (1368–1426) imagines himself on his deathbed in his poem ‘Lerne to Die’ (1421), where with his ‘yen mental’ (spiritual eyes) he sees ‘Th’estat of al anothir world than this.’ [stanza 96] Now of confort have Y greet lak and mis; lack and loss Horrible feendes and innumerable Awayte upon my soul miserable. [stanza 97] The blake-faced Ethiopiens Me envyrone and after it abyde, surround; await To hente it whan that it shal passen hens …. grab (Hoccleve [1892] 1925: lines 670–5) Like Saint Bridget, Hoccleve effortlessly invokes a cultural stereotype of the Black Ethiopian devil, suggesting the unmotivated ubiquity of this racial Other. John Lydgate, almost certainly the most prolific poet of the fifteenth century, retells the story of Raymond of Campagno (Champagne) towards the end of the Fall of Princes (c. 1438), his massive chronicle of Fortune’s assault on those who have achieved worldly success. In Boccaccio (Lydgate’s source), the story of Philippa of Catania (Cathenoise) stands as an ironic coda – the story of a low-born woman who achieves great power in Sicily but dies in a gruesome public execution – to nine books of The Fates of Illustrious Men (Figure 6.4). In Lydgate’s account, the courtier Raymond purchases as a slave ‘a child

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FIGURE 6.4  Philippa of Catania marries the Ethiopian, in Giovanni Boccaccio, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes (translated by Jean Fouquet). Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek cod.gall. 6 (1458), fol. 347r. © Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

which was born in Ynde. / [new stanza] Lik [like] Ethiopiens was his colour’ (Lydgate 1923: IX.2874–5). Raymond has him baptized as his own namesake and teaches him Christian dogma. The Indian-Ethiopian former slave prospers and becomes the king’s groom, ‘And thouh he was blak of his visage, / To Cathenoise was ioyned [joined] in mariage’ (2887–8). Philippa becomes governess of King Charles’s daughter, and ‘Hir husbonde th’Ethiopien withal / Of Charlis houshold was maad senescall …. For he that was a boy the last day, / An Ethiopien broun and horrible of siht [sight] … Now [he] of nuee [new] hath take the ordre of kniht …. Swich sodeyn clymbyng axeth [asks] a sodeyn fall’ (2915–16, 2924–30). Eventually this incidental Ethiopian, whose entire identity is bound up in his epidermal difference, dies not in a ‘sodeyn fall’ but of natural causes, and is given a royal funeral. The account allusively presents a striking combination of tired racial stereotype (where Indian and Ethiopian are interchangeable) and what seems perhaps the backstory of everyday racial interaction in Sicily and Naples. In contrast to Lydgate’s (and Boccaccio’s) ‘modern instance’ of race sensation, in the Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun (1398) Honorat Bovet confects a calm, reasoned convocation of voices not otherwise intelligible, presented as part of a dream vision. Bovet reanimates the author of the Roman de la Rose so that he may interrogate four (male) spokespersons of distinct races and groups: a Physician, a Jew, a ‘Sarrazin’ and a Dominican friar. This interchange is mediated by the Prior, a stand-in for Bovet himself. In speeches that run six hundred lines (about 40 per cent of the total work), the ‘Sarrazin’

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offers a brief account of international Islam, but in the main provides a coherent critique of the ways in which Europeans have failed their own religious and cultural ideals. When Jean de Meun asks why the ‘Sarrazin’ has travelled to France, he swears by ‘Mahommet’ and touts his mastery of languages, religion, literature, law – of all subjects, in fact (Figure 6.5). He has come to investigate the condition of Christendom (l’estat des Crestians; Bovet 2005: 313), a proper ethnographic mission. When Jean requests a report, he replies, now I’m worried about this encounter (Or vy je mal ceste encontree; 344), fearing retaliation for his cultural surveillance. Reassured by Jean, he condemns the diversity within Christian belief and practice, widespread overindulgence, increasing effeteness, the decline of clear divisions among the estates and the dominant role of the young in society. He specifically castigates Christians

FIGURE 6.5  The Prior and the ‘Sarrazin’ converse; image of the latter’s body and head defaced. From Honorat Bovet, Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun. BNF MS 810, fol. 18r, 1398. © BnF.

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for their failure to redeem captives held for ransom by Muslims (Bovet 2005: 350–680). When Jean suggests the possibility of further religious wars, the ‘Sarrazin’ speaks of the amity in which Christians and Muslims live in contemporary Iberia, and his plans to share the ethnoreligious knowledge he has accumulated in Granada, Morocco and Turkey (700–36). When Jean asks for further observations, he censures blasphemy, marital dissolutions, economic inequity, class hostilities and corruption within law enforcement (742–830). When Jean makes a final request, he excoriates the excesses and hypocrisies in Rome (838–98) (Figure 6.6). Jean’s interchange with the Jew is likewise Euro-focused. When asked why he has returned to France (Charles VI expelled French Jews in 1394), he lambastes the outrageous exploitations of French merchants and money-lenders, and affirms that Jewish bankers would be much more honest and cooperative (Bovet 2005: 246–92). This embedded autocritique that Bovet places in the mouths of these Others resembles the ventriloquized censure offered by the Sultan of

FIGURE 6.6  The Prior and the ‘Sarrazin’ continue to speak; image of the latter’s head defaced. From Honorat Bovet, Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun. BNF MS 810, fol. 19v. © BnF.

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Babylon in Mandeville’s Travels, and clearly has less to do with ethnic authenticity than with European self-reform (Mandeville 2011: 86–8). At the same time, however, Bovet’s staging of this interaction achieves engagement and intelligibility only if his audience possesses prior knowledge of (and interest in) racial types and differences: a stereotype signifies only through broad cultural recognition, in this case, raced identity based upon epidermal colour and religious diversity. Strikingly, the ‘Sarrazin’s’ skin has been darkened and he wears turbanlike headgear over curly hair; the Jew wears the stigmatizing badge mandated by Christian authorities (Figure 6.7). The two authorially prepared manuscripts that survive perhaps shed further light on racialized identities: among the custom illustrations, seven of seventeen show the Black ‘Sarrazin’, and several of these have been defaced. Bovet’s confected and hortative dream vision stands in strong contrast to a set of manuscripts that would have been intimately familiar to their owners, whose behaviours and emotions they orchestrated. A group of images from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Sephardi and Ashkenazi

FIGURE 6.7  Jean de Meun surveys representatives of different racial types; note the badge worn by the Jewish interlocutor. From Honorat Bovet, Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun, BNF MS 810, fol. 6v. © BnF.

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Haggadot recapitulate the intensity and closeness of the Jewish community, and prescribe the forms of their social and ritual lives. One of the strategies these artefacts pursue in underscoring a unified Jewish identity entails representing Others whose symbolic presence marks the boundary or signals the antithesis of shared values. The Sarajevo Haggadah (Zemaljski muzej Bosne i Heregovine, c. 1340, produced in Aragon or Catalonia, folio 65a) offers an image of the family at the Seder meal, all in proper order and wearing finery, with ritual tableware recognizably represented. In this culmination of the holiday, the family moves from the biblical, mythic events of the past to a moment of shared intimacy. In the left foreground sits a Black woman with an African phenotype, dressed in a yellow gown and a white headscarf, holding a piece of matzah. ‘Although we cannot say with precision where the figure in the Sarajevo Haggadah is supposed to have come from, or whether she is a Muslim or not, she nonetheless emblematizes the presence of the enslaved “Moor” or “Saracen” in Christian Spain’ (Cohen 2019: 18). She is at the table, but not with the family, and likely therefore to be a sub-Saharan servant or slave, whose presence may signify the family’s wealth and status, and their own exemption from slave status rather than any desire for racial communing.

FIGURE 6.8  Marginal portrait of Muslim warrior as the Wicked Child in Passover Seder. The Rylands Haggadah, John Rylands Library Hebrew MS 6, fol. 23a, c. 1330s. Public domain.

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The Rylands Haggadah (John Rylands Library, Hebrew MS 6, folio 23a, c. 1330s, produced in Catalonia; Figure 6.8) accompanies the Seder readings for the Wicked Child with the marginal image of a Black warrior in the midst of an attack, scimitar raised and edged with blood, and shield in his other hand (Figure 6.9). Introducing a raced Muslim other into the Haggadah’s consciously self-restricted character of genre (ritual guide) and language (biblical Hebrew) works to underscore the devotional handbook’s role in intensifying communal consciousness and, in this instance, religious and racial difference. A related manuscript pictures the Wicked Child as a European soldier, dressed for battle and armed with sword and shield, an image that invokes not racial but religious difference between Jews and Christians (Barlow 2017: 227–9). Yet in the Rylands Haggadah the Wicked Child never ceases to be a son and a participant in the shared liturgy. The overt hostility of the figure reinforces the Wicked Child’s rejection of community in his assigned Seder passage, but it also entwines a raced Muslim participant into the tensions and hostilities among the three confessions in Spain’s convivencia. ‘The Muslim warrior / wicked son figure bears witness to a shifting cultural meaning of Passover in 1330s Barcelona, as it drags the Muslim minority into the power-play between Christians and Jews’ (227). The intimacy of raced difference in the context of Iberian convivencia stands in contrast to an image in the Ashkenazi Haggadah by Joel ben Simon (BL Addl MS 14762, folio 14a, c. 1430–70, produced

FIGURE 6.9  Portrait of the Muslim warrior in the Rylands Haggadah, c. 1330s: detail. Public domain.

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in Germany) where a Black warrior with ‘African’ profile rides next to Pharaoh as the Egyptians pursue the Jews in the Exodus. Presumably the inclusion of this one raced figure among the massed troops in a Haggadah from Mitteleuropa works to exoticize the Egyptians as persecutors of the Jews. One last vernacular text – perhaps again the same but not quite – that helps trace out the meanings and impact of race is the romance of Maskil and Peninah, written in biblical Hebrew by Jacob Ben El‘azar. Deploying rhymed prose and heavily overlain with biblical phrases and allusions, it imitates the Spanish Arabic narrative genre of maqamāh, and was written in Christian Toledo around 1213. The text provides no specific coordinates or proper names for the setting, and the narrative often seems like an other-worldly dream vision teeming with verbal allusions. At the outset, the King of the Land of Beauty, fearing that beauty has disappeared, demands that ‘all gazelles, female and male’ be sought for in his provinces. When he sees thirteen-year-old Maskil, he makes him crown prince: ‘all who saw him were consumed with passion for him’ (Rosen 2008: 159). Maskil organizes an expedition to the Land of the Arabs, where they take gazelles captive and return safely home. Maskil falls in love with Peninah, and locks her inside himself (160). They make songs celebrating the other: Peninah sings, ‘a lovely rose-[bed] grows on his cheek’; Maskil observes ‘Roses bloom in her cheeks.’ Clearly the ideal of beauty is light-skinned. Out in the fields, as they are feasting together, a giant appears, ‘and when Maskil got closer to him, he realized he was black’; he says, ‘This Cushite has come here for no reason other than to take my soul away!’ (Rosen 2008: 161). Maskil sees that ‘His face [was as black as] a piece of wood pulled out of the fire’ (162). The giant tells Maskil to abandon Peninah, and Maskil shouts, ‘He who placed heavenly lights in Peninah’s face … put coals in yours’, and then makes a poem in which he repeats the latter phrase. He vows that whether the giant is descended from demons or from Adam, he will conquer him. The giant replies, ‘I am of the Cushites and my name is Cushan.’ Peninah buoys Maskil, and he sings, ‘You are but a Cushite – and Cushites are nothing to me’ (163). They have a first, then a second epic battle, and in a third encounter Maskil slays him; as the lovers ride back to ‘the Dwelling of Delight, they passed by the [corpse of the] Cushite and saw his flesh-folds black as coals’ (166–7). The couple marry and spend ‘their days in peace and their years in joy’. As an allegory, one might read the narrative as the Intellect’s love for Wisdom, with Cushan as the enemy of Platonic love, and the contrast of black and white as the opposition of evil and good (Rosen 2008: 167–8). On a more literal level, when Peninah calls Maskil an ‘Edomite’ she seems to frame him as a Christian, as do other ‘geographical and ethnic markers’ (169). Peninah, from the ‘Land of the Arabs’, seems clearly Muslim, and the repeated references to Cushan’s blackness, as well as his Cushite affinity, strongly associate him with Africa. In an Arabic maqamāh composed in biblical Hebrew the fanciful story of an idealized and passionate interfaith marriage abuts the graphically violent clash of a light-skinned Christian and a black-skinned Muslim. Whether the text gestures at a resolution, or simply works to keep these elements in suspension, raced and religious identities clearly beckon to the reader. Maskil and Peninah perhaps finds a suggestive counterpart in Abraham bin Ezra’s Hebrew poem ‘Ancient Battle’, in which he suggests that an observer of pieces on a chessboard ‘might think that they were Christians  and Moors’ (Cole 2007: 167). Labelling the opposing chessmen ‘dark ones’ (Muslims) and ‘red rivals’ (Christians), Abraham bin

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Ezra effectively racializes a cultural pastime whose moves and outcomes may be played over and over: ‘they will fight again before long’, for the vectors of race are always in play (168).

GLOBAL ETHNICITIES IN EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE: INDIANS As the narrator of Mandeville’s Travels makes his fitful and desultory way from Britain first to Jerusalem and then to the world beyond, he interrupts himself to say that one cannot see the North Star from the ocean near southern India: Through this we can perceive that the earth and the sea are of round form …. And it can easily be discovered by experience and by clever research that, if a man found passage by ship and people who wanted to go explore the world, he could sail all around the world, both above and below …. If I had found company and ship to go farther, I believe it to be certain that we would have seen the whole roundness of the firmament. (Mandeville 2011: 111–12) The narrator then supplies a whole series of latitudinal calculations that insinuate technical mastery of cartography and navigation, and, adding them together, avers he has personally traversed three-quarters of the globe. For this reason I say for certain that a man could travel around all the land in the world …. For you know that those who are in the place of the Antarctic are exactly foot against foot with those who live beneath the Tramontane [North Star], just as we and those who live under us are foot against foot …. Know that according to what I can perceive and understand, the lands of Prester John, emperor of India, are under us. … for our land is in the low part of the earth to the west, and Prester John’s Land is the low part of the earth to the east. (Mandeville 2011: 113) Circumnavigation simultaneously augurs interconnectedness and diversity, as the antipodes at once sever and join extremities, sustaining cultural autonomy and insuring reciprocity. In this reversible world, opposites match and Britain is India turned inside out; a calculus of difference works identically in all human societies but produces non-identical results. Of the Numidians he writes Thai er [are] blakk of colour, and that thai hald [hold] a grete bewtee [beauty], and ay the [the more the] blakker thai er, the fairer tham think tham. And thai say that, and [if] thai schuld paynt ane aungelle and a fende [fiend], thai wald [would]paynt the aungelle black and the fende qwhite [white]. And if thaim [they] think tham noght black ynogh [enough] when thai er borne, thai use certayne medecynes for to make tham black withalle. (Seymour 2010: 26)

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The Numidians’ veneration of blackness duplicates the value scheme that explains Europeans’ attachment to whiteness. This oppositional and interdependent structure of Black and white difference finds a counterpart in the mosaic of the Trinitarian Order at the church of San Tomasso in Formis, Rome (Figure 6.10). The Trinitarians were founded through the support of Pope Innocent III in 1198, with the commitment to allocate one-third of their income to ransom Christian captives; this was frequently achieved by redeeming a Muslim prisoner and then arranging a person-for-person exchange. The mosaic shows Jesus enthroned grasping a white captive holding a cross with his right hand, and clutching a Black captive holding his chain with his left hand. Jesus clearly serves as mediator through whom the transaction takes place, but the symmetrical balance of the two captives – at once the same and opposite – seems inescapable (Cipollone 1984: 86–104; Liez 1992: 69–71). Both figures are still in chains, though the fetter of the white prisoner snakes to Jesus’ throne, while the Black captive seems to hold his tether in his right hand. The mosaic may be simply transactional, illustrating the kind of bargain the Trinitarians managed hundreds of times a year, but the interconnection leads  the

FIGURE 6.10  Christ mediates the redemption of Black and white captives on the outward-facing mosaic on the church of San Tomasso in Formis, Rome, c. 1210. © Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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viewer to take in the interchangeability of their immediate confinement but also of their human condition (Friedman 2002: 190–1). The image has since c. 1212 been public art, visible to all on the street or in the square; its spectacle of Black and white must have recruited viewers to recognize, consciously or unconsciously, the structural dynamics of raced identities. The accounts of circumnavigation and the Numidians are just two of the diverse array of medieval travellers’ tales that Mandeville’s first-person account sutures together, and it became, in its manifold formats and variants, the most widely known travel book in Europe from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. The text demands that readers take seriously the claims of difference articulated in every race, region and religion that the narrator describes, and then use this profusion of meanings to defuse the inequities linked to any single claim or system. Within this view of the world and its peoples, Mandeville assigns a crucial role to the antipodal Indians, for these are the last people the book’s invented persona visits before he returns to England. The closing section of the text makes clear not only its distinctive vision of global affiliations but also the ways in which these correspond to momentous and characteristic changes in Europe’s relations with its Others during the late Middle Ages and early modern era. The sites that make up the global itinerary create meaning through the light they cast on one another, and the conscious self-critique intensifies through the frequent observations of the narrator upon the contrast between the sometimes strange but frequently praiseworthy behaviour of aliens and the routinely deplorable character of life in Europe. The crowning instance of this opposition is the description of the virtuous Indians, the Brahmans and Gymnosophists, situated in the Farthest East as the last discrete people Sir John encounters before his return to the British Isles, situated on the western extremities of Europe. In positioning the British Isles and the islands of ‘Ind’ as antipodes and precise counterparts, Mandeville emphasizes the global linkage of East and West through these two kingdoms that are structural counterparts, situated at the extreme edges of the oikumene. The antipodal structure at once sets up and short-circuits simple Same–Other structural judgements. These Indians inhabit another large and good and bountiful island where there are good and trustworthy people, and of a good way of life according to their belief and of good faith, and although they are not Christians and do not have perfect law, nevertheless through natural law they are full of all virtues and they flee all vices and all wickedness and all sins …. they do unto others only what they want done unto them, and in this custom they fulfill the Ten Commandments. (Mandeville 2011: 172–3) These Indians never commit mortal sin, they never suffer natural disasters, and they never experience material want. Sir John identifies this earthly paradise as the ‘island of Bragmey, and others call it the Land of Faith …. Generally all the peoples of the islands there around those far countries are more trustworthy and just than they are anywhere else’ (Mandeville 2011: 173). The narrator concludes, from the Indians’ excellence and from the temperate character of their land, that ‘it appears that God loves them and favorably accepts their

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belief and their good works’. He mentions that ‘[i]n the distant past King Alexander sent [someone] to reconnoiter these islanders because he wanted to win their country’, but they reject his overtures. The narrator next visits the Gynosophe, ‘a good and trustworthy people and full of good faith, and they follow a good many of the customs and the good habits that those mentioned above do’ (Mandeville 2011: 174). He relates how the Gymnosophists impressed Alexander through their virtue, leaving the narrator himself no less impressed: as he draws together his remarks on the Indians, he comments: ‘Although these people do not have the articles of the faith such as we have, nevertheless for their natural good faith and for their goodwill I believe it to be certain that God loves them, and that God favorably receives their service just as He did from Job, who was pagan’ (175). As his scriptural justification for this belief, the narrator quotes several texts, including John 10:16: ‘[God] had other servants than [those] under Christian law.’ Mandeville sums up the import of this entire section on the Indians – seemingly an attempt to ‘own’ racial difference through fully knowing it yet refusing appropriation – through an explicit adjuration to its readers ‘that this was a sign that one ought not to despise any earthly people for their diverse laws, nor any one person. For we do not know whom God loves and whom he hates.’ As final proof of God’s love, Mandeville reveals that the Indians prophesied the Incarnation three thousand or more years before the event, thereby reincorporating them into Christian universalism. This brief summary and collection of excerpts perhaps gives some sense of the effect of Mandeville’s Travels: similar to Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Mandeville pushes its audience to a reexamination of their most familiar values and assumptions. Its global perspective insistently demonstrates that what one sees depends entirely on where one is situated. The viewpoint on Others attributed to the Pygmies, for example, reiterates the transactional character of the calculus of difference: they have ordinary-sized humans who do agricultural work for them, but ‘the little people mock these big people and scorn them just as we would large giants if they were amongst us’ (Mandeville 2011: 128). Mandeville’s Travels ultimately presents its encompassing vision of the oikumene not as referential – accurate descriptions of real peoples and places, useful directions – but as fictional and provocative: reorganizing the shape of the world, and the relations between hemispheres, religions, peoples will depend upon a review of received opinion and an internalization of new values. In its Epilogue, Mandeville reiterates the theme that Europeans, with their internal differences, must see themselves as only one among peoples who might merit God’s favour: Know that in all these countries about which I have spoken, and on all these islands, and amongst all these diverse peoples that I have described to you, and the diverse laws and the diverse beliefs they have, there is no people – because they have reason and understanding – who do not have some articles of our faith and some good points of our belief, and who do not believe in God who made the world, whom they call the God of Nature. (Mandeville 2011: 184) This sense of the Indians as an autonomous, even admirable race provoked a large number of visual representations that often emphasized the challenge that the ascetic

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simplicity of these antipodal peoples directed at the materially luxuriant civilization represented by Alexander and his Western entourage. In the sumptuous Livre des merveilles, which includes a French Mandeville, three Gymnosophists kneel before Alexander, presumably exchanging information about their rival ways of life (Figure 6.11). Neither phenotype nor skin colour distinguishes Indians from Europeans. In contrast, a striking but nuanced representation of ethnographic difference and raced identity in India surfaces in at least three surviving manuscripts produced in the Paris workshop of Maître François. These accompany a French translation of Saint Augustine’s City of God, and take the form of a full-page image in three registers, two of which feature the Brahmans and Gymnosophists in their encounter with Alexander the Great. These illustrations confirm the Indians’ status as compressed and highly visible symbols of natural and exotic goodness, who claim in their own right – outside the scaffolding of the Alexander romance – a prominent place within universal history. Iconographically, Maître François has represented the Indians (and especially the Gymnosophists) as an autonomous and distinct people, whose skin colour has been darkened, in contrast to other fifteenth-century renditions (Figure 6.12). In effect, he has created an ‘ethnoglyph’, a composite where colour, clothing, dwellings, family units and mores mark a people’s status as a nation within a raced identity, affirming their capacity for biological, social and cultural reproduction through time and space. These images help demonstrate the free-standing and widely shared cultural capital the Indians possessed as icons of the contact zone where East and West, Europe and its others, negotiate global identities.

FIGURE 6.11  Three Indian Gymnosophists converse with Alexander the Great in an unbuilt landscape. From Le livre des merveilles. BNF MS fr 2810, fol. 219r, c. 1410. © BnF.

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FIGURE 6.12  Indian Gymnosophists – women, children and men – encounter Alexander in their seafront enclave. From Saint Augustine, La cité de Dieu, illuminated by Maître François. BNF MS fr 18, fol. 60v, c. 1470. Public domain.

This assumptions and components assembled here are deeply embedded in the cultural idiom deployed in accounts of the ‘Indies’ produced by Columbus, da Gama and Vespucci in the following decades, suggesting not a break but continuity in the ways in which Europeans understood race as a crucial constituent of physical, political and cultural identity.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Race and Gender SARAH SALIH

INTRODUCTION: RACE AND THE MEDIEVAL Half a lifetime ago I attended a school in rural England which interpellated the boys into Bedan racial categories by placing them in houses named Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes, so that the schedule of sporting competitions was styled as a never-ending series of race wars. Girls, meanwhile, belonged to separate houses named for former school matrons. Masculine belonging was national, racial and historical; feminine belonging was local, domestic and subservient. Gender, thus, was raced, and race was gendered, and their intersection produced positions differentiated in time and space. Nobody seemed to find any of this odd at the time. I begin with a personal anecdote to emphasize the specific place and time that I am writing from: from the (still, just, for now) United Kingdom, a nation struggling to come to terms with its post-imperial phase and its historic responsibility for racial injustices. It shows too that the medieval contributed to that history and that it still matters: the labels early medieval writers used to clarify the complex experiential reality of identities that were contingent, overlapping and negotiable (Halsall 2013: 258–65), were moving schoolboys around classrooms and playing fields in the 1980s. Modern and contemporary operations of ostensibly scientific ‘racecraft’ are informed by and liable to collapse into their earlier folk forms, to which the medieval contributes (Fields and Fields 2012: 198). And while the specific categories of Angles, Saxons and Jutes are obsolete in any other context, the more compendious Bedan categories of British, English, Irish and Scots still mark fault lines in insular politics. The medieval has a special and paradoxical role in the received history of race, a contribution it makes through absence. On the one hand, medieval Europe is currently popularly misunderstood as a repository of undifferentiated whiteness, innocent of racial tension because innocent of racial diversity. Clearly this is not historically true. Latin Christendom was an organizing category, and the multiple myths of Trojan origin made it possible to think of western Europeans as sharing ancestry, but medieval history is full of local, regional and international conflicts that involved racing adversaries. Yet the ‘longed-for racial purity of nineteenth-century medievalist ethnonationalisms’, argues Helen Young (2015: 83), even now governs popular understanding of the period. This view is ultimately traceable to the nineteenth-century scholarship that made the medieval the crucial period of national origin, holding it up as the moment when the nation was

I am grateful to Thomas Hahn for inviting me to contribute this chapter, and for his ever-encouraging editorial feedback.

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self-identical, as yet uncontaminated by the foreign: ‘this pseudo-history assumes, first, that the peoples of Europe are distinct, stable and objectively identifiable social and cultural units, and that they are distinguished by language, religion, custom, and national character, which are unambiguous and immutable’ (Geary 2002: 11). Patrick J. Geary and other medievalists demonstrate that this account is, simply, untrue and that medieval people understood their identities in diverse and fluid ways. However, such critiques may be misread to produce once more, from the opposite direction, a medieval that is innocently pre-racial. Geary demonstrates that ‘The particular type of ethnic nationalism that we know today is of recent origin’ (Geary 2002: 41); Robert Bartlett likewise argues that cultural and environmental factors were more central than biological ones to medieval racial thinking (Bartlett 2001: 45), but these observations can be true of specific materials yet have limited significance. For racial thinking in the present day is by no means limited to pseudoscientific, biologically defined ethnicity; it is no more coherent now than it was in the Middle Ages. Geraldine Heng summarizes: ‘race theory … understands, of course, that race has no single or stable referent: that race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content’ (2018b: 19; emphases in the original). Race is not a thing, but an activity. Paul Gilroy shows that a ‘new racism’ was already observably in operation in the West by the 1980s, centring on culture rather than biology, and claiming to discriminate between ‘authentic and inauthentic types of national belonging’ (Gilroy 1987: 42, 50). The new racism, then, reaches back to the old racism: the multiple medieval discourses of discrimination with reference to culture, religion, environment, law, custom, descent and physical appearance were also racializing operations. What we might consider to be mere social difference might be racialized: Havelok the Dane’s inherent and immutable royalty shows through his humble disguise, in the form of light streaming from his mouth and a ‘gold red … noble croiz’ (Shepherd 1995: 36, lines 1262–3) on his shoulder. The evident incoherence of medieval racial thinking can indeed help to reveal the incoherence of contemporary racial thinking. As Thomas Hahn argues: If the elusiveness of race – as a component of organic identity, as an analytic descriptor, as a trope of difference, or as a phantasm of representation – equips the term to describe the complexity of modern social relations, it seems counterproductive to cite these same capacities (its versatility, its ambiguity) as reasons to exclude race from the analysis of medieval documents and events. (Hahn 2001a: 9) Medieval race, thus, has now become a possible field: indeed, since race has become interested in the medieval, it has become imperative for medievalists to take account of race. Yet medieval racial categories may superficially resemble modern ones while their specific contents have changed. I focus here on insular and Northern European materials, but with the emphasis on how their racial thinking continually involved discussion of relationships to continental Europe and further East via the Mediterranean world. These are stories of migration rather than of indigeneity. The originary narrative of masculine Trojan settlement was supplemented by further stories of travelling women, stories that mix and match motifs of exogamous desire, mixed marriage, miraculous and monstrous children, and the intergenerational work of perpetuating race.

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Medieval historians invented racial categories in order to tell history about geography. The British Isles contained, Bede wrote, four ‘nations’: ‘English, British, Scots and Picts’ (Bede 1994: 1.1, 38); his apparently factual statement, however, naturalized his own fateful choice to categorize the inhabitants of the several kingdoms of the day as the gens Anglorum, the people of the English, or Angles. As Michelle P. Brown writes, ‘the very concept of “Englishness” stems from Bede’s attempts to construct a collective identity for the mêlée of peoples inhabiting the former Roman province of Britannia’ (2010: 4). Bede’s history of conversion told of a rupture of identity: his invention of Englishness offered continuity with their past to a people who had torn down their sacred groves to build churches, who had relegated their ancestors to damnation. Four centuries later Geoffrey of Monmouth supplied the complementary history of the Britons. ‘Like Bede, moreover, Geoffrey’s text performs the separation of the island’s people … similarly stressing the eternal solitariness of the insular races’ (J. J. Cohen 2007: 68; emphasis in the original): Bede had succeeded in establishing race as a central organizing category of history. It is not quite true that there were no white people in medieval Europe, but their whiteness was not our whiteness.1 Robert of Gloucester’s thirteenth-century version of the encomium of Britain, a topos originating with Gildas and transmitted through Bede and then Geoffrey (Staley 2012: 17–19), adds a comment on the whitening effect of ‘engelond’, a location which is ‘apparently conflated with the entire island’ (Clarke 2006: 132): So clene lond is engelond. & so cler wiþ outen hore Þe vairest men in þe world. þer inne beþ ibore So clene & vair & pur ȝwit. amonge oþere men hii beþ Þat me knoweþ hem in eche lond. bi siȝte þar me hem seþ. (Robert of Gloucester 1887: lines 180–3) (So clean a land is England, and so clear of dirt, that the fairest people in the world are born there. They are so clean and fair and pure white, compared to other people, that one can recognize them in any country on sight.) Whiteness, then, is an environmental effect that shows in the bodies of the nation’s inhabitants, irrespective of their indigeneity or race, for Robert previously recounts the familiar sequence of settlements, as indigenous ‘Brutons’ are supplemented by ‘picars & scottes’, ‘engliss & saxons’, ‘þe folc of denemarch’ and ‘þat folc of normandie’ (Britons, Picts, Scots, English, Saxons, the people of Denmark, the people of Normandy; Robert of Gloucester 1887: lines 42–54). Immigrants, or at least their children, can be assimilated through the power of environmental influence. Insular whiteness is at once a somatic and a moral quality, the visible aspect of inner purity; the claim appears to be grounded in Bede’s anecdote of Pope Gregory’s admiration of the Angles ‘with fair complexions, handsome faces and lovely hair’ (Bede 1994: 2.1, 70). English whiteness is instantly recognizable, though what it looks like is entirely obscure. Whiteness is portable in English bodies when they travel abroad, and is a specifically insular quality, not shared with other northern Europeans, for ailing French visitors may be cured by the island’s healing properties. Yet the South English Legendary (SEL) life of Edmund of Canterbury has Christ appear to the saint in the guise of a ‘fair whit child’ (fair white child; D’Evelyn and Mill 1956: 494, line 60; Middle English Dictionary 2021: s.v. ‘whit’ 6, esp. 6b, 6d), in the more common differentiating sense of ‘white’ to mark an individual as notably

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pale-complexioned, often indicating holiness, beauty or aristocracy. The latter sense would be unusable if whiteness really were considered a uniform quality of the insular population: Robert’s boast of English superiority cannot ever have been meant, or read, as a literal statement about English bodies.

GENDERING RACE, RACING GENDER Gendering race begins from a default masculine position: racial alterity is thus often figured as a problem in gender. Alterity may be gendered as feminine, as when Christians imagine Jews as effeminized and sodomitical (Kruger 2006: 93). Or it may be figured as excessive, uncontrolled, impotent masculinity, embodied in the giants of romance (J. J. Cohen 1999) or the blustering pagan tyrants of hagiography (Bernau 2006: 110). This figuration allows Christianity, specifically, to take on feminine personifications, as the defiant virgin martyr or the persecuted princess Constance; despite its actual hegemonic power, Christianity embodies itself as a vulnerable, suffering yet eventually triumphant woman (Mills 2003: 203). In the course of racializing the Irish, a construction that was to have extraordinary longevity, Gerald of Wales added bestiality to the collection of sexual

FIGURE 7.1  Ox-man of Wicklow. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hiberniae. London, BL, MS Royal 13 B VIII, fol. 19r. © The British Library Board.

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transgressions that might connote the improper gendering of the other. In Wicklow, he writes, there lived a man with a human body and the limbs of an ox (Figure 7.1), who could not speak at all; he could only low … He came to dinner every day and, using his cleft hooves as hands, placed in his mouth whatever was given to him to eat. The Irish natives of the place, because the youths of the castle often taunted them with begetting such beings on cows, secretly killed him in the end in envy and malice – a fate which he did not deserve. (Gerald of Wales 1982: 73–4) The slur is clear enough: the Irish, claim the invading Cambro-Normans, not only have disgusting sexual habits but also are close enough to beasts to interbreed with them. Gerald’s associative cast of mind then recalls numerous other cases of bestiality, concluding with a Parisian lion that loved a woman named Johanna (Figure 7.2), but that is only an individual crime, with no issue, in any sense, for Gerald was not engaged in racing the French. In a patriarchal system, men and women necessarily have different investments in race and different jobs to do in relation to it. While men body forth their racial being, women work to transmit and produce it. Attention to the temporal dimension of race, its reiterations, reifications, mutations, brings into focus women’s work of biological and cultural reproduction. Explaining the nature of the Irish, Gerald points to the failure of their women to uphold their responsibilities. Irish babies, he explains, are not encultured: ‘they are for the most part abandoned to nature. They are not put in cradles, or swathed; nor are their tender limbs helped by frequent baths or formed by any useful art. The midwives do not use hot water to raise the nose, or press down the face, or lengthen the limbs’ (Gerald of Wales 1982: 100). The natural state of babies is inchoate, and they need active intervention if they are to become people. The figure of the monstrous or formless child, which recurs in The King of Tars and the Constance legend, is a statement of the inadequacy of ‘human’ as a category and the pressing need to shape and place the raw material of each potential-human in race and gender, place and time. This shaping is women’s work.

FIGURE 7.2  Bestiality. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hiberniae. London, BL, MS Royal 13 B VIII, fol. 19v. © The British Library Board.

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TALES OF MIGRANT WOMEN A supplement to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history of Britain’s Trojan origins highlights the gendered story within the racial story. Geoffrey’s chivalric Trojan settlers lose control of the island as their descendants lose control of their masculinity: the Britons become weakened, degenerate and ‘began to indulge in sexual excesses such as had never been heard among other peoples’ (Geoffrey of Monmouth 2004: 273) and thus cede dominion to the more properly masculine Saxons. Geoffrey’s prequel to Bede attracted its own early fourteenth-century prequel; this supplementary mythology explained both the presence of the indigenous giants whom the Trojans killed and the island’s name Albion, and placed immigrant women literally as the prologue to national history.2 Albina and her thirty-two sisters are gender rebels, the daughters of a king of Syria, who refuse to accept the authority of their husbands. She is ‘of kynges blod hyer’ (of royal blood more noble; Castleford 1996: 4, line 141) than her husband, argues Albina, who persuades her sisters to murder their husbands. The king exiles his daughters, who eventually arrive in Britain, feed on the abundance of fruit and meat offered by this uninhabited island paradise, then take demon lovers and give birth to the giants whom the Trojans were to encounter on their arrival. Giants are, on biblical precedent, the expected outcome of such liaisons (Gen. 6.4), and are also, perhaps, the outcome of women who refuse to continue the work of transmission and placing, the excessive adult forms that untrained lump-children might grow into. As a contribution to national mythology, this is a distinctly perverse way to tie up the loose end of the giants’ origin: it displaces noble, masculine, military Trojans from their originary position and replaces them with a disorderly feminine presence. It shores up the British/Trojan claim to masculine dominance in the face of their later deterioration, yet at the cost of disrupting the origin story. Introducing gender difference complicates the tale of nation. While only the Trojan story was told, the logic was of colonialism’s collapse of space into time: Geoffrey’s tale of settlement and foundation repeats Virgil’s, three generations later, making Britain’s story a belated ‘stage in the one and only narrative it is possible to tell’ (Massey 2005: 4), that of the translatio imperii from East to West. With the Albina supplement, nation becomes instead ‘the product of interactions … a simultaneity of stories-so-far’ (9). The encounter of the stories-so-far of Trojans and giants repeats and depends upon the earlier encounter of stories-so-far of runaway princesses and opportunistic demons. Feminine excess and transgressive sexuality are at the origin of British history. Though this encounter is a false start to ancestry, the figure of the giant was adopted in the later medieval broad present as a totem of the nation’s history: ‘a monstrous body standing at the originary moment when a heterogeneous group of conquered Anglo-Saxons, ruling Anglo-Normans, and even some Celtic peoples began to imagine themselves a collective entity’ (J. J. Cohen 1999: 31); Gog and Magog still walk from the Guildhall to the Strand every year in the Lord Mayor’s procession. The ‘Saracen Legend’ of Thomas Becket’s parentage oddly recaps aspects of the Albina legend: a Middle Eastern woman rejects the values of her own kin and finds her destiny in Britain, where she bears her children. This gratuitous encounter with the foreign is a prequel to the life of the Anglo-Norman saint, first appearing as a thirteenth-century interpolation into Edward Grim’s Latin life of Becket, recently dated to c. 1240 by John Jenkins (2020); it then transfers into English vernacular hagiography, first in the early then the later South English Legendaries, the later one being the main source of the version in the 1438 Gilte Legende (Mills 2012: 129).3 This fictive supplement to Thomas’s life

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was probably prompted by the existence of the Church of St Thomas at Acre, which generated a prequel narrative to account for the Eastern connection; it thus originated in the London end of Thomas’s cult (Warner 2007: 51). The more sober account, that both Becket’s parents were London resident Anglo-Normans, continued to be available in Latin lives, in which Thomas’s mother, whose name was probably Matilda, had prophetic dreams during her pregnancy, as saints’ mothers do, and taught her son piety and literacy (Staunton 2001: 40), fulfilling her responsibility to begin inducting him into culture. In the ‘Saracen Legend’, however, Gilbert Becket, on pilgrimage or crusade in Holy Land, was captured and imprisoned by an emir, whose daughter fell in love with the prisoner, questioned him about his home and religion and proposed marriage to him, offering to convert to Christianity. The alarmed Gilbert was prompted to flee, but the daughter, not dissuaded, ran away to follow him, crossed the Mediterranean, asking for ‘London’, her only word of English, made her way across Europe until she arrived at Gilbert’s very door, in Cheapside, where his servant recognized her. Her conversion, marriage to Gilbert and the birth of Thomas follow.4 This legend is, obviously, the romance storyline of the ‘Saracen Bride’ grafted onto a hagiography otherwise notable for the density of its historical detail. Western European stereotypes of Saracens were well established and clearly gendered: Saracen men were warriors, either monstrous or chivalric mirror images of the Christian reader; both types appear, for example, in the Chanson de Roland. Saracen women are occasionally monstrous, such as Constance’s first mother-in-law, but more common is the ‘Saracen Bride’, an aristocratic woman who voluntarily converts to Christianity for love of a Christian protagonist. Such stories ‘have little historical basis’ (Heng 2018b: 141), but, as Sharon Kinoshita explains, bolster Christian self-esteem: This common epic motif … was particularly attractive for representing the Franks’ contact with peoples they perceived as culturally superior. Unlike the pagans on Latin Christendom’s northern and eastern frontiers, Muslims from advanced Mediterranean cultures had nothing to gain from conversion. They could be seduced only in the imagination, in the figure of the bold princess ready to exchange a royal Saracen husband for an intrepid Christian count. When Orable delivers the rich city of Orange into the hands of Guillaume Fierebrace, accepts baptism, and marries him, it is at once an erotic fantasy and a political victory. (2001: 92) Such stories, in epic and romance, commonly accompany other fantasies of military victory; the imagined European masculine reader is situated both as active subject and as the object of a female desiring gaze. It is a fantasy of effortless cultural superiority, in which Christianity and European masculinity are simply and self-evidently desirable, and only need to be themselves in order to attract the attention and desires of the other. Taken out of romance and attached to a historiographic hagiography, the story may have some further cultural work to do. The ‘Saracen Legend’ continues that work of claiming the self-evident desirability of Christianity; as is usual for hagiography, the momentous decision to convert is formulaic and unexamined. As Robert Mills has suggested, the vagueness with which Umm Thomas’s original religion, language and culture are characterized gives the impression that she converts not from one to another, but ‘from nothing to something’ (Mills 2011: 393). Only in the second SEL version are her people described as Saracens, and in a later version they become Jews; this is not an

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engagement with the reality of other races/religions/cultures (Mills 2012: 137). But though the ‘Saracen Legend’ was later to be used to encourage crusading and evangelization (Warner 2003: 124), here at its inception into English language hagiography, the fantasy is detached from aspiration of territorial conquest. If Gilbert is a crusader he is a markedly unsuccessful one, for he is never shown to fight and arrives in the Holy Land only to be taken captive. The Becket version of the legend retreats from the prospect of Eastern military conquest, shifting the attention and the centre of action from the Holy Land to Christian Europe, and to London. The ‘Saracen Bride’ of romance is a heroine before she is a Saracen: Jacqueline de Weever points out that in French romance ‘[b]y insisting that all heroines be blond, white, and rose, including Saracen women, language lends itself to the erasure of identity in the portrait of the Saracen woman’ (de Weever 1998: xxii). English romance followed the French practice of not marking such characters as racially other: Bevis of Hampton’s Saracen princess Josiane, for example, is ‘whyte and swete’ (Fellows 2017: 39, line 581), just as the Saracen heroine of the French Aucassin and Nicolette has skin whiter than daisies (Matarosso 1971: 35). Umm Thomas is described only briefly as a ‘faire douȝter’ (fair daughter; Horstmann 1887: 107, line 23) in the earlier SEL text and not at all in the later one, but the illustrator of the Queen Mary Psalter depicted a blonde beauty (Figure 7.4), using a convention quite different from the ‘common pejorative visual vocabulary’ that identified ‘demons, Jews, Ethiopians, Saracens, and other negative figures’ with dark skins and exaggerated features (Strickland 2003: 173). The trope of the ‘Saracen Bride’ thus diverges from historical practice around conversion and marriage. Steven F. Kruger finds that ‘Jews and Saracens, thought of as both religiously and racially different and as possessing bodies somehow essentially other than Christian bodies, are often depicted as strongly resistant to conversion’ (2006: 75), a perception that created ‘uncertainty about the licitness of sexual and familial relations with new converts to Christianity’ (103). But the Bride whose destiny was always to become a Christian carries that teleology in her body, and her conversion leaves no Saracen residue. Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh astutely notes of the SEL’s ‘Saracen Legend’ that in the scene of arrival in London, ‘We can only see Alisaundre through the gaze of the citizens of London’ (2019a: 296). That is, we see her racialized, in real time, as her mere differences – of language, in all versions, of ‘continaunce’ (Horstmann 1887: 108, line 68; demeanour), in the early SEL, of dress, in the Queen Mary Psalter – are declared to be scandalous, subhuman and intolerable. Sara Ahmed describes present-day moments of racial crisis: ‘There are techniques, bodily as well as disciplinary techniques, whereby some bodies are recognized as strangers, as bodies out of place, as not belonging in certain places … Some bodies are in an instant judged as suspicious, or as dangerous, as objects to be feared, a judgement that is lethal … it is dangerous to be perceived as dangerous’ (2017: 143). This is exactly what happens to Umm Thomas in Cheapside. In the later version, she is described walking around like ‘a best’ (a beast) who ‘ne couthe no wisdom’ (had no understanding; line 76), acting, from the point of view of the ‘folk’ around her, ‘[a]s heo were of anoþer world’ (as if she were from another world; line 77). The crowd stares at the ‘mopiss best’ (bewildered beast; line 78), and children and ‘wilde boyes’ (rough boys; line 79) ‘siwede hure’ (followed her) and ‘scorned hure’ (mocked her; line 80) (D’Evelyn and Mill 1956: 613). The narrative here sets up a pointed contrast between Umm Thomas’s hopes, fears and sufferings, previously explored sympathetically and articulately, and the perception of the crowd that her foreignness makes her bestial, even otherworldly. The London crowd do not recognize her as a ‘Saracen Bride’, but as matter out of place.

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In this recognition and racialization of the visitor, London constructs itself as a monoculture of undifferentiated Englishness, easily provoked into outbreaks of racial panic by the intrusion of a foreigner; it is rather like, indeed, the all-white originary nation imagined in present-day racist discourse. It was not, of course. The later SEL, remarking that Umm Thomas ‘ne couþe Engliss word non’ (knew no word of English; D’Evelyn and Mill 1956: 613, line 73) apparently forgets that Gilbert Becket was a Francophone Norman: as Anne B. Thompson argues, the legends remake the AngloNorman Thomas as ‘a kind of de facto Englishman’ (2003: 50). They also substitute a monoglot Anglophone culture for the actual diversity of twelfth-century London. The scene obscures, for example, the presence of a Jewish community – and Jewry Street, now Old Jewry, adjoins Cheapside – to which a Middle Eastern visitor might have turned for guidance in this foreign city. For the Legendary, initially written about 1280, thus to occlude London’s Jews is ominously prophetic of their expulsion in 1290. Yet textual accounts of London had traditionally emphasized its cosmopolitan connectedness. Bede already remarked that London was ‘an emporium for many nations who come to it by land and sea’ (1994: 2.3, 74); William FitzStephen begins his Becket biography with a sketch of London that emphasizes the continual influx of luxury goods from the East, including weapons, spices, gold, incense, palm oil, gems, silk, wine and furs. The goods come from places ranging from Arabia to ‘Sabaea’, from Babylon to the Nile to China, from France to ‘the far lands where Russ and Norseman dwell’ (Gillingham 2014: 45). London, in this account, is a node in an international network, requiring foreign goods to be fully itself, to make the jewels and furred robes that marked out the urban elite, and, presumably, accepting the presence of the foreigners who turned up selling such things as part of the mundane normality of urban life. Hence the ‘Saracen Legend’s’ replacement of this cosmopolitan city with an aggressively xenophobic community prompts the question of how Umm Thomas can become assimilated to her new home. The legend thus acknowledges the work of selftransformation routinely required of women under patriarchy, who must build new identities for themselves upon marriage, and illustrates how their religious, racial, cultural difference is obliterated in the interests of patrilineal continuity. Its extended account of gradual assimilation is another departure from the romance norm, in which the ‘Saracen Bride’s’ conversion to Christianity effects instantaneous and total assimilation. Religious conversion, the obvious direction of her story from the moment she meets Gilbert, is straightforward, but she remains culturally alienated at least for a period; thus Rajabzadeh argues that ‘Alisaundre Becket remains raced even after her conversion’, since she remains Arabic-speaking and never learns English, and thus that the early SEL version of the ‘Saracen Legend’ is ‘one of the earliest moments of racial identity perceived, translated, and portrayed as distinct from religious identity in the Middle Ages’ (Rajabzadeh 2019a: 300). Rajabzadeh’s picture of the young Thomas as ‘a mixed-raced child, part-Arab, partEnglish, whose heritage language is Arabic’ (300) is attractive, and not an impossible reading, but I think rather that the texts imply that Umm Thomas eventually succeeded in learning the language and customs of her new home. Her assimilation, however, is a complicated and multistranded process. The Queen Mary Psalter images, appropriately for a visual medium, present her difference visually, in an elaborately folded and tied headscarf that covers her neck (Figure 7.3): earlier in the book, Sarah (fol. 9) and other women of the Old Testament wear similar garments, so it marks Umm Thomas as an intrusion from the past as well as from a distant land and foreign culture. After she is stripped for baptism (Figure 7.4), she wears a lighter,

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FIGURE 7.3  Umm Thomas arrives in London. From Queen Mary Psalter. London, BL, MS Royal 2 B. vii, fol. 288v. © The British Library Board.

FIGURE 7.4  Umm Thomas is baptized. From Queen Mary Psalter. London, BL, MS Royal 2 B. vii, fol. 289r. © The British Library Board.

simpler veil for her wedding (Figure 7.5), loosely covering her hair but leaving her neck exposed: the Virgin Mary chooses a similar style to receive the Magi (fol. 112v). The change of dress thus inducts Umm Thomas into Christian space, culture and temporality, in an instantaneous and total transformation. The textual accounts centre on language, acknowledging that language acquisition is not instantaneous. The early SEL emphasizes

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FIGURE 7.5  Umm Thomas marries Gilbert Becket. From Queen Mary Psalter. London, BL, MS Royal 2 B. vii, fol. 289v. © The British Library Board.

that her conversation with the bishops about her conversion was carried on in translation, and the same must be presumed to be true in the later version too, for after her marriage Umm Thomas asks that Gilbert’s servant Richard, ‘Þat knoweþ me wel & my langage’ (who knows me and my language well; line 142, D’Evelyn and Mill 1956: 615) should stay behind to help her while Gilbert returns to the Holy Land on pilgrimage. Gilbert worries about the wisdom of returning to the Holy Land while his wife ‘was so ȝong & ne couþe. of þe lands maner noȝt’ (was so young and did not know the ways of the country; D’Evelyn and Mill 1956: 614, line 124); assimilation requires mastering a habitus as well as a language. Though she is not explicitly said to have learned English or Anglo-Norman, there is ample time for her to have done so by the time of Gilbert’s return, when the ‘Saracen Legend’ rejoins the more prosaic account of Madame Becket’s instruction of her son. The interaction of race and gender here brings the normative patrilocal expectation that it is a wife’s job to adapt to her husband’s people; hence Mills is probably right to assume that she has meanwhile learned English and that ‘This miraculous eradication of heathen difference is the final stage in Alisaundre’s cultural assimilation’ (Mills 2011: 390). The logic of the gendered division between, in de Weever’s terms, white and Black Saracens is that racial identity for women is usually fluid, since women are required to switch their loyalties and identification on marriage. Hence Umm Thomas’s Saracenity is eradicated and not passed on to her son. Mills cites nineteenth-century iterations of Becket’s ‘Saracen Legend’ which represent Thomas himself as the residue of Saracen identity, his later career the product of his ‘hot eastern blood’, to contrast the medieval versions which lack any sense of Thomas as a person of ‘mixed race’ (Mills 2011: 394). Mixed-race persons, or families, were certainly conceivable: there was, for example, the Black and white checkered knight Feirefiz, the son of the white Christian knight Gahmuret and the Black Moorish queen Belacane in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. Gerald of Wales, the foremost racial theorist of his day, claimed for his Cambro-Norman clan a complex sense of what kinds of qualities might be racially transmitted: he reports his uncle Robert Fitz Stephen proclaiming: ‘We derive our descent, originally, in part from the blood of the Trojans, and partly we are

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of the French race. From the one we have our native courage, from the other the use of armour’ (Gerald of Wales 2001: 20).5 Yet Becket’s is not the only tale that foregoes the opportunity to construct a mixed-race identity. The lump-child in The King of Tars is wholly lump then, on baptism, wholly child. The Umayyad caliphs of al-Andalus, sons of enslaved, often Christian, concubines, were ‘blond like their mothers and predominantly blue-eyed’, but nonetheless Muslim and Andalusian, since enslaved women did not transmit their religion, culture or familial connections (Heng 2018b: 142). Christian royal marriages were usually international alliances, in which a bride maintained connections with her natal family, but such queens needed to adopt the language and customs of their new home (Parsons 1998: 4). Women transmitted nobility but not necessarily race. One such international bride, Isabella of France, was the likely owner of the Queen Mary Psalter, and might have seen in the images of Umm Thomas a mirror of her own journey to her new home in England (Stanton 1996: 185–6). Gender and status, that is, impact the transmission of race. In biological terms, racial belonging might be considered as an aspect of the form that, in Aristotelian and much medieval biology, was usually considered to be a paternal inheritance, whereas women supplied mere matter (O’Faolain and Martines 1974: 131).6 To put the same process in social terms, identity is, usually and mainly, transmitted patrilineally, thus requiring women to be more weakly raced so that they can suppress their natal belonging and transmit their husbands’ lineage. In the ‘Saracen Legend’, then, gender trumps race: the specifically feminine position of the ‘Saracen Bride’ requires that race (religion, language, dress, demeanour, culture, habitus) be flexible. But this is only one story, not a finding that can be generalized across medieval racial thinking. The hagiographic romance, The King of Tars, shares the Vernon manuscript and several key themes – Saracens, marriage, conversion – with the romance inflected hagiography of the ‘Saracen Legend’. Once more, the Saracen desires the Christian, with the genders reversed: in the romance, the Muslim/heathen Sultan of Damascus insists on marrying the daughter of the Christian King of Tars, a woman ‘white as fether of swan’ (Chandler 2015: line 12). Once more the bride must adjust to her husband’s ways: she converts her dress and demeanour – ‘richeliche sche was cladde / As hethen wiman ware’ (she was dressed richly, as the heathen women were; lines 380–1) – and feigns religious conversion while privately holding true to Christianity. In contrast to Umm Thomas, her identity is not evacuated; a residue of Christianity remains. The birth of their child as a shapeless ‘rond of flesche’ (lump of flesh; line 577) triggers a religious competition (Figure 7.6), which Christianity, of course, wins by baptizing the lump-child into human form. The Sultan’s subsequent baptism also produces instantaneous and total somatic change: ‘His hide that blac and lothely was / Al white bicom’ (His skin that was black and ugly became all white; lines 922–3). The gender poles of the ChristianSaracen marriage story are interchangeable, so long as the claim of Christian primacy remains stable: here race/religion trumps gender. Once more, there is an exception to the principle that Saracenity is resistant to total conversion, implicitly because the Sultan is now one flesh with his irreducibly Christian wife. Sacramental conversion via baptism is supplemented by the sexual transmission of race/religion: the whole family becomes wholly Christian. The story of the King of Tars may be based on a historical marriage between a Tartar khan and an Armenian princess (Correale 2005: 280): it is recognizable as a fantastic version of those tales of conversion by continental brides told in Bede’s history. The Constance legend is perhaps the most famous version of these tales of immigrant princesses, due to Chaucer’s treatment of it as The Man of Law’s Tale, but the main elements are

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FIGURE 7.6  Sultan and Sultaness of Damascus. From King of Tars. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS 19.2.1, fol. 7r. Public domain.

already present in Chaucer’s source, Nicholas Trevet’s Anglo-Norman chronicle of about 1334. Here the conversions are doubled: the failed conversion of Saracens follows the historical pattern of a marriage arranged by treaty, whereas the English conversion is dramatic, miraculous, instantaneous and total. The story is a romanticized account of the geopolitical shift in which Rome separated from the empire in the East and turned to face Western Europe, bringing even far-flung places such as Northumberland into Roman space-time. The circulation of women carrying Christianity and Romanitas with them makes possible the construction of a supra-identity of European Christendom. Bede, Stephanie Hollis argues, systematically underestimated the contribution that immigrant women, the Christian wives of English kings, made to the formation of the English Christian nation (Hollis 1992: 227); if so, the romances tell a more fully gendered racial history than does the sober, documented history. A partial analogue of the ‘Saracen Bride,’ the fairy mistress, generates narratives in which racial difference is harder to overcome. The fairy mistress is another actively desiring woman who selects her lover, and fairy lore is, amongst many other things, encoded racelore. Dominique Battles argues that in Sir Orfeo, an adaptation of the classical legend of Orpheus with fairyland substituting for the classical underworld, the habits and material culture of fairies and humans marks them as representatives, respectively, of the Normans and the English (Battles 2010); the way in which fairies and humans share the landscape under different conditions allegorizes the unequal coexistence of the English and Normans. Albina’s nominal whiteness might indicate a kinship with the whiteness of early medieval elves (Hall 2007: 55), in which case the encoding has been reversed, and an originally supernatural character has been naturalized as a foreigner. More commonly, fairies and other supernatural beings are associated with indigeneity. The English saint

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FIGURE 7.7  Saint Guthlac with demons. From Guthlac Roll. London, BL, MS Harley Y 6, Roundel 7. © The British Library Board.

Guthlac was tormented in his fenland retreat by demons speaking the British language (Figure 7.7) (J. J. Cohen 2003: 144); his contemporaries knew Roman and prehistoric structures in the landscape as ‘enta geweorc’ (giants’ work; Leslie 1985: 67, line 87). Fairies pertain to the landscape, as the South English Legendary (D’Evelyn and Mill 1956: 409–10) explains, for these ‘eluene’ (elves; line 255) frequent the town but are also ‘bi daie muche in wode beoþ. & biniȝte upe heie doune’ (by day are often in the woods, by night upon the high downs; line 256). They ‘[a]liȝhte adoun in monns forme. biniȝte and bidaie’ (come down in the form of men, by night and by day; line 240) and often lie with women ‘as hi were of fleiss & blode’ (as though they were of flesh and blood; line 241), but their ‘engendrure’ (conceptions) ‘ne comþ neuere to gode’ (never come to good; line 242). Conversely, they disguise themselves as women and lie with men but ‘bitraieþ hom outriȝt’ (betray them entirely; line 244). They are so prevalent that people see them everywhere ‘ofte in forme of woman’ (often in the form of women; line 253), as they ‘boþe hoppe & pleie’ (dance and play; line 254) in ‘moni deorne weie’ (many secluded places; line 253). Male fairies threaten and rape and are antagonists whom a human protagonist fights for possession of a woman, as in Sir Orfeo. Fairy women seek out human lovers to lavish them with gifts, as in Marie de France’s tale of Sir Lanval. The gendered division, then, is rather like the division of Saracens into warriors and brides, and the similarity occurs because both are centred in Christian, masculine self-image. Encounters with fairies recast encounters with alterity into more comfortable tales in which Christian masculinity is

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inevitably destined to triumph. The translation of any kind of other into fairy lore makes the encounter sexualized and intimate: the SEL shows a landscape saturated with desire. Yet fairies and demons, though they may be disguised, cannot be converted like the ‘Saracen Bride;’ their nature is irreducible, and they will pass their qualities onto their children. We have already met Albina’s giant children; Merlin’s magical powers derived from his incubus or fairy father (Green 2016: 85–98), and the troubles of the Angevin kings were attributed to their descent from a fairy or demonic ancestress, who flew out of a church window to escape exposure to the Mass (Wade 2011: 121–2). Fairies represent a concept of race as immutable difference, that might be temporarily hidden but that will tell in descendants. Baptism can transform Merlin’s powers but not remove them: fairies are where race appears as atavistic inheritance. There can be no true assimilation to the fairies and there is no understanding them either. Whether they appear as allproviding fairy mistress or hostile fairy rapist, their purposes are inscrutable; there is no responsibility on humans to understand their point of view, for it is incomprehensible.

IN LONDON, LATER London is a leading character in Umm Thomas’s story, which, as Jenkins (2020) argues, was itself almost certainly of London provenance. She falls in love with Gilbert as he speaks to her of ‘þe toun het Londone. þat he was inne ibore’ (the town of London that he was born in; D’Evelyn and Mill 1956: 611, line 32); ‘Londone Londone’ (613, line 74) is the phrase that gets her there, and when she arrives at Gilbert’s house, the later SEL comments that the Becket residence is ‘nou an ospital. irered of sein Thomas’ (is now a hospital built for Saint Thomas; 613, line 84), expecting readers to recognize a familiar site. The legend’s readers were prompted to look for traces of the Beckets in their own present day. By the early fifteenth century the grave of Thomas’s parents had been incorporated into civic ritual: the newly elected Mayor and a procession of aldermen visited the churchyard of St Paul’s, ‘where lie the bodies of the parents of Thomas, late Archbishop of Canterbury; and there they also repeated the De profundis, etc., in behalf of all the faithful of God departed, near the grave of his parents before mentioned’ (Carpenter and Whitington 1861: 24). It is possible that the early naming of Umm Thomas as Alisaundre dropped out of the tradition because it was contradicted by local knowledge of Thomas’s mother by the name of Matilda; but, given the dominance of the ‘Saracen Legend’ in vernacular Becket hagiography, London’s civic elite probably considered themselves to be memorializing the Saracen girl. Although the narrative eventually smooths away her difference so that she becomes fully assimilated, it necessarily, in the process, records the phases of her life as stranger and as immigrant. As they honoured her memory, the assembled Londoners were presented with a mirror image of their predecessors in the grip of racial panic and implicitly instructed not to engage in such xenophobia: outbreaks of violence against those perceived as foreign were (and indeed are) a recurrent feature of London’s politics (Davis 2019: 121). Yet the legend need not generate much discomfort: Umm Thomas, as a ‘Saracen Bride’, was always going to witness to the primacy of Christianity, England and London. To close once more with the personal and the situated: my students here in London are fascinated by the story of Umm Thomas and need no prompting to compare it to present-day discourses around Middle Eastern migrants to the city. It is not, of course, a straightforward celebration of the migrant, whose story is rooted both in patriarchy and in Christian supremacy. But, though we have not collectively got much better at thinking about human difference, this tale of a decisive, brave and loving immigrant girl still works to counter the myth of the racially homogenous medieval past.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Race and Sexuality STEVEN F. KRUGER

INTRODUCTION: BIOLOGICAL RACE AND RACISM Claims that race is a modern invention rely in large part on the argument that it is only with modernity that distinctions between peoples are intimately and systematically tied to the body and its supposedly inherent biological characteristics. But, while it is true that modern biologizing constructions of race are different, and often more systematic, than what we find in pre-modernity, the body still figures in striking and significant ways within medieval Western European attempts to classify peoples by race.1 The difference between medieval and modern racial constructions lies not so much in whether they rely on ideas about embodiment as in precisely how they deploy such ideas. Bodies operate within medieval racial discourses in several mutually reinforcing ways that emphasize distinct, if also interlocking, aspects of embodiment, which we might describe as (1) ontologizing, (2) sexualizing and (3) sensationalizing. Ontologizing distinctions call attention to the nature of the human being in a world of other beings whose difference from the human serves to define it. Within a natural philosophy that is dependent simultaneously upon Neoplatonic, Aristotelian and Christian understandings of the cosmos, distinctions among different sorts of being are elaborated hierarchically: inanimate beings are subordinate to those with vegetative souls, plants, which grow and reproduce; plants are subordinate to animals, which possess the capacity for movement and sensation; humans stand at the apex of animate, earthly beings because of their rationality. Angels and spirits transcend terrestrial being, existing beyond the realm of mundane corporeality. Within such a system, distinctions among different sorts of human being also take on a hierarchical cast: the construction of inferior classes of humans imputes to them both a lesser rationality and a biology closer to the animal than to the properly human. Sexualizing distinctions emphasize barriers to the ‘mixing’ of racial groups. If there were no such barriers – the implicit logic goes – any essential difference between races would dissolve. Of course, people sorted into different racial categories can have sex with each other and can reproduce. The insistence on basic sexual differences between races is, then, at its root performative: it attempts to instantiate (counterfactually) the very difference that it claims simply to describe. It posits real characteristics of the gendered body that allow the division of human beings into those with whom it is proper to have sex and reproduce, and those with whom it is improper, reprehensible, even abominable. Both ontologizing and sexualizing racial distinctions operate in large part through sensationalizing differences, highlighting particular attributes of the body that are

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apprehensible to the senses and that can be made to signify irreducible differences between races. Such sensationalized distinctions call attention to specific bodily features seen as significant to the ontologizing distinction of one kind of human being from another, as well as to the maintenance of sexual differences between racial groups. Distinct sorts of embodiment, apprehended through the senses, come to represent essentially different sorts of human being. In modernity, it is particularly skin colour that signifies race, and while skin colour differences in the Middle Ages are not so systematically articulated as they later come to be, they are nevertheless already important within medieval systems of racialization.

ONTOLOGIZING DISTINCTIONS: ANIMAL, HUMAN, MONSTER From antiquity, humanness is defined in contrast to other sorts of beings: non-rational animals, on the one hand, and wholly rational, ethereal spirits, on the other. In such hierarchical systems, where distinct ontological categories nonetheless abut each other, border regions become crucial. At the boundaries of such categories as the animal, human and angelic, are there hybrid beings that incorporate animality and human rationality, on the one hand, or humanity and a purer, angelic spirit, on the other? Such a question features in the Hebrew Bible, when, in Genesis 6.4, we see ‘giants … upon the earth’ who seem to result from interspecies sex: ‘For … the sons of God went in to the daughters of men, and they brought forth children.’ These giants – gigantes, in the Latin Vulgate text used in the Middle Ages, translating the Hebrew Nephilim – are ‘mighty men of old, men of renown’, but they are not simply human. And they come to be associated with God’s judgement, in the very next verse, that ‘the wickedness of men was great on the earth’ (6.5) and his decision therefore to ‘destroy man’ (6.7) through Noah’s flood. Breaching the boundary of the properly human here threatens the very survival of humankind. Although the flood is properly understood to have cut off all human life not descended from Noah, later the Bible nonetheless suggests a certain monstrous survival. In Numbers 13.18–34, Israelite scouts to the land of Canaan encounter giants (Nephilim), ‘monsters of the sons of Enac, of the giant kind’ (13.34). The echoes of Genesis 6.4 suggest a continuity with monstrous beings from before the flood, and these terrifying beings make the Israelite scouts seem, to themselves, ‘like locusts’ (Num. 13.34). Here, we see suggested a racial (or even species) difference that makes the ‘normal’ humanness of the Israelites small by comparison. Based in part on biblical passages like these, a tradition develops that descendants of the cursed figure of Cain somehow survived the flood to produce a monstrous progeny. Alongside this tradition, the more proper, post-diluvian lineage of Noah is also understood in a racializing manner, with Noah’s three sons, Ham (Cham), Shem and Japhet, thought to be the ancestors of the peoples of the three great continents known to medieval Europeans: Africa, Asia and Europe (see Braude 1997). Ham, like Cain, is cursed, through his son Canaan, because he uncovers his father’s nakedness (Gen. 9), and he and Canaan come to be confused and conflated with Cain, in part, it seems, because of the similarity among the names Ham/Cham, Canaan and Cain (see Goldenberg 2017). Ham’s African progeny thus comes to be associated, too, with the monstrous ‘kin of Cain’. Questions about the boundaries of humanness are also posed within the geographically oriented writing of classical antiquity, as part of an attempt to describe the worldwide

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diversity of human and humanlike beings. Pliny the Elder’s influential Natural History identifies a number of ‘monstrous races’ located largely within Ethiopia (Africa).2 Pliny explains that ‘It is not at all surprising that towards the extremity of this region the men and animals assume a monstrous form, when we consider the changeableness and volubility of fire, the heat of which is the great agent in imparting various forms and shapes to bodies’ (1855: 6.35). Thus associating climate – specifically extreme heat – with bodily volatility, Pliny proceeds to identify a number of ‘peoples’ and ‘races’ (gentes and genera, in the Latin) through which he explores the range of humanness along a number of interlocking axes. He identifies human types at the extremes of longevity – those who ‘do not live beyond their eighth year’ and those who ‘live to their four hundredth’ (7.2; also 6.35). He notes races that are both extremely small, ‘but three spans [twenty-seven inches] in height’, and large, ‘more than five’ or ‘eight cubits’ tall (7.2; also 6.35). He further distinguishes races by their unusual anatomy, with anatomical features enlarged, doubled or halved. One people has ‘ears so large as to cover the whole body’ (7.2). Others have ‘only one leg’ and lie ‘on their backs … [to] protect themselves from the sun by the shade of their feet’ (7.2). Some have ‘two pupils in each eye’, others ‘eight toes on each foot’ (7.2). Bodily features may also be displaced, with ‘but one eye … in the middle of the forehead’ or ‘feet … turned backwards’ (7.2; also 6.35). And some races lack noses or nostrils, upper lips, tongues, mouths or necks (6.35, 7.2). Pliny thus displays a geographically distributed kaleidoscope of human difference, and in a number of cases, he explicitly raises the question of where the human ends and the animal begins. He compares one race with ‘four feet’ to ‘wil[d] beasts’ and notes another ‘people’ with ‘the heads of dogs’ (Pliny the Elder 1855: 6.35). Others ‘go sometimes on four feet, and sometimes walk erect; they have also the features of a human being’ (7.2). Another ‘nation … dwell in the woods and have no proper voice’, ‘screech[ing] in a frightful manner; their bodies are covered with hair, their eyes are of a sea-green colour, and their teeth are like those of the dog’ (7.2). Here, the distinctions between human and animal almost completely fall away, and elsewhere, Pliny notes another people who cross the human/animal divide sexually: ‘some of the Indians have connection with beasts, and from this union a mixture of half man, half beast is produced’ (7.2). In treating humanness, then, Pliny delineates a rich and strange diversity that, on the one hand, contrastively reaffirms Roman personhood as a norm and, on the other, suggests that the human is a pliant category divisible into a large number of subcategories, not all of them easily distinguished from the animal. Such ancient concern with the limits of the human, emerging from both biblical and classical traditions, continues to manifest itself throughout the European Middle Ages and within a variety of different kinds of writing – geographic, natural philosophical, theological, exegetical and imaginative. Though the monsters of epic and romance traditions might be thought of as pure fantasy constructions, their representation often involves an exploration of human ontology and the attendant question of racial difference. A monstrous figure like Grendel in the Old English epic Beowulf (dated anywhere between the eighth and the eleventh century) might seem at first to be a singular monster, unconnected to what we call race. But the poem gives him a mother and a longer genealogy, identifying him as demonic, a ‘fiend out of hell’ (Beowulf 2000: 100 [101]), but also as part of the monstrous ‘kin of Cain’:3 ‘Cain’s clan’, who are ‘banished monsters’ (106, 105) that God has ‘condemned as outcasts’ (107). After Grendel’s defeat, his ‘monstrous’ mother (1259) appears to avenge him, and again, her genealogical connection to the accursed Cain is specified. Grendel’s mother ‘had been forced down into fearful

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waters’ (1260) after Cain’s murder of his brother, and Grendel then springs ‘from Cain’ along with other ‘misbegotten spirits’ (1265, 1266). Grendel and his mother are demonic, monstrous others to the humanity of the Danes whom they attack and of Beowulf, the hero who defeats them. And yet they have a kin – ‘ogres and elves and evil phantoms’ as well as ‘giants’, who ‘out of the curse of [Cain’s] exile … sprang’ (112–13, 111) – and a clearly human heritage, though an ‘accursed’ one banished to the borders of humanness. In later medieval culture, too, both biblical and classical traditions of monstrous races continue to contribute to Western Europe’s attempts to distinguish itself from racial others. In a fourteenth-century travel text such as Mandeville’s, which purports to describe the journeys of a single individual but is in fact a compilation of earlier texts, encounters with groups of human-monstrous people abound. Like Pliny, Mandeville associates the monstrous races with places distant from Europe – Africa, India and the Far East. And he brings the Plinian tradition together with the biblical, invoking the division of the world among Noah’s three sons and associating Ham (in place of Cain) with the monstrous races: ‘the pagan peoples come from [Ham] and different island peoples, some of them headless, some disfigured, and some with deformed limbs’ (Mandeville 2012: 92). As does Pliny, Mandeville explores human difference along a number of distinct axes, recognizing giants, ‘Ascopards’ (2012: 35, 113), and pygmies (87, 89); those who ‘only live for eight years’ (89) and those who ‘seem to be eternally young and live without serious illness’ (76; also 116). Peoples’ limbs and other features are also, in Plinian fashion, halved, displaced or misshapen, including some ‘people with only one eye … in the middle of their forehead’; others with ‘no heads’, whose ‘eyes are in their shoulders and their mouths are on their chests’; still others with ‘neither heads nor eyes’, whose ‘mouths are behind, between their shoulders’; as well as ‘people who have a flat face without a nose or eyes, but they have two small holes instead of eyes and they have flat mouths without lips’; and ‘disgusting people who have a lip above the mouth that is so big that when they sleep in the sun they cover up their whole face with that huge lip’ (86–7). (See Figure 8.1, which illustrates this section of the text, showing headless people as well as cannibals.) Mandeville also repeatedly calls attention to races that stand at the border between the human and the animal: dog-headed people (85), those ‘like beasts’ who lack reason (85, 118); ‘wild men with horns on their heads like animals … [who] are utterly hideous’ (108); people who ‘are feathered all over except on their faces and the palms of their hands’ (117). The tradition of monstrous, non-European races survives the expansion of European geographical knowledge to the Americas. Even in the late sixteenth century, an English explorer such as Walter Raleigh can note, in his 1595 Discovery of Guiana, a nation of people … [who] are reported to have their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts, and … a long train of hair grow[ing] backward between their shoulders. … Such a nation was written of by Mandeville, whose reports were holden for fables many years; and yet since the East Indies were discovered, we find his relations true of such things as heretofore were held incredible. ([1595] 1910) Throughout the European tradition, the monstrous races are cast far away from Europe. But the kinds of ontologizing distinctions they embody are also brought closer to

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FIGURE 8.1  The Plinian races in Mandeville. BL Harley MS 3954 fol. 42r. © The British Library Board.

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home in the characterization of peoples with whom medieval Europeans came into more direct and regular contact. As the Mongol Empire approached eastern Europe in the early thirteenth century, texts such as Matthew Paris’s Chronica majora present the Mongol people as ‘savage, lawless and ignorant of humanity’ (quoted in S. Lewis 1987: 284): They have hard and robust chests, lean and pale faces, rigid and erect shoulders, short and distorted noses; their chins are sharp and prominent, the upper jaw low and deep, the teeth long and few; their eyebrows grow from the hairline to the nose, their eyes are shifty and black, their countenances oblique and fierce, their extremities bony and nervous, their legs thick but short below the knee. In stature they are equal to us, for what those lose below the knee is made up for in the greater length of their upper parts. (S. Lewis 1987: 286) Such a description emphasizes Mongol bodily difference alongside savagery. For Matthew, in sum, the Mongols are a ‘monstrous tribe of inhuman men’ (S. Lewis 1987: 286). European discourses also consistently make Jews and Muslims (often referred to as ‘Saracens’)4 ontologically distinct from Christian Europeans. Both of these religious others are commonly referred to as dogs and associated with animals thought of as stupid, vicious or unclean (see e.g. Stow 2006). These associations are largely metaphorical, but they also have real force. Guillaume of Bourges, a thirteenth-century Jewish convert to Christianity, despite having become a Christian, finds himself, as a born Jew, accused by some of his new coreligionists of being an ass and a dog (see Kruger 2009, 2015). And both Jews and Muslims are consistently associated with malign spiritual forces, that is, with devils and demons (see Trachtenberg [1943] 1983; Strickland 2003). Thus, a late medieval depiction of Muslim others, the Middle English romance The Sultan of Babylon (c. 1400), presents a sort of fantastic compendium of potential racial difference.5 Some of the poem’s Muslims seem not appreciably different from their European counterparts, but others are strongly distinguished by their skin colour, by an imputed animality, by demonic qualities or by actual monstrosity. The poem frequently refers to Muslims using animalizing epithets such as ‘hethen houndes’ (Sultan of Babylon 1990: 935), and it describes them, and specifically Ethiopians, as ‘like the develes of helle’ (3098; also 1006). The warrior Estragot, identified as ‘a develes sone, / Of Belsabubbis lyne’ (356–7), is also described as having a ‘bores hede, blake and donne’ (346–7). Further, he is a giant, ‘So stronge and so longe in length’ (355). Later, the ‘geaunesse’ (giantess) (2943) ‘Dam Barrok’ (2939) is identified as his ‘wife’ (2944). The Ascopars, ‘men of myghte’ (496; also 1424, 2648), also seem to be giants. The giant Alogolofure is identified as ‘Of Ethiope … Of the kinde of Ascopartes’ (2195–6), ‘devely stronge’ (2193), and with ‘skynne … blake and harde’ (2194), ‘tuskes like a bore’ (2197) and ‘hede like an libarde [leopard]’ (2192, 2198). In these representations, devilishness, skin colour difference, animal monstrosity and gigantism all come together to bring the Muslims and their ‘kinde’ to the very edge of humanness.

SEXUALIZING DISTINCTIONS: GENDER/SEXUALITY AND RACIALIZED BODIES As intersectional feminists, for instance Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), have emphasized, a category such as race is never constructed or experienced in isolation from other such identity categories as class, gender and sexuality. More particularly, race always concerns

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sexuality since race is about keeping groups of people and lines of inheritance distinct. As Judith Butler notes: ‘the reproduction of the species will be articulated as the reproduction of relations of reproduction, that is, as the cathected site of a racialized version of the species in pursuit of hegemony through perpetuity, that requires and produces a normative heterosexuality in its service’ (1993: 167; emphasis in the original). The maintenance of ontologically distinct races, then, demands the construction of barriers to cross-racial sexuality, and medieval writers particularly highlight sexual differences between races, including gendered differences that make for configurations of femininity and masculinity unfamiliar to Western Europe. Within the tradition of the monstrous races, we find a number of races differentiated from the human norm precisely by their unusual gender or sexuality, especially their hermaphroditism or androgyny.6 Thus, Pliny identifies the Androgyni as ‘a people who unite the two sexes in the same individual, and alternately perform the functions of each’ (Pliny the Elder 1855: 7.2). The very first of the monstrous creatures in the (seventh- or eighth-century) Liber monstrorum is the Hermaphrodite (1.1), described as ‘a human of either sex’, ‘who nevertheless in their very face and breast appeared more virile than womanly and was considered by the unknowing a man; but they loved womanly works and deceived ignorant men in the mode of a prostitute’ (quoted in Lendinara 1999: 127; my translation). At the origin of biblical accounts of racial difference and monstrosity, too, stand sexual transgressions: the ‘sons of god’ reproducing with the ‘daughters of men’; Ham uncovering his father Noah’s nakedness. It is significant that, in Beowulf, the monstrous masculinity of Grendel is matched by his mother’s monstrous femininity. The monsters of Beowulf belong to a kin group conceived of as different from other humans in ways that include gender and an implicit sexuality, since the monsters have reproduced their kin across generations stretching back to Cain. In Mandeville, we also find a number of peoples distinguished by their unusual gender and sexuality, including a people similar to Pliny’s Androgyni, ‘both male and female’, with ‘the genitals of both’ (2012: 87). (Some late medieval printed editions of Mandeville include a woodcut illustration of the Androgyne where the genitals have been covered over. See Figure 8.2.) Other peoples, mainly located in Asia and India, are distinguished by less major sexual differences: practicing polygamy (64, 109); having sex only to conceive children (109); appointing a man to ‘take [a wife’s] virginity’ before she has sex with her husband (113); sharing ‘all women … in common’ (79); practicing incest (114). These differences might be thought of as cultural in nature, as not necessitated by biological difference, but they still are strongly implicated in embodied life, in how gendered bodies stand in relation to each other. When we turn to peoples with whom medieval Europe had more direct and consistent contact, we find that differences in gender and sexuality are also often emphasized in the establishment of race. As we have seen above, Matthew Paris depicts the Mongols as in possession of unusually configured bodies, and a writer such as William of Rubruck, recounting his thirteenth-century mission to the Mongol court, focuses intently on Mongol appearances and practices that reveal embodied gender, especially a tendency toward gender non-distinction. the dress of the girls differs not from the costume of the men, except that it is somewhat longer … [W]hen several ladies are riding together, … they look like soldiers, helmets on head and lances erect … And all the women sit their horses astraddle like men … They never lie down in bed when having their children. (William of Rubruck 1900: 72–5)

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FIGURE 8.2  Mandeville’s Androgyne, with genitals obscured, in Das buch des ritters herr hannsen von monte villa (translated by Michel Velser; Augsburg: Anton Sorg, 1481). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, 2 Inc.c.a. 1083, fol. 59v. Public domain.

William depicts Mongol marriage practices, too, as diverging from European norms: They observe the first and second degrees of consanguinity, but no degree of affinity; thus (one person) will have at the same time or successively two sisters … [S]ometimes [after his father’s death] a son takes to wife all his father’s wives, except his own mother … When then anyone has made a bargain with another to take his daughter, the father of the girl gives a feast, and the girl flees to her relatives and hides there. Then the father says: ‘Here, my daughter is yours: take her wheresoever you find her.’ Then he searches for her with his friends till he finds her, and he must take her by force and carry her off with a semblance of violence to his house. (William of Rubruck 1900: 77–8) The sexual violence suggested here is emphasized much more strongly in Matthew Paris, where rape and cannibalism are combined in the depiction of Mongol ravages: The old and ugly women were given to the cannibals … as their daily allowance of food; those who were beautiful were not eaten, but were suffocated by mobs of ravishers … Virgins were raped until they died of exhaustion; then their breasts were

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cut off to be kept as dainties for their chiefs, and their bodies furnished an entertaining banquet for the savages. (quoted in S. Lewis 1987: 286) (See Figure 8.3 for an illustration of Mongol violence and cannibalism from Matthew Paris.) The representation of Muslim gender and sexuality overlaps in some significant ways with these depictions of Mongols. Muslim women in epic and romance, unlike Mongol women, are often treated as attractive love interests for Western European knights, and as assimilable, through religious conversion, to Christianity.7 But a Muslim heroine, for instance Floripas in The Sultan of Babylon, although she ends up married to one of the poem’s Christian knights and a Christian herself, behaves in ways that might be thought of as active and masculine rather than appropriately feminine. She betrays her father, family, country and religion; she takes a lead role in military planning; she commits murder. Muslim men are also often depicted as having a propensity to violence – one that, for a warrior such as Floripas’s brother Ferumbras (who also ends up converting to Christianity), is wholly appropriate. But, as with the Mongols depicted by Matthew Paris, Muslim masculine violence also often reaches beyond its proper bounds. Ferumbras’s and Floripas’s father, the eponymous Sultan of Babylon, when he does not get his way, usually resorts to violence, often attacking the idols that are imagined (wrongly, of course) to stand at the centre of his Muslim religion. He commits, repeatedly, what can be understood as sacrilege. Nevertheless, when he suffers his ultimate defeat, he stubbornly refuses to convert to Christianity. Now he turns his violent impulses against a new religious object, spitting in the baptismal font in one last sacrilegious act. Muslim masculine violence is also often depicted as taking an explicitly sexual form. In Guibert of Nogent’s twelfth-century presentation of a (spurious) letter about Muslim abuses circulated in Western Europe to spur Christians to undertake what became the First Crusade (1096), Muslims are shown, like Matthew Paris’s Mongols, revelling in sexual violence, and here, a violence that includes both hetero- and homosexual rape:

FIGURE 8.3  Mongol violence and cannibalism. From Matthew Paris, Chronica majora. Corpus Christi College 16, fol. 167r. © Icom Images/Alamy Stock Photo.

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Truly, when virgins of the faithful were seized, they were taught to become public harlots … Mothers seized within sight of their daughters were harassed many times by sex acts repeated by diverse men, while their daughters, standing by, were forced to sing abominable songs while dancing in the midst of such things. Immediately after, this same passion … was brought around to the daughters … And while the feminine sex is not spared … they proceed to the masculine, transgressing animality and breaking the laws of humanity … [T]hey killed a certain bishop by means of sodomitical abuse … [This] appetite … is dirty with sexual minglings unheard of for brute animals and forbidden to the Christian mouth. (1879: 131–32; my translation) Jewish men, too, are often associated with excessive violence, especially in the host desecration, ritual murder and blood libel accusations that arise against them from the thirteenth century onwards. Here, Jews are depicted attacking both the body of Christ in the form of the Eucharist and Christian boys in reenactments of the Crucifixion. Such accusations do not usually impute sexual violence, but medieval texts do often implicate Jewish men in sexual transgressions. The late eleventh-century monk Peter Damian attacks sodomy and Jewishness in remarkably similar terms (see Kruger 2006: 90–6). Jews and sodomites are both associated with the hyena, an animal thought to change its sex every year (see Strickland 2003: 147–8, 153–4). Intermarriage with Jews is compared to sodomy, adultery and bestiality (see Kruger 2006: 90). And the Jewish, and Muslim, practice of ritual circumcision suggested to Christian imaginations the possibility that Jews and Muslims might practice forced circumcision or castration upon Christian men (see Kruger 2006: 81–4). The flipside of seeing Jewish men as excessively violent is that they are also treated as weak and inadequately masculine. In defining itself against Judaism, Christianity depended upon a distinction between carnal (Jewish) readings of scripture and spiritual (Christian) ones. This binary mode of thinking, with its gendered associations – spirit as male, body as female – contributes to an overall gendering of religious difference. Jewish carnal circumcision especially comes to be distinguished from a Christian ‘circumcision of the heart’ (see Rom. 2.22) and associated with a diminished Jewish masculinity (see Kruger 2006: 81–3). The violence imputed to Jewish men in the blood libel is understood as compensating for the imperfections of Jewish masculinity – including most strikingly the monthly anal bleeding or menstruation that, from the thirteenth century onwards, Jewish men were widely depicted as experiencing (see Johnson 1998; Resnick 2000). A text such as the fifteenth-century English Croxton Play of the Sacrament (1975), which depicts a Jewish host desecration, portrays Jewish men as simultaneously violent and vulnerable. They attack a consecrated host with vehemence. But the host is impervious to their attacks, and in compensation the body of the Jewish leader, Jonathas, begins to fragment. Only conversion to Christianity enables the re-establishment of his bodily integrity (see Kruger 1992). Stereotypical and gender anomalous representations of Jewish women are rarer than of Jewish men, but they might be seen as moving in two distinct directions. On the one hand, Jewish women are represented as sexually attractive and a snare to Christian men. Thus, two Jewish women in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s narratives of miracles are described as ‘like many of [their] race … very beautiful’; they seduce two young Christian men (Caesarius of Heisterbach 1929: 2.23–4). On the other hand, Jewish women are

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sometimes masculinized and presented as sexually unattractive (see Kruger 2006: 84; and Lipton 2014: 201–37). All these constructions have strong consequences for Jews living within Western European societies. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 insisted on strong separations between Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities. Jews and Muslims were required to distinguish themselves in their clothing in part to prevent their having intercourse with Christians. Other legislation forbade Jews from having Christian servants or employing Christian wet nurses, again with a sense that such situations potentially facilitated forbidden interreligious sex (see Kruger 2006: 89–90). And the desire to keep Jews and Christians separate within Western Europe led, with a certain implacable logic, to a series of expulsions of Jews from Christian lands, beginning with England in 1290 and continuing through the end of the fifteenth century, with the Spanish and Portuguese expulsions of 1492 and 1496/7.

SENSATIONALIZING DISTINCTIONS: SKIN COLOUR AND OTHER MARKERS OF RACE All five of the senses can be involved in medieval distinctions between races, and in ways that we might describe as both subjective and objective. That is, the racial other might be depicted as the subject of a sensual difference – sensing something differently than do Western European Christians – or as its object, appearing to European senses as different from the norm. Thus, many of the racialized differences we have so far discussed, and certainly differences of gender and sexuality, suggest bodies whose sense of touch – their experience of excitement, pleasure, pain – differs significantly from that of Western European Christians. The imagination of how such bodies would feel to the touch is implicit, too, in the representation of a strangeness meant to inspire fear or disgust or fascination. Indeed, Pliny describes races whose touch has powerful material effects, for instance, ‘cur[ing] those … stung by serpents’ (1855: 7.2). Racialization also operates around the sense of smell. Pliny identifies, for instance, a race of people who ‘subsist only by breathing and by the odours which they inhale through the nostrils’ (1855: 7.2). Mandeville similarly describes a race of ‘little’ people who ‘live on the scent of wild apples’ (2012: 117). More negatively, Jews, in later medieval representations, come to be represented as having distinctive organs of smell – grotesque, hooked noses. (Strickland [2003] and Lipton [2014] give a number of examples; see Figure 8.4 for one such representation of a Jew engaged in ritual murder.) In an objective register, too, Jews are depicted as smelly, as characterized by the foetor Judaicus (see Trachtenberg [1943] 1983: 47–50). In the realm of hearing and sound, racial differences are also often highlighted. Jewish failures of understanding are represented as a sort of deafness. And the sounds that racial others produce are frequently associated with nonsense or animality. Pliny notes some nations that lack speech but instead ‘employ gestures by nodding the head and moving the limbs’ (1855: 6.35). Mandeville represents a number of peoples whose speech is animallike: wild men who ‘only grunt like pigs’ (2012: 108), and others who ‘don’t speak except to make a snake-like noise’ (85). And as Dorothy Kim shows, the embodied articulation of Hebrew sounds becomes an ‘extensible marker of race’ in medieval linguistic discourses (2015: 58–64). Twinned with the (metaphorical) claim of Jews as deaf (to meaning) is the depiction of Jews as making sounds that seem (objectively) devoid of meaning.

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FIGURE 8.4  Representation of the Jew Samuel engaged in the supposed ritual murder of Adam of Bristol. BL Harley MS 957, fol. 22r. © The British Library Board.

The sense of taste provides fertile ground for racializing distinctions that entail the breaching of a taboo understood to define humanness – the taboo on cannibalism.8 Interestingly, however, it is not only through representing the racial other as cannibalistic that taste and eating habits are implicated in the production of race. Indeed, some texts represent European Christians literally eating the racial other and thus suggesting that other’s proper role as food. Here, the self’s cannibalism is paradoxically construed as not true cannibalism, since its human food is denied the status of true humanity. When, in the early fourteenth-century romance Richard Coer de Lyon, the crusading King Richard is unwittingly fed the flesh of Saracens, he pronounces it extremely tasty, a fine substitute for the pork he has been craving. The ironic equivalence of Saracen flesh with a meat forbidden to Muslims as food serves as a particularly humiliating way of differentiating Saracen bodies from the Christian body that here heartily consumes them. A similar association between racial-religious others and the food they are specifically prohibited from eating is demonstrated in the visual tradition of the Judensau (dating to the thirteenth century), which shows Jews suckling on, inspecting the anus of and preparing to eat the excrement of a gigantic, grotesque sow (see Shachar 1974).

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Such mocking of Muslim and Jewish ritual prohibitions suggests a broader suspicion of foreign food habits – eating and taste (in the subjective sense) that is seen as strange, disgusting, even inhuman. In the Plinian tradition, non-European races are represented as ‘living on the flesh of elephants’, ‘panthers and lions’, vipers or locusts (Pliny the Elder 1855: 6.35, 7.2). In Mandeville, one people ‘eat[s] snakes’ (2012: 85), a practice also attributed to the Muslims of The Sultan of Babylon, who celebrate by eating serpents fried in oil (1990: 987). Preparing for battle, they ‘drinke wilde beestes bloode, / Of tigre, antelope and of camalyon’ (1007–9). Less violent, but still strange to a European palate, is the Mongols’ drinking of kumis, fermented mare’s milk, a persistent focus in William of Rubruck’s account. But more pervasive than this attention to the eating of foods unfamiliar in Western Europe is the accusation that non-Europeans and non-Christians eat human flesh in a way that calls into question their very humanness. Pliny depicts races that ‘live on human flesh’ and ‘drink… out of human skulls, and plac[e] the scalps, with the hair attached, upon their breasts, like so many napkins’ (1855: 6.35, 7.2). In Mandeville, a number of different peoples are identified as cannibals, with their cannibalism often treated as central to their culture. On one island, people ‘let their hounds throttle’ their ill friends and then ‘eat their flesh instead of venison’ (Mandeville 2012: 84). Another people ‘have one wicked habit: they eat human flesh more enthusiastically than anything else … they say it is the best and sweetest meat in the world’ (79). Mandeville depicts a group of giants, who ‘prefer to eat human flesh above any other’ (113). Elsewhere, Mandeville links kin structures tightly to cannibalism: ‘the fathers eat the sons and the sons the fathers, the husbands their wives or the wives their husbands’ (86). As noted above, Matthew Paris’s chronicle also claims cannibalism among the Mongols; in one illustration to his text (see Figure 8.3), Mongols decapitate and dismember their enemies, roasting one of them over an open fire, and devouring their flesh. And the persistent anti-Jewish accusations associated with the blood libel represent Jews as needing to consume human blood in order to repair their own physical debilities; they are understood to use the blood from the supposed ritual murder of Christians to prepare foods for Passover. The last of the five senses, sight, has a particular salience in modern constructions of race, which put visible differences, and especially skin colour, at the centre of their racializing taxonomies. But such constructions are not uniquely modern. Both subjective sight (the ability to see, or not) and objective sight (visible appearance) are implicated in the medieval representation of race. In one of the most pervasive of anti-Jewish tropes, supposed Jewish deficiencies of reading or interpretive practice are treated as blindness. This trope, though metaphorical, comes together with other representations of Jewish misunderstanding as bodily debility – deafness, stiff-neckedness, hardheartedness – and tends, through repetition, to suggest a Jewish embodiment that is marked by disability. Jews are also represented as different in their appearance – as we have seen, above, with the stereotypical depiction of the Jewish nose – and this includes, as M. Lindsay Kaplan has argued, a characteristic difference in skin colour (2018: 81–102; also see Resnick 2012). Indeed, skin colour differences feature prominently in racializing discourses from Pliny onwards, with the heat of Africa especially associated with the production of black skin. Pliny notes a number of peoples ‘of a black tint’ (1855: 6.35), and Mandeville writes that ‘[Nubians] are black in colour, and they believe that to be very beautiful, and indeed

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the blacker they are the fairer they think themselves … This country is spectacularly hot and that’s what makes the people there so black’ (2012: 25; also 72). In the medieval romance tradition, too, the skin colour of Muslim antagonists, and sometimes protagonists, is often emphasized. In The Sultan of Babylon, some of the Muslim warriors are ‘bloo, some yolowe, some blake as More’ (1990: 1005). The thirteenthcentury Middle Dutch romance Moriaen (Morien 1901) features a Moorish Arthurian knight who is Black. At one point in Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, the Muslim knight Palomides is depicted as ‘discolowred and defaded’ (1971: 473). And skin colour difference in the romances is, at least sometimes, treated as inheritable. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s early thirteenth-century Parzival depicts the marriage between the European knight Gahmuret and the Muslim queen Belacane. Their son Feirefiz bears the marks of his biracial status on his skin: ‘His skin was pied. It had pleased God to make a marvel of him, for he was both black and white’ (Wolfram von Eschenbach 1980: 40).9 A romance like the early fourteenth-century Middle English King of Tars, on the other hand, suggests that skin colour and racial difference might not be immutable: here, a Muslim sultan undergoes a conversion to Christianity that involves not only a religious but also a physical transformation of self: ‘His hide that blac and lothely was / Al white bicom thurth Godes gras / And clere withouten blame’ (Chandler 2015: 922–4). Even here, however, where skin colour and race seem malleable, they are tightly linked to an embodiment also deeply enmeshed in inheritance. The sultan’s conversion and transformation are effected because his marriage to a Christian princess (who pretends to convert to Islam while remaining Christian) leads to the birth of a child who is lifeless and without coherent bodily form. The sultan’s own gods (Islam is here again wrongly depicted as idol worship) cannot give the child life and shape, but the wife’s Christian god successfully vivifies the baby. This miracle leads the sultan to convert, and so it is a sort of reverse inheritance that allows for the amelioration of religious-racial identity: the child, given life by Christianity, effectuates his own father’s birth as a whitened Christian.10 As medieval race becomes more strongly and consistently associated with skin colour, the use of whiteness as a marker of racial identity also becomes more prevalent.11 A moral difference mapped onto the colours black and white comes to be conflated with racial identities, and a moralized whiteness operates in visual representations of saints and angels as blond and white-skinned (see Caviness 2008). In a wide range of texts, including both romance and lyric, standards of beauty entail an idealized complexion of ‘white and red’ for noble lovers. Visual representations – for example, the manuscript illustrations of a poem like the thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose – emphasize this fair-skinned ideal. (See Roman de la Rose Digital Library 2021; for the representation of figures like Dangier in the poem as Muslim, see Altschul 2013.) Visual traditions also develop to represent race via dark skin. These are often demonizing, as scholars such as Ruth Mellinkoff (1993) and Debra Higgs Strickland (2003) detail. But we also find images of dark-skinned racial others that are more neutral or even positive in their associations.12 A figure such as Saint Maurice, a Roman-era, Egyptian Christian martyr, is depicted with dark skin as early as the thirteenth century. In images of the three Magi, one of the three is frequently represented as Black (see Figure 8.5). And in the illustrations of Honorat Bovet’s fourteenth-century dream vision, L’Apparicion maistre Jehan de Meun, the Saracen interlocutor in the text’s interreligious debate, described in the text as ‘black as coal’ (2005: 69), is depicted with dark skin (see Figures 8.6 and 8.7).

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FIGURE 8.5  The Magi approaching Herod. Getty Museum MS 101 (2008.3), fol. 35v, c. 1190–1200. © The Getty Museum (open content program).

AT THE BORDER OF THE MEDIEVAL AND THE MODERN In closing, I turn to Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea (composed in the 1460s about events in the 1430s and 1440s), a text that brings us towards the inception of modern racial schemata. Zurara recounts the Portuguese voyages to West Africa sponsored by the Infante Henry the Navigator, which help institute a new historical era in Europe’s relationship to the rest of the world, setting the conditions of possibility for the Atlantic slave trade. But how much of a historical break in the representation of race do we see in an early chronicle of this era such as Zurara’s

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FIGURE 8.6  The ‘Sarrazin’ among the poem’s other characters, in Honorat Bovet, L’Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun. BnF MS fr. 811, fol. 5r. © BnF.

written in a Middle Ages that has not yet definitively ended? That is, does the incipiently modern idea of race sharply distinguish itself from the medieval; or does it maintain and repurpose medieval modes of classification and understanding, even if to significantly new ends? Zurara highlights a religious motive for Henry’s sponsorship of the voyages that might be seen as echoing the motives for thirteenth-century missions to Asia such as William of Rubruck’s. But this religious motive is largely subsumed to a commercial rationale that entails especially the taking of captives, presented as a matter-of-fact, necessary consequence of encounter. The success of each voyage is measured not only in terms of how far it progresses geographically along the West African coast but also in terms of the precise number of African captives taken and brought back to Portugal.13 In chapter 25 of the Chronicle, after the return to Portugal of a number of caravels carrying 235 African captives (Gomes Eanes de Zurara [1896] 2010: 80), Zurara describes in some detail the scene in which the Portuguese divide their human cargo for distribution to the parties who have a stake in the now completed voyage: [T]he seamen began … to take out those captives, and carry them on shore … [T]hese, placed all together in that field, were a marvellous sight; for amongst them were some

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FIGURE 8.7  Maistre Jehan speaks with the ‘Sarrazin’, in Honorat Bovet, L’Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun. BnF MS fr. 811, fol. 9v.

white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned; others were less white like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops, and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere. (Gomes Eanes de Zurara [1896] 2010: 81) The captives here are clearly displayed as objects, and Zurara reminds us, with the phrase ‘those who saw them’, that an audience looks on. Especially striking in the passage is that the captives, as they are made into merchandise, are distinguished not by gender, age or place of origin (all categories deployed elsewhere in the Chronicle to enumerate them) but by skin colour, and by means of both a Black–white binary in which white occupies the dominant pole, and a colour spectrum that includes a middle term between Black and white. That is, the schema Zurara deploys strongly anticipates modern, colonial racial schemata. Here, however, the skin colour categorization of the captives arises from wholly medieval resources. The understanding of those who are ‘of a reasonable whiteness’ as therefore ‘fair’ is well established, as suggested above, in medieval lyric and romance. The blackness and supposed ugliness of Ethiopians is also commonplace in geographical

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writing. And the racializing word used to describe those who are ‘less white’, translated here as ‘mulatto’ – the Portuguese word is ‘pardo’ – has both a long prehistory and a long afterlife within racial constructions. Derived from the Latin and Greek pardus, pardos (leopard), in modern Portuguese it continues to mean brown, grayish and brown-skinned, and it still describes someone of multiracial origin. Joan Coromina and José Antonio Pascual (1980–91) document its use as a colour word associated with wild animals from the early Middle Ages on, and in Portuguese as early as 1111. And the racialized meanings of pardo are prepared for as far back as the Hebrew Bible and the book of Jeremiah: ‘If the Ethiopian can change his skin, or the leopard [pardus] his spots, you may also do well, when you have learned evil’ (13.23). In at least one medieval Spanish translation, the thirteenth-century General Estoria, this is ‘Si el de Ethiopia puede mudra la su piel que non sea negra. o el pardo los sos colores demudados. si este pudiere seer; podredes uos otrossi fazer bien quando aprendieredes mal’ (Biblia Medieval n.d.). In sum, the terms of Zurara’s skin-colour-based system of racial classification are all available in earlier medieval discourses, and Zurara here deploys them with ease. The text also, of course, contains one major difference from later racist discourses of slavery: here, it is not just Black Africans, but Africans of every colour, who are treated as enslaveable. But Zurara also elsewhere associates African blackness and enslavement by invoking Noah’s curse of his son ‘Cain’: [T]hese blacks were Moors like the others, though [they were] their slaves, in accordance with ancient custom, which I believe to have been because of the curse which, after the Deluge, Noah laid upon his son Cain, cursing him in this way: – that his race should be subject to all the other races of the world. / And from his race these blacks are descended. (Gomes Eanes de Zurara [1896] 2010: 54) Although, as modernity establishes a full-fledged system of race and enslavement associated with skin colour difference, such racialized constructions will be further developed and solidified, here – at the border between the medieval and early modern – we see that the racial constructions about to become dominant as the Atlantic slave trade expands build importantly upon medieval constructions that already understand racial difference as deeply, essentially embodied.

CHAPTER NINE

Anti-Race? The Danger of Binaries WILLIAM CHESTER JORDAN AND HELMUT REIMITZ

More than a generation ago, some of the most prominent students of modern history such as Eric Hobsbawm (1990) and Ernest Gellner (1983) expressed the hope that nationalism and racialization were fading phenomena in Western democracies. Unsurprisingly, what we observe is rather the opposite: an increasing mobilization and politicization of nationalism and racism of different kinds all over the world, not least in Europe and North America (see Brubaker 2015: 5–9, 145–54). In response to this development, intellectuals and scholars have focused not only on the increasing salience of nationalism and racism in the present but also intensively discussed and studied their historical and historiographical foundations. This is also true for late antique and medieval history, albeit with different intensity and foci in the different subfields, academic milieus and countries. The present chapter opens with a reflection on the ontological status of race in modern social scientific and biological discourses. After that, we look at some examples of how the history of this discourse had an impact on and was inflected by the study of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. We hope that this will help to clarify some of the differences in the historiography of early and high medieval history, as well as the different foci and approaches to race and ethnicity in European and North American medieval studies and the contrasting assessments of the heuristic value of race in different academic milieus. In so doing, we hope to turn the conversation between the two authors of this chapter into a wider conversation involving other scholars who study race and ethnicity in the past, between different traditions exploring ethnicity and race, and between history and literary studies. To be sure, we cannot be comprehensive in our coverage of the enormous historiography of ethnicity and race in late antique and medieval studies since the establishment of history as a modern scholarly discipline. Nonetheless, we hope that our selection of examples will make plain how geographically diverse, long emerging and complex and, despite all their differences, how intertwined the scholarly genealogies still are. This in turn might help – in tandem with critical race studies – to widen the current focus of scholarship and social media beyond the racializing tendencies and race-thinking in the United States. It might also help scholars mobilize a diversity of approaches to the study of race and its overlapping concepts and categories such as ethnicity, indigeneity, collective consciousness, nation and so on. In the end, such an effort would contribute to

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the expansive epistemological approach to the history of race in the Middle Ages that this volume seeks to promote (see Whitaker’s introduction to this volume). Individual human beings differ in body type, complexion, hair texture, eye colour, language, dialect, devotional practice and the like. Some of these characteristics are biologically heritable, though often in far more complex ways than was once thought and with outcomes that are usually only probable, not certain.1 Race-ing scholarly and nonscholarly practices, to use an increasingly encountered neologism, implies bringing critical questions about racial assumptions to historical and sociological analysis.2 This is not an entirely new approach in medieval studies, and the language of race-ing is not the only terminology that scholars have used to describe it; alternatives included ‘race-thinking’, ‘race-making’ and ‘racialization’ (Whitaker 2015). Whatever the terminology, the approach confronts the implications and inherent incoherence of sorting individuals into races, that is, largely non-overlapping categories of people whose somatic characteristics, descent by blood, religion or some combination of these are determinative of behaviour. Men and women have repeatedly and deliberately mobilized race to disadvantage certain groups in almost unimaginably hurtful ways.3 Those who employ the word and concept to this effect have often insisted, for example, that race reflects a categorical reality and that there is a hierarchy of races. Many persist, most perniciously, in asserting that particular races are incapable of so-called higher social, intellectual, moral and cultural beliefs and practices. Many racialists and racists maintain that a low average IQ (itself a highly problematic, even valueless, numerical index of intelligence) is characteristic of the Black, or so-called Negro or Negroid race. Or, they have asserted that a propensity for sharp business practices inheres in Jews. Or, to give one final example, they have claimed that the propensities of certain racial groups are innately more violent, more callous in their violence, bestial or more aggressive sexually than the propensities of other groups. Conversely, members of disparaged groups have sometimes accepted that characteristics related to somatic markers, such as athletic ability, are racial, a strategy that runs the risk of complicity, that is, of buying into the more general myth of the reality of race (see Wiggins 1997). An extreme view, popularized in nineteenth-century literature of varied genres, argued against the unfettered mixing of the so-called superior and inferior races (Lemire 2002). Miscegenation (a term attested for the first time in an anti-abolitionist critique in 1863, see OED Online 2021: s.v. ‘miscegenation’) would lead to mongrelization, also a popular nineteenth-century term, in the offspring. If permitted free rein, according to anti-miscegenationists, mongrelization would eventuate in the virtual suicide of the superior race without the reverse effect, the elevation of the inferior. The toxic belief in the consequential pairing of purity with authenticity is at work here, failure to preserve purity being the equivalent of treason to one’s (higher) race. In the mental universe in which members of the purportedly superior race felt threatened by what was also called race mixing, there was a consequent desire to impose restraints both on those allegedly misguided members of the superior race who would favour or were said to favour equal rights and on all members of the inferior races. When self-described and uncompromising members of a so-called superior race have had greater political, economic and social authority than those whom they have reviled as inferiors and those among the same group who adhered to milder views, they have institutionalized brutal methods of political and social control (Pascoe 2009). These have ranged from slavery and serfdom to various forms of apartheid (segregation, untouchability, militarized policing, mass incarceration, ghettoization, expatriation and genocide, among them).

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People seeking to explain the origins of the supposed races – and their relative superiority or inferiority – have sometimes argued from religion. One method employed has been to adduce scriptural texts describing God’s punishment of groups descended from a common rebellious individual as the originating moment in the constitution of one or another inferior race (Goldenberg 2003). Alternatively, defenders of the reality of race have argued from a hypothetical polygenesis, another nineteenth-century coinage, descent from more than one original pair of human beings, with different mental capacities and somatic characteristics, each line of descent from the original pair constituting a different race (Fleuhr-Lobban 2006: 73–8).4 Still others, notably in the eighteenth century, invoked climatic and geographical factors to explain characteristics like the variety of hair textures and pigmentation typed as racial markers (Harvey 2016). These views, however, never achieved general popularity with racists, since they led some of their defenders (geoclimatic determinists) to regard race as mutable over one or more generations. That is to say, if individuals or groups moved to different climata and sired enduring lineages, one would expect these lineages to reap the benefits or incur the defects of their new environmental conditions.5 More recently, some racialists and racists, even scientists, though typically not geneticists, have mobilized genetic arguments in favour of the reality of race – unpersuasively according to most experts in the field as well as evolutionary biologists and historians of science (Yudell 2011; Milam 2019). In every case, ruling elites have mobilized these alleged truths, whether they claim to base them on religion or science, to justify domination and exclusion: colonialism and imperialism; extrajudicial violence such as lynching; discriminatory legislation with regard to everything from education to housing, freedom of movement, voting, public accommodations and intermarriage; involuntary medical experimentation; and forced sterilization. Modern racism owes a debt also to a number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century projects, behemoth in scope, in which Catholic and Protestant divines published the major sources of the ancient and medieval European past. They did not pursue knowledge solely for its own sake. Despite the high quality of much of the technical scholarship, the bitter hatreds between the érudits of the two confessions fed on pre-existing ethnic and regional hatreds and informed the selection of records for publication and their interpretation. Statist projects and the scholarship associated with them went hand in glove with or followed in the wake of the ecclesiastical projects and could draw on classical perceptions of the ruler’s embodiment of Romans’ spirit or its embodiment in the Romans themselves. Ernst Kantorowicz described long ago how this hallowing or halo-ing of essentialness was an ancient characteristic of elite culture (1957: 78–84).6 This conceit heightened the collective sense of self – set off against the so-called other – in the political and cultural landscape. The assertion that cultural and sexual mixing would pollute this genius was a commonplace. Yet, for a world that was the inheritor of over a millennium of dynastic marriages, intermingling the royal families and the aristocratic lineages of every European land, this claim reeked of incoherence (Bartlett 2020: 9–31). Unsurprisingly, the dominance of the categorical thinking that divided humanity into races in the early modern period became an important focus for the study of ancient and medieval history in Europe. For a while, it accentuated scholars’ researches in the medieval and remoter past for the essence of Germanness or Frenchness or Englishness and therefore of the institutions that were unique to this or that people. Early folklorists contributed by shifting the focus in their own work to non-elites, primarily peasants, whom they regarded as less tainted by sexual mingling outside the gens and therefore as purer repositories of the genius of the people: ‘[T]he vital, active genius of the nation returns

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personified in the work of the race’, perhaps instantiated ‘in a single individual … [but] it is the folk that creates the epopee’ (Cocchiara 1981: 224, paraphrasing the Brothers Grimm).7 Such an outlook almost wholly overlooked migration over long distances and shorter migrations in search of seasonal work or food in times of scarcity that cut across perceived ethnic and linguistic boundaries. It also neglected the contribution of longdistance traders and of armies and navies on the move to the disruption of customary practices of endogamy and sexual taboos. This search for national origins was not necessarily or, better put, not always originally linked to efforts to convince oneself and others of the existence of a complex hierarchy of races.8 In France, for instance, reflections on the divisions of human society intensified during the conflicts of the French Revolution during which time certain commentators preferred a binary identification of race with an upper class and lower class (Wood 2013: 19–50). Some aristocrats tried to substantiate their claims to a superior social status as descendants of the successful Frankish conquerors who even managed to supplant the powerful Roman Empire (Boulainvilliers 1727–8, 1732). Advocates of the French monarchy reacted with highlighting the Gallo-Roman origins of the French kingdom (Du Bos 1735), whereas supporters of the Revolution in contrast emphasized the Celtic identity of the French nation that would at long last throw off the yoke of the descendants of Frankish and Roman conquerors alike.9 These debates still appear in the infamous Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races) by Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1853–5).10 The tension between rising nationalism and political fragmentation made Germanspeaking countries a fertile ground for reflections on political claims based on nationalistic and racist thinking. The founders of the most important editorial enterprise, the Monumenta Germaniae historica (MGH), set about to provide the evidentiary baseline for the historical definition of the German nation.11 The emblem that the Monumenta took at its founding in 1819 makes clear the philosophy undergirding the project, a wreath of oak leaves surrounding a text in Roman capitals: Sanctus amor patriae dat animum (the sacred love of the fatherland fosters the spirit). The aim of the collection was to provide for the first time a critical edition of all the documents relevant to the origins and rise of the Germans after the end of the Western Roman Empire. These also included documentation on the Vandal kingdom of Africa, the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy, but above all the most enduring of the so-called Germanic successor state(s) of the Western Roman Empire, the Frankish kingdoms (Dümge 1820; Pertz 1831). In essence, the achievement of the Monumenta was to bind together two distinct and in some ways divergent grand narratives: on the one hand, the origin and definition of Germanness, both textual and national, and, on the other, an idea of science as critique, a discourse of progress and emancipation.12 The combination of these two narratives further intensified in the first half of the twentieth century and culminated in Germany in the establishment of Rassenkunde or Rassenlehre as a complex and dangerous amalgam of social analysis and political practice. Its most influential representative for the ancient and medieval past was probably the archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna who created an approach (the so-called siedlungsarchäologische Methode) to study the history of discrete and welldefined races throughout the ages (Kossinna 1928, 1912).13 Kossinna and many of his contemporaries regarded this method as scientific proof of the biological foundations of different races and the superiority of the German race or Volk. Kossinna’s work played an important role in Nazi Germany, but he became only the most prominent member of a larger research network (Wiwjorra 1999). Other prominent members were for instance

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the Polish archaeologist, prime minister and later Nazi-collaborator Leon Kozłowski (1933; Brather 2008), and the Australian Gordon Childe who worked in Scotland (D. Harris 1994). After 1945, the discipline of Rassenkunde or Rassenlehre withered. Owing to the horrors of the Nazi regime, the study of races became a political taboo. However, many of the older assumptions associated with the enterprise found their way into studies made by historians and archaeologists, naively or not (see Steuer 2001). This continuity or lack of problematization went hand in hand with a long period in which European medievalists and archaeologists avoided the inconvenient topic with its tainted historiography.14 It took some time before they embarked on the systematic development of a more critical approach to the study of the history of identities in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In these studies, early medievalists, most of whom were working in Europe, employed the concept of ethnicity. However, the critical study of ethnicity became a highly contested subject – we will briefly come back to this historiography soon.15 There was a distinctive English take on the national origin narrative. Many scholars claimed that English liberty and the institutions that undergirded it went back to and, therefore, were dependent on their ancient Germanic seed, the innate egalitarian spirit of the war band (aka hardy farmers) and such (Gossman 1968; Evans and Marchal 2011; Wood 2013). Many similar ideas – but this one in particular – jumped the Atlantic Ocean and became the favoured theses among American medievalists and theorists of the origins of Anglo-American liberty. Everything from the New England town meeting to the representative assemblies in England and North America were traceable to the sociopolitical character of human life in the ancient German forests. The self-confidence, not to say hubris, of these assertions manifested itself in a resulting disdain for non-AngloAmericans living within Anglo-American dominated regions. These included people of full or partial African descent (the only exceptions being those who could ‘pass’ as members of the superordinate race). This disdain extended to Indigenous peoples in America as well as to the Irish in Britain and later to large numbers of the latter in America. When the regius professor of modern history at Oxford University, Edward Augustus Freeman, went on a speaking tour in the United States in 1881, he summed up this contemptuousness in a quip that America ‘would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it’ (quoted in Stephens 1895: 242). Freeman wrote with equal distaste of the Native Americans he encountered (Freeman 1883: 149–51). Other commentators shared his overall views without always using such incendiary language. Freeman represents the whole body of constitutional historians targeted by contemporary liberals and even more so by subaltern scholars and postmodernists for racism and its malevolent impact on traditional scholarship.16 It is only fair to add, however, that the origins of a great many other fields of study have at least some of their roots in racialist ideologies. Classical, particularly Greek and Egyptian, archaeology and philosophy are cases in point and were the focus of a searing debate in the 1980s centred on Cornell University Professor Martin Bernal’s book Black Athena. The study first appeared in 1987, and provoked some measured and partly positive responses but also a whirlwind of defensive criticisms and indignation from practitioners.17 Bernal felt compelled to answer his critics in two additional volumes published in 1991 and 2006. Even if Bernal lacked nuance in his representation of the history of Classics, the argument that race, as it was understood in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, informed and distorted a great deal of the scholarship produced at the time remains a strong one.

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Let us now turn our attention from the influence of race in the construction of the academic disciplines to the current state of scholarship. The first point worth making is that there is a distinction between studies of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, on the one hand, and those of the high and late Middle Ages, on the other, and that this distinction has a geographical dimension as well. In Europe, critical studies have mainly concentrated on the history and role of ethnicity and ethnic identities in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, to respond to and deconstruct the massive abuse of ancient and medieval history in modern nationalist movements (Geary 2002; Pohl 2009). One of the main agendas of this research tradition has been to revise a long and influential historiography that perceived the end of the Western Roman Empire as the result of a dramatic clash of cultures between the barbarian or Germanic and the Roman world. For a long time, the victory of the Germanic ‘race’ over Rome was deemed a victory of a Germanic ethnic mentality over the constitutional sentiments of the Roman provincial population.18 It has only been in the last three decades that such misconceptions of the complex transition from the late Roman to a post-Roman world have been comprehensively deconstructed.19 As more recent studies, principally by late antique and early medieval historians and archaeologists, have emphasized the increasing salience of ethnicity and its politicization was not the reason for the end of the Western Roman Empire but one of the results of the fundamental changes during the last centuries of its existence.20 Even as ethnicity, rather than race, developed into the more common category to talk about early medieval peoples, the term itself became highly contentious in the 1990s. Certain Viennese scholars (the so-called Vienna School) had started to problematize and deconstruct long-held notions about the role of (a singular) Germanic identity and ethnicity and began to historicize ethnic identities. This effort to ‘defamiliarize’ what it meant to belong to a people or Volk in the early Middle Ages provoked mixed feelings. Vigorous arguments ensued, comparable in intensity to those between supporters and opponents of critical race studies now. Certain scholars simply felt that the effort was unnecessary. The work of the so-called Nationes-Projekt, part of the defamiliarization effort, became a particular target of ridicule. The enterprise did not become widely known outside of Germany, but what little was known of it in the United States prompted sometimes bemused and belittling dismissal, something that only German-speaking scholars could find significant (see e.g. Reuter 2006). Other scholars regarded the whole enterprise as dangerous, potentially reinforcing rather than undermining the nationalistic and nationalizing trends of the older historiography. While such attitudes were more common in oral communication – conference papers and academic lectures – than in writing, the Vienna School came under critical scrutiny in publications by Walter Goffart and some of his students, a group that became known as the Toronto School in analogy to the Vienna School.21 The main takeaway of the Toronto School was that this research on ethnicity was pointless because it projected a modern construct onto the distant past, one that reproduced and reified the nationalizing impulse of older historiography. This is not the forum in which to pursue this debate, but it might be worthwhile to mention that observers came to perceive the discussion and criticize it as a binary, two positions that misled many colleagues into overlooking more nuanced interventions. This in turn made it difficult to formulate a productive reconceptualization of the question and thus to further develop critical ethnicity studies for late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The experience reinforces how important it is to develop approaches to ethnicity or

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race, for that matter, that avoid an either-or scheme, approaches that allow for multiple methodologies, in parallel, complementary or in a bricolage to study the complexity of their histories.22 Let us now shift focus to North America where, in the mid-twentieth century, neither race nor ethnicity has had a notably lofty perch on the research agenda of historians of the high Middle Ages. The institutional history that characterized their work represented the ‘state’ as more important in social life than tribes, clans and the ethnic groups studied by early medievalists.23 In the later part of the century, however, North American historians came under the influence of the kinds of history, especially social history, represented by various strands of the Annales School.24 This led these scholars to concentrate on new ways to do history from below, to investigate social strata beyond rulers, princely courts and the governing classes, and to explore questions of marginalization and persecution. The effect was also to encourage a new, more dynamic take on political and institutional history. In the long aftermath of this intellectual ferment, studies centring on the history of racializing tendencies and race-thinking in the period 1100–1500 have multiplied, a further impetus being disquiet over the appropriation and abuse of medieval history by modern racists (see Whitaker’s introduction to this volume). Literary scholars above all have adopted the approach of critical race studies.25 The texts that have excited their interest the most are the chansons de geste and the romances, especially those that treat Muslim (Saracen)-Christian conflict and type Muslims as dark and Christians as white (Ramey 2014; Nadhiri 2017; Heng 2018b). A particular romance convention has been the focus of their interest, namely, the stories told, often in the context of epic military conflict, of beautiful and whitish-whitening/already-Christian-at-heart Muslim princesses yielding, mesmerized, to chivalrous and victorious – and white – Christian knights. Inevitably, these women would then convert. Although the racism or racialism of these texts seems obvious at first, the conversion motif complicates interpretation. Colour was symbolically important but confessional affiliation, achievable by conversion, could be read as more significant, perhaps, to medieval Christian authors. If they had regarded race as indelible, as modern racists do, then baptism would have run the risk of being meaningless. Historians and historically minded literary scholars have not limited themselves to literary texts but have also employed race as an analytic category in the study of social relations. Concerned with the present discourse of white supremacy, Cord Whitaker, for example, has attempted to identify motifs or implicit narratives from the long genealogy of modern racism in the United States that resonate with or owe their origin to aspects of a veiled racism of the medieval period (Whitaker 2019a). This move, widely admired, requires methodological discipline to avoid ‘foisting the present onto the past unjustly’ (Whitaker 2019a: 7). In order to avoid the pitfalls, different fields must employ different disciplinary strategies, since they confront divergent methodological and historiographical challenges. Literary scholars, for instance, have started to experiment with deliberate anachronism as a method to deepen sensitivity for the multiple historical layers of racethinking and acting.26 Such an approach is problematic for historians, which only means that scholars need to have an open conversation – a dialogue – across disciplines and fields that allows for a plurality of approaches to study the multiple histories of race and ethnicity. This might be more complex in the study of race-thinking than it is for other subjects. As Rogers Brubaker and Frederic Cooper have remarked in their important article on the

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study of social identities, one of the challenges of the study of race, nation and ethnicity is that they ‘are at once categories of social and political practice and categories of social and political analysis’ (2000: 4; emphasis in the original). The entanglement of political and scholarly agendas makes conversations across disciplines and fields – including the authors’ own subfields, the early and high Middle Ages – more difficult and contentious, but all the more important. Above we used the phrase the ‘veiled racism of the medieval period’. In point of fact, did people in the high Middle Ages think about alterity in terms recognizably racist or racialist by modern standards? This is a vexing question. The jury – an institution, once also regarded as part of the legacy of Germanic genius – is still out on this point. Historian Robert Bartlett (2001) in his well-known article has insisted that if a biological notion of relatedness, differentiating one set of peoples from others along biological lines, existed in the Middle Ages, then race was a medieval construct. He went on to analyse the plasticity and compare the diverse semantics of medieval terminology such as gens, populus and natio and their various meanings in different contexts and over time. However, though concluding that modern terminology is as flexible and generic as its medieval counterpart is, he chose not to distinguish between race and ethnicity, and preferred to use ethnicity as the term to work with (Bartlett 2001: 42). Bartlett’s argument, however, has encountered criticism for allegedly justifying a historiography that (1) prefers ethnicity in order to relativize or diminish the historical significance of concepts of race in the past and (2) disregards the history of race-thinking (D. Kim 2019a: 2). One wonders how recent critics would have reacted to the article if Bartlett had chosen to use the term race instead of ethnicity, something he actually did opt for in his monograph on The Making of Europe (1993: 197–242). In this case, Bartlett’s take might well have been regarded as more compatible with recent approaches of critical medieval race studies that operate with relatively wide definitions of race. The influential definition by Geraldine Heng in her recent book The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages is a good example of this. Heng defines race as ‘one of the primary names we have … that is attached to a repeating tendency, of the greatest import, to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups’ (2018b: 3). Such a definition certainly helps to unveil traces, aspects or potential layers of racemaking or race-thinking in the history and the study of the Middle Ages that are often overlooked. However, if such an approach is used to study processes of race-thinking or race-making in the Middle Ages, it runs into similar methodological issues as Bartlett’s approach by raising the question whether such an inclusive definition of race does not rather obscure the historical peculiarities and specific trajectories of race-thinking. While wider definitions clearly help to answer the question ‘Why Race?’, they still provide no adequate response to the question of whether every hatred should be considered as a form of racism (W. C. Jordan 2001). In other words, how can we study race-thinking as a historically situated yet open-ended process distinct from other forms of categorization? To historicize various discourses of race-thinking, we would suggest that other scholars employ sharper definitions as well. A more precise definition would help to distinguish race-thinking from other perceptions, imaginations and orderings of the social world such as gender, ethnicity, indigeneity, class, religion and the like. This in turn would allow and encourage scholars to study the various forms in which race-thinking and race-making have manifested themselves vis-à-vis different forms of social identity and identification.27

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Such an approach is likely to reveal that racial categorization is not a constant in human history, but a specific view of the social world, among others, that members of human societies have chosen to impose on their society and its members. This is not to claim that historians’ methods must prevail. On the contrary, our observations merely highlight the importance as well as the complexity of the study of race. They suggest that scholars find new ways to bring multiple methodologies to bear, to foster parallel research strategies, and to meld them in a bricolage – a ‘rhizomic’ or ‘accretive’ approach (see Whitaker’s introduction to this volume). The goal remains to discover sophisticated and heuristically productive ways to exploit all the concepts we have discussed and, thus, to refine our understanding of the Middle Ages.

NOTES

Introduction 1 Two recent collections demonstrating the need for and practice of critical medieval race studies include the collection edited by Andrew Albin et al. (2019), Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past, and the special issue ‘Critical Race in the Middle Ages’ in Literature Compass edited by Dorothy Kim (2019a). 2 I will retain Heng’s term when referring to actions in the material world, such as the veneration of a holy figure discussed below. I will use my term when referring to the discursive, artistic and theoretical moves relevant to the conceptual development and maintenance of racial ideology. 3 See my discussion of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale in Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race Thinking (Whitaker 2019a: esp. 85–8). 4 The African representative among the three Magi is sometimes Balthasar and sometimes Jaspar. According to tradition, the three Magi, or wise men, worshipped the infant Christ in Bethlehem, and they each represented one of the three known continents (Africa, Asia and Europe). For a more in-depth discussion of the tradition, see my chapter on the Three Kings of Cologne titled ‘Black Metaphors Inside and Out in Their Narrative and Spiritual Contexts’ (Whitaker 2019a: esp. 97–122). 5 For further discussion of the victimhood complex that attends white supremacism, see Whitaker (2019a: 194–5). 6 For ‘heritage politics’, Miyashiro relies on the work of Danielle Christmas (2019) and on Rambaran-Olm’s (2018) arguments concerning white supremacists’ claims to ‘European indigeneity’ and attendant claims that they are suffering ‘white genocide’. 7 They seem to obliquely refer to her excavations of the La Venta site in the early 1980s. See González Lauck (1990). 8 Translation is mine, with reference to Bartholomaeus Anglicus (1975–88). My translation also appears in Whitaker (2014: 166).

Chapter 1 1 This compelling reading is gratefully received from Candace Barrington. 2 Marcus Elias notes that self-reflection increases in many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English romances even as crusade becomes a more contested and less successful enterprise: Crusade Literature and the Interrogation of Self: Romance and History, 1291–1453, (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).

Chapter 2 1 On this sense of gratitude, see Akbari (2020: 324–5). Wallace Cleaves (Tongva) beautifully articulates the importance of situating oneself: ‘I’m centering myself in the field and using my own narrative to explore the work of decolonizing medieval studies, or at least I hope that I am. My focus and the attendant direction of my research is influenced by my own perspective, as it must always be. If we really want to decolonize the field, we have to meaningfully do that through self-examination and active practice’ (Cleaves 2020: 24). See also Tarren Andrews (Bitterroot

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Salish), who argues for the value of ‘emic scholarship’ and calls for ‘a new kind of field—one that recognizes the power of subjectivity in all facets of our scholarship’ (Andrews 2020: 7). Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) places this requirement in explicitly ethical terms: ‘Within Nishnaabewin, I am responsible for my thoughts and ideas. I am responsible for my own interpretations and that is why you’ll always hear from our Elders what appears to be them ‘qualifying’ their teachings with statements that position them as learners, that position their ideas as their own understandings, and place their teachings within the context of their own lived experience. This is deliberate, ethical and profoundly careful within Nishnaabewin because to do otherwise is considered arrogant and intrusive’ (Simpson 2014: 11). For an overview of the term’s usage from the seventeenth century to the present, see Wilton (2020). An early account of bodily diversity in Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum and related texts on climate can be found in Akbari (2004: 157–66). On the role of nature in the discourses of racialization found in Pliny, Augustine, and Isidore, and developed richly in Higden’s Polychronicon and the Middle English Kyng Alisaunder, see Miyashiro (2021). This commentary is possibly by Michael Scot. For the sake of brevity, I quote from John Trevisa’s very literal late fourteenth-century Middle English translation but also provide the book, chapter and page citation for the Latin text. The Middle English translation appears in Bartholomaeus Anglicus (1975–88). In the absence of a modern critical edition of the Latin text, I cite Bartholomaeus Anglicus ([1601] 1964). Citations are first to the page number of the Middle English translation, then to book, chapter and page number in the Latin text. For a more detailed analysis of the relationship of the racialization of Jewish and Muslim identities in the Middle Ages, see Akbari (2009: 112–54 [ch. 3, ‘The Place of the Jews’], 155–99 [ch. 4, ‘The Saracen Body’]). For an important corrective on the use of the term Saracen, see Rajabzadeh (2019b). Space does not permit me to engage with Pearce’s provocative and stimulating (yet also harsh) critique here, but see Akbari (forthcoming). Arendt republished ‘Race-Thinking Before Racism’ in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). For an account of this article in the context of Arendt’s views on anti-Black racism, see Gines (2007). As Burroughs puts it, ‘Given her work on racism and her own personal experiences with antiSemitism it is quite possible that Arendt possessed insights on race-based discrimination that were not available to other, non-oppressed whites.… But Arendt is also white, thinking and writing about anti-black racism in a society structured by norms of white superiority and black inferiority. As a white person (a member of the dominant social group in a white supremacist society), Arendt remains susceptible to dysfunctional norms associated with white ignorance’ (2015: 67). On harmony in diversity as seen in the De proprietatibus rerum, see Akbari (2004: 160–4). Nicolás Wey Gómez illustrates the reception of Albertus Magnus’s climate theory by way of writers such as Pierre d’Ailly in the travel logs of Columbus: ‘As Columbus’s Diario shows, the deferral of human monstrosity to the outer margins of the archipelago he thought he had found in the Indies was directly informed not only by the notion that extreme latitudes gave way to extreme natures but also by the urge to identify a somatic substitute for blackness in the newly discovered peoples—and along with this substitute (physical deformity) a negative moral trait (anthropophagy) that would serve as justification for capturing slaves’ (2008: 316). On Albertus Magnus, see N. Gómez (2008: 278–80). I am grateful to Valeria López Fadul for pointing out Gómez’ work to me. For the sake of brevity, I quote from the Middle English translation of The Book of John Mandeville, based on London British Library MS Cotton Titus C.xvi (Mandeville 1967) but

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25 26

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also provide the citation for the French edition (Mandeville 2000). Citations are in the text, first to the page number of the Middle English translation, then to the chapter and page number in the French text. ‘Licet autem huiusmodi nigri aliquando nascantur etiam in aliis climatibus, sicut in quarto vel in quinto, tamen nigredinem accipiunt a primis generantibus, quae complexionata sunt in climatibus primo et secundo, et paulatim alterantur ad albedinem, quando ad alia climata transferuntur’ (Albertus Magnus 1980: 27). ‘Le monde colonial est un monde compartimenté. Sans doute est-il superflu, sur le plan de la description, de rappeler l’existence de villes indigènes et de villes européennes, d’écoles pour indigènes et d’écoles pour Européens, comme il est superflu de rappeler y apartheid en Afrique du Sud’ (Fanon 2002: 41). The quotation cited by Vernon (2018) appears at page 45 in the French text. Translations are my own. For an incisive account of how Fanon’s work might be mobilized within North American Indigenous critiques of settler colonialism’s politics of ‘recognition’, see Glen Sean Coulthard (2014). On the value of Alexander romances as a widely disseminated set of texts for approaches to medieval world literature, see Akbari (2017: 7). Quotations from the Roman de toute chevalerie are from the edition of Brian Foster and Ian Short (Thomas of Kent 1976–7) and are cited in the text by line number. Translations are my own. Beatus of Liebana, Apocalypse (bifolium), New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art MS 1991.232.1, fol. 2b–c. For a more detailed account of the depiction of Ethiopians in pictorial art and textual traditions, see Akbari (2019b: 81–7). For a powerful articulation of the disjunction between determinations of indigeneity on the basis of genetic ancestry and those made by Indigenous tribes or nations, see TallBear (2013). NativeEuropean (@european_native), joined January 2020 (accessed 29 January 2020). This account has since then been deleted or suspended. @european_native, ‘Map of ancient Germanic and Celtic tribes’, 28 January 2020 (accessed 29 January 2020). @european_native, ‘Charles Martel stopped the first invasion at Tours, 200 years after Mohammad’s death. His descendants then went on to wipe Europe of its indigenous beliefs and traditions. 1288 years later… there is no indigenous remaining in Europe, and no Charles Martel’, 25 January 2020 (accessed 29 January 2020). @european_native, ‘Comparing my genome against the library of catalogued genomes from antiquity. Appears 15% “Celtic”, mainly Insular, and 75% “Germanic”, with heavy influence from the North Germanic, including the Lombards after their migration’, 14 January 2020 (accessed 29 January 2020). @european_native re-tweeting @SurvivetheJive, ‘Blond Mummies, Tocharians and IndoEuropeans of China’, 18 January 2020 (accessed 29 January 2020). @european_native re-tweeting @SurvivetheJive, ‘Tomorrow at 1500 GMT: Jive Talk with @RFultonBrown, from the Department of History at the University of Chicago. We will discuss how a religious perspective is necessary for understanding the medieval mind’, 15 January 2020 (accessed 29 January 2020). @european_native re-tweeting @EchoesofthePas1, ‘Do not forget that within you YOU carry the seed of thousands that came before you! Do not become an offspring of civilization—without memory; without connection to Soil and Blood!’, 9 January 2020 (accessed 29 January 2020). ‘The title of this exhibition is mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People), a Cree word to describe that when the French arrived, they arrived in wooden boats. The two paintings together

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really speak about the arrivals and migrations and displacements of people around the world. And the Great Hall, of course, is this place of people entering and people leaving. In the left painting, Welcoming the Newcomers, Miss Chief is literally bending over to assist people arriving to North America. That has to do with generosity. In the second painting, Resurgence of the People, Miss Chief is commanding this boat, which looks a lot like a migrant vessel, and many people across the world are being displaced from their own lands. Miss Chief is leading this resurgence of the people to represent a return to our languages and a return to our traditions’ (Monkman, Kent 2019). 28 On the relationship of Black and Indigenous identities within North American tribal nations (both those recognized by the American federal government and/or American state governments, and those who as yet lack that recognition), see Hlebowicz’s nuanced account of language revitalization that draws attention to the complex situation of the Lumbees living in what is now North Carolina; the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape, in southern New Jersey; and the Ramapough Lunaape Nation, in northern New Jersey and the border with New York (2019: 61–2): ‘Four hundred years of contact with more powerful European colonizers gradually changed Indian communities into tiny pockets of people living on obscure reservations (e.g. Pequots in Connecticut or Pamunkeys, Mattaponis in Virginia) or dispersed among much greater non-Indian populations, intermarrying with other ethnic groups and even seen as “coloured”, “Mullatoes” or “Black”, not Indians anymore’ (58).

Chapter 3 1 Translation of verses from the Qurʾān are from Nasr et al. (2015). 2 For two examples of this complaint, see Loomba (2009) and Nirenberg (2009). 3 See, for example, the Loeb Classics edition of Pseudo-Aristotle (Problems 878a, 20–8; Aristotle 2011) and Lehoux (2014). 4 I do not know of any work comparing Aristotle and Pāṇini’s reproductive analogies, but for a comparative approach that opens philosophical horizons, see Staal ([1965] 1988). 5 For a general survey of the Almohads, see Bennison (2016). Fierro’s work in the field has been fundamental; see her essays collected in Fierro (2012). On their conversionary policies, see Fierro (2010) and García-Arenal (1992: 95). Stroumsa (2009) provides a sophisticated treatment of the impact of the Almohads on Jewish thought. For debates over Maimonides’ conversion, see Kraemer (2008: 116–24). 6 The story is told by ʿAbd al-Wāḥid al-Marrākushī (1963: 383), who had connections to the Almohad court, in his history of the Almohads. See also the earlier edition by Reinhardt Dozy (al-Marrākushī 1881: 223–4). I cite here the translation by Paul Fenton, whose work on the North African converts (Ibn Zikrī 2016) is indispensable for the topic. 7 Joseph ben Judah ibn ʿAqnīn is discussed by Fenton (Ibn Zikrī 2016: 15–18). The citations are from his Ṭibb al-nufūs (Ben Judah Ibn ʿAqnīn n.d.: 143a–6). 8 On the use and various etymologies of bildī, see Fenton (Ibn Zikrī 2016: 23–5). 9 Ibn Sakkāk is quoted by Ibn Zikrī (2016: 135 [Arabic pagination]), who disputes that Ibn Sakkāk could ever have made such a statement (27). 10 Al-Januwī is the subject of ongoing research by Manuela Ceballos, whose unpublished manuscript ‘Theology from the Margins: Sīdī Riḍwān al-Januwī and his Community of Outsiders’ (n.d.) brought him to my attention. Her work is largely based on the unpublished biography written by his disciple Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf al-Sijilmāsī (n.d.; Rabat, Bibliothèque Générale, MS 114K). She cites the point about leading prayer from page 92 of Vincent Cornell’s (unpublished) transcription of that work. It may be that certain schools of Sufism were more open to muhājirūn than others. See Fenton (2005: 513–20).

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11 See Goldziher, Van Arendonk and Tritton (1960–2007) and Van Arendonk and Graham (1960–2007) for a general discussion of the development of the concept of sharīf/sayyid. For the Maghreb, see García-Arenal (2006). 12 For a (probably eighteenth-century) example of such a history, see Fatḥah (2004). The treatise traces the history of the Qaysārīya back to the reign of Mulay Idris (d. 791) and claims that throughout the history of Fez, rulers permitted muhājirūn to sell in the markets or hold administrative positions only when the rulers were weak, illegitimate or impecunious. Strong, legitimate rulers properly favoured the shurafāʾ. On Idris and the shurafāʾ, see Beck (1989: esp. ch. 4). 13 Mayyāra’s point that all Muslims are converts so all would be excluded from markets by this discriminatory logic (2013: 141) is borrowed from the earlier fatwa of al-Kharrūbī (d. 1556), included by Mayyāra in his compendium (2013: 93). On Mayyāra, see García-Arenal (1991). See also (more generally) García-Arenal (1987). 14 The ‘Farewell Address’ contains exhortations to the early Muslims about social relations. Hadith collections, Quranic commentaries and biographies of the Prophet written in the centuries after his death give various versions and pieces of the speech and place it in different times of his career. Some of the modifications (not included in the six canonical hadith collections) contain statements about the equality and brotherhood of Muslims, whether Arab or non-Arab, black or red. The address is itself an excellent example of how foundational texts could be used and even transformed in an ongoing debate about identity and discrimination, whether tribal, ethnic or religious. See Mottahedeh (1976: 164) and Marlow (1997: 24–5). 15 Ibn Zikrī discusses Muhammad’s marriage to Jewish converts (Ibn Zikrī 2016: 66–7 [Arabic pagination]), the relationship between Ismael’s and Ishaq’s descendants (16) and Jewish descent from prophets (134). 16 Another version reads ‘My father is Isḥāq, my grandfather Ibrāhīm, my uncle Ismāʿīl, and my brother Yūsuf.’ In biographical sketches, Ṣafīya was given a tribal genealogy stretching back to Levi son of Jacob. For examples of her use in these debates see Mayyāra (2013: 163) and Ibn Zikrī (2016: 18, 49, 67, 77 [Arabic pagination]). Not all stories about Ṣafīya were so positive. Compare Ibn Isḥāq (1955: 517), in which Abū Ayyūb fears that Ṣafīya will attempt to murder the Prophet. 17 For more detailed treatment of these transformations in the Jewish, Christian, and convert communities, see Nirenberg (2002). 18 Spitzer (1941) suggested that race derived from Latin ration. The proposal was strongly rebutted by Contini (1959, 1970), who proposed its derivation from old French haraz/haras, the stallion’s deposit. See also Wartburg (1960: 111) and Sabatini (1962). Merk (1969) attempted to defend Spitzer’s alternative etymology, to which Coluccia (1972) provided a rebuttal. None of these utilize the sources I touch upon above. 19 Examples of such usage are legion. A particularly famous one is that of Pineda ([c. 1589] 1963–4: 410): ‘Ningún cuerdo quiere muger con raza de judía ni de marrana.’ 20 ‘La.x. titulo dela enfermedat. que dizen raza. // Faze se alos cauallos una malautia quel dizen Raça. Et faze se de sequedat dela unna.’ This particular manuscript is from the fourteenth century, but the Catalan translation claims that the Castilian translation was made at the command of Alfonso X of Castile (r. 1252–84). 21 On this work, see Cifuentes and Ferragud (1999). For the Castilian translation by Martín Martínez de Ampiés, see Dies ([1499] 1992). 22 For multiple examples of raça in the late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Castilian poetic corpus, see Nirenberg (2009: 249–50). For the 1470s see Guillén de Segovia (1962: s.v. ‘raça’).

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23 Much of this ‘common sense’ could also be found in ancient authors whose prestige in the medieval Christian and Islamic worlds of learning was immense. See for example Aristotle’s History of Animals (7.6 on the resemblance of children to their parents, and cf. his On the Generation of Animals 1.17–18) or Xenophon’s On Hunting (3, 7 on breeding of dogs). 24 The use of the phrase by nature to distinguish old Christians was already common by this date. 25 For examples of attempts at discrimination in the 1430s, see Nirenberg (2002: 23–4). 26 The texts connected with the controversy have recently been gathered and reedited by González Rolán and Saquero Suárez-Somonte (2012). 27 The metaphor is a reference to Jesus’ rebuke of the Pharisees in Mt. 5.15; Lk. 8.16, 11.33; Mk 4.21. 28 For a (far too) strong thesis about the impact of Iberian ideas of purity of blood in the New World, see Sweet (1997). On the importance of Islamic ideas about blackness in structuring the massive slave trade of the Muslim world, see Gomez (2005: 35–40; 2018: 43–57). (Gomez does not, however, touch upon Maghrebi discussions of lineage and conversion.) 29 The Fuero juzgo, a thirteenth-century translation of the Visigothic Liber iudiciorum, transmitted aspects of this legislation into civil law. See, for example, Fuero juzgo (1815: 179). Vidal Doval (2020) has studied the use of these texts in the Toledo controversies of the fifteenth century. 30 The famous canon De Iudeis (Corpus iuris canonici, Dist. 45, c. 5, in Friedberg and Richter 1955: 161–2), for example, corresponds to canon 57 of Toledo IV (Martínez Díez and Rodríguez 1992: 235). On how the Visigothic conciliar decrees entered canon law, see Marmursztejn (2016: 233–40; 2019). See also, from the same volume, Poutrin (2020). 31 On the shuʿūbīyah controversy, see now Savant (2016), Szombathy (2005) and Larsson (2005). Classic studies include Goldziher (1966: 137–98), Gibb (1962) and Mottahedeh (1976). See more generally Marlow (1997). 32 Writing in Cordoba, around 940, Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih provides one example of the reach of the shuʿūbīyah controversy into the Iberian Peninsula (Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih 1982: 3.403–8). A century later the Muslim convert (or descendant of converts) from Christianity Abu Amir ibn García al-Bashkunsi (i.e. el vascuense, the Basque) produced a treatise that provoked no less than five surviving replies penned over the following centuries. See Monroe (1970) and Larsson (2003). 33 Arabic: Ibn Qutayba (1998: 186). Ibn Qutayba includes a section on horses in his treatise on the shuʿūbīyah (120–7; 2019: 101–4) and also gives detailed information about them in several other books, including his Adab al-kātib, Kitāb al-Maʿānī al-kabīr and ʿUyūn alakhbār. 34 Arabic: Ibn Qutayba (1998: 46). 35 See also Savant (2006); and more generally, Firestone (1990). See also Szombathy (2003: 114). 36 Compare the saying attributed to Muhammad: ‘God chose Kinānah from among the children of Ismāʿīl, and He chose the Quraysh from the Kinānah, and He chose from the Quraysh the Banī Hāshim, and He chose me from the Banū Hāshim’ (Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2276, in Ibn al-Ḥajjāj 1994: 15–16.38). 37 To give just one medieval example: in fifteenth-century Iberia, Alonso de Espina asserted the demonic lineage of Jews (Espina 1494: 2.79, col. d). See Ginio (1998: 16–17). In 2018, Robert Bowers invoked John 8.44 to justify his murder of eleven Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue (see Zaimov 2018).

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38 This list includes modern as well as medieval thinkers. The nineteenth-century Spanish scholar Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo believed the Jews had invented the racism that was then ‘turned against them’ (Menéndez y Pelayo 1946: 408). The eugenicist Alfred Schultz (1908) took a similar position. More recently Winthrop Jordan ([1968] 1977) placed ancient Jewish exegesis of the curse of Ham at the origins of his history of racism, as does Ivan Hannaford (1996: 100–15).

Chapter 4 1 I cite Devisse as well as Bindman and Gates to acknowledge the groundbreaking work of the earlier scholarship, and because the 2010 English re-issue sometimes presents materials in slightly different formats. 2 The Turkish conquest of Constantinople interrupted the slave trade from the Black Sea area. In the Eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula, Black African slaves are present from the second quarter of the thirteenth century, but they became more numerous from the later fifteenth century onwards, with the development of direct slave trade from West Africa to Portugal and Spain. See Verlinden (1955: 225–6, 270–3, 282–6; 1977), Epstein (2001) and Blumenthal (2009). 3 A considerable number of studies examine the representation of Black Africans in medieval art, exegesis, travel and vernacular literature. Apart from The Image of the Black (L’Image du noir) 2.1 (Devisse 1979a; Bindman and Gates 2010), see Mielke (1992), Metzler ([1997] 2009), the contributions to the special issue ‘Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages’ of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Hahn 2001b) and Martin (2001). 4 This chapter builds on van der Lugt (2005, 2018). I only touch upon the question of the reproductive and sexual functions of Black women, a theme discussed by Biller (2005). See, however, note 26 below. In updating I have made use of an English translation of the earlier article from 2005 by Thomas Hahn, to whom I extend my warmest thanks. 5 I have not encountered this description in other medieval sources. The opening of mouths suggests the inspection of slaves. One of Albert’s sources, the Pantegni of Haly Abbas, gives instructions for examining the bodies of slaves but does not mention their mouths (1.24, ‘De signo sani corporis’ (Haly Abbas n.d.: fol. 5v–6r; 1515: fol. 4r–4v). I have not found clear references to these passages in the Pantegni in Latin sources. 6 However, in his Expositio problematum Aristotelis 10.67 (10.60 in the Greek), Pietro d’Abano distinguishes between the Ethiopians, who he says live close to the equator, and Black people generally, who people a larger area: ‘Quare est quod dentes ethiopum habitantium primum clima ad meridiem et universaliter nigrorum quod est ab extremitate tercii climatis versus torridam zonam sunt albi’ (Pietro d’Abano 1482: no foliation). 7 See Wartburg et al. (1922–2002: 6.1.554, s.v. ‘maure’) and, for example, Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis prologue (Jacques de Vitry 1986: 52–3). The prologue is now considered inauthentic. 8 Questiones salernitane B46 (see Lawn 1979: 23). 9 Alexander von Roes, Memoriale ch. 15: ‘Et dicuntur Gallici secundum quosdam a nitore corporum; galla enim grece, latine dicitur lac; et hanc expositionem vocabuli ego reprobare non debeo tamquam ab antiquis traditam. Verum est quod respectu Hispanorum vel Maurorum nitent corpore aliquantulum albiores; respectu vero circumiacentium provinciarum, videlicet Saxonum et Anglorum, nullatenus a nitore corporum dici possunt’ (1958: 107). 10 The fifteenth-century German translation edited in the same volume also lacks the term maurus. Instead, it mentions people inhabiting Spain and the Mediterranean. 11 For the meaning of glaucus, see Pastoureau (2000: 25–7).

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12 For other examples, see Van der Lugt (2018: 54). 13 Johannitius (1978) had only retained the idea that some colours signify excessive heat (black, yellow and red), others excessive cold (glaucus and white). 14 See Van der Lugt (2018: 53–8). For the concept of complexion, see Jacquart ([1984] 1997), Chandelier and Robert (2013) and P. Jones (2013). 15 For this division in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, see, for instance, Gould (1996). 16 Haly, Commentarius in ‘Quadripartitum’ Ptholemei 3.11: ‘non loquitur [Ptholemeus] nisi de locis temperatis et de complexionibus temperatis. … Dixerunt enim physici quod talis medicina est calida in secundo gradu in comparatione rei temperate que non inclinatur ad caliditatem neque frigiditatem. Dicunt similiter quod hec medicina est frigida in secundo gradu in comparatione talis complexionis. Similiter astrologi dicunt talis planeta significat spissitudinem corporis in comparatione spissitudinis corporis temperati et talis color erit albus in comparatione coloris temperati et generis illius nati. … Et non dicas pro ethiopiano quod erit albus, sed dices quod non erit sic niger ut alius et sic oportet te res intelligere quas Ptholemeus tibi dicit in hoc capitulo et similibus’ (1493: fol. 72r). 17 Isagoge ch. 20: ‘Ab exterioribus nempe colores adveniunt, sicut ex frigore scotis, ex calore ethiopibus, et ex aliis multis accidentibus’ (Johannitius 1978: 156). 18 Pietro d’Abano, Liber compilationis phisonomie 2.1.1: ‘Color niger valde levis timidum versutum atque imbecillem hominem denunciat. Referturque ad eos qui meridiei calidiora cohabitant ut indi. Color vehementer albus pallore quodam obductus timidum defectum viribus flegmate pronosticat, nisi vi egritudinis contingat. Refertur ad femellas scotorum. Cum color rubeus albo consparsus fuerit fortes animos insinuat, qui quidem si vere medius horum duorum existat temperamentum designat. Proportionatur illis qui scilicet incolunt clima’ (1474: no foliation; compared with MS München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, CLM 637, fol. 16v–17r [Pietro d’Abano n.d.]). See also the digression on physiognomy in Albert the Great, De animalibus 1.3.7 (Albert the Great 1916–20: 222–3). Pietro d’Abano shows some awareness of the tension between the two models. The colour black is qualified as ‘valde levis’ and he mentions Indians rather than Ethiopians. 19 Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis 2.80.189 (Pliny 1950: 83) and 6.22.70 (Pliny 1980: 40); Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum 14.5.14 (Isidore of Seville [1911] 2002: n.p.); see also 9.2.122. 20 Hippocrates, De aere et aqua et regionibus 12–22 (Hippocrates 1932: 96–102); Galen, De complexionibus 2.6 (Galen 1976: 86); Haly Abbas, Pantegni 1.20 ‘De mutatione complexionis propter regionem’ (Haly Abbas n.d.: fol. 5r; 1515: fol. 3v–4r). 21 William of Mirica, Commentarius in Physonomiam Aristotelis (William of Mirica n.d.: fol. 194v–5v; cited in Ziegler 2005). 22 See also Girolamo Manfredi, Il Perche 5 (Manfredi 1668: 187–8). 23 The question of the colour of sperm is part of a series of quodlibeta debated c. 1300 at the faculty of Arts in Paris. The question concerns the difference in colour between sperm and the menses. Ethiopians are not mentioned. ‘Queritur utrum sperma sit album’ (Paris, BnF, MS lat. 16089, fol. 74rb). 24 The medieval Latin translation can be found in Renaissance editions of Pietro d’Abano’s Expositio 10.67 [sic], for instance, Pietro d’Abano (1482: without foliation). In his Historia animalium (3.9.517a.16–20), Aristotle (1964–9) proposes the same explanation for the colour of the Ethiopians’ fingernails, but not for their teeth. 25 Albert is following Avicenna, Canon 1.2.2.1.11 (Avicenna 1507: fol. 32r). 26 There are recurring discussions in medieval sources about differences between white and Black women with respect to the quality of their breast milk and sexual behaviour. In

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27 28 29

30

31

32

33

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his Quaestiones super ‘De Animalibus’, 15, q. 10 (Albert the Great 1955: 7, 271), Albert extrapolates from a statement in Aristotle’s De generatione animalium, stating that Black women are more agreeable in bed than white women. Contrary to the passage in De natura loci, one wonders whether ‘black’ and ‘white’ are ethnic markers here, or distinguish, rather, (olive-skinned) brunettes and (fair-skinned) blondes. See also Michael Scot, Liber Physonomie 1.8: ‘Lac mulieris nigre et brune est semper melius illo albe et rubee’ (2019: 302). For an ethnographic reading of these debates, see Biller (2005). Galen, De complexionibus 2.6 (Galen 1976: 86); Tegni 14.4 (Galen 2002: 316); Haly Abbas, Pantegni 1.20 (Haly Abbas n.d.: fol. 5r; 1515: fol. 3v–4r). See also Nicole Oresme, Le livre des politiques d’Aristote 7.13 (1327b) (1970: 297). De natura loci 2.3: ‘In operationibus autem animalibus, qui sub aequinoctialia sunt, vigent propter subtilitatem spirituum et plus in inveniendo propter calidum movens et acumen spirituum eorum. Cuius signum est, quia praecipui in philosophia in India fuerunt et praecipue in mathematicis et magicis propter fortitudinem stellarum super climata illa super quae perpendiculares radios proiciunt planetae’ (Albert the Great 1980b: 26). Arnau de Vilanova, Speculum, ch. 82 ‘De regionibus’: ‘Proinde caliditas hominum habitantium in extremis climatibus testatur illorum regiones esse distemperatas, nam meridionales ut plurimum parvi sunt in statura et in forma symi et in colore nigri, veloces ad iram et tarde placabiles, inciviles moribus, facilime apprehensionis, sed precipites in iudicio et habentes impetuosam audaciam, vulnera tamen et effusionem sanguinis valde timent, natura sibi conscia paucitatis imprimente timorem illum propter quod ingeniis plus quam bello student resistere suis hostibus. Sunt etiam in cibo parcissimi, modicum valde comedentes, licet frequenter luxuriam vero bestialiter exercent, nec sexum nec etatem nec speciem attendentes, et fragiles quidem sunt viribus sed agiles, proinde ad cursum et saltum promptissimum (sic)’ (Arnau de Vilanova [c. 1308] 1520: fol. 26r). Commentarius in Spheram Sacrobosci, ch. 3: ‘Tertio queritur de colore ethiopum et videtur quod non debeant esse talis coloris, quia … videmus quod si ipsi generent in parte septentrionali generabunt nigros, quare videtur quod nigredo in ipsis non sit vire lucis vel caloris ipsius habitationis. … Quod opponitur quia generatur niger in partibus septentrionalibus. Dicendum quod hoc est quia complexio in qua conveniunt non est mutata propter mutacionem loci, et ideo in [MS: de] se virtus digestiva informata calido illius regionis adhuc retinet modum sue complexionis in partibus istis, et ideo ethiops generans in partibus istis generat nigrum, sed non sibi simile sed minus, et ille generabit nigrum non tamen eque nigrum et ideo per continuitatem generationum (ms. continenciam generum) et complexionis alteracionem tandem ad convenientem huius habitationis colorem’ (Commentarius in Spheram Sacrobosci n.d.: 46a; the manuscript has page rather than folio numbers). Haly, Commentarius in ‘Quadripartitum’ Ptholemei 2.2: ‘Item sperma in principio sui generamenti est complexionis illius generanti; convenit ut sit niger quod natus est in terra frigida, tamen niger minus generatore suo parum, et quod hic talis generet alium nigrum minus eo et non cessabit attenuari nigredo donec tota remota sit’ (Haly 1493: fol. 30v). Albert the Great, De natura loci 2.4: ‘Licet autem huiusmodi nigri aliquando nascantur etiam in aliis climatibus, sicut in quarto vel in quinto, tamen nigredinem accipiunt a primis generantibus, quae complexionata sunt in climatibus primo et secundo, et paulatim alterantur ad albedinem, quando ad alia climata transferuntur’ (Albert the Great 1980b: 27). Paternity cases filed by slaves against their masters reveal the reality of mixed unions in fifteenth-century Valencia. In one such case a white slave woman is forced to abandon the claim that she carries her master’s child, when the child turns out to be Black. See Blumenthal (2009: 184–7).

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34 In medieval sources I have not found any clear references to a similar case in Pliny and Solinus about a Black wrestler who was the son of a white woman, who herself was the result of an adulterous liaison with an Ethiopian. Cf. Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis 7.12 (Pliny 1977: 55–6); Solinus, Collectanea rerum mirabilium 1.79 (Solinus 1895: 20). 35 A. Coles (1995: 61–4; 73–4) emphasizes the importance of the concept of distribution and claims that the difference between Aristotle’s theory and pangenesis is only relative. 36 For example, Pietro Gallego, Opera omnia quae extant (2000); Albert the Great, Quaestiones super ‘De animalibus’ (1955); the anonymous commentary in MS Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 2164 (Quaestiones n.d.); Petrus Hispanus, De animalibus 11 (= De historia animalium 7.5.586a) in MS Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, 1877 (Petrus Hispanus n.d.: fol. 271vb–272ra). 37 I discuss medieval debates about resemblances and differences between parents and offspring in detail in my forthcoming book about the foetus. 38 The distinction between the internal and the external body is already used in a question on family resemblances in the Prose Salernitan Questions, which in turn goes back to Urso of Salerno (B 175; Lawn 1979: 93). A Parisian manuscript of this collection, copied in the 1230s or 1240s applies Urso’s explanation to the case of the woman of Elis. 39 Here the child is a dwarf, but in his De Animalibus, Albert refers to a version of the Black child anecdote: 22.1.4 (Albert the Great 1916–20: 1352). 40 For an overview of the belief in Jewish, Greek, Latin and Indian texts, see Doniger and Spinner (1998). 41 Jerome does not explicitly say that the mother is white, and the accusation of adultery is implicit as well. 42 Here the child is much more beautiful than its parents. This version was cited in medieval biblical commentaries, but I have not found it in medical and philosophical discussions. In a third passage (Contra Iulianum libri sex 5.14.51 [Augustine of Hippo 1865: PL 44, col. 812–13]), which seems to have had little or no influence on medieval discussions about maternal impression, Augustine describes it as the reverse of sense perception. In the latter, images are transmitted from the body to the soul; in the former, from the soul to the body. Here Augustine also rightly cites Soranus of Ephesis’s treatise on women’s diseases (first to second century ce) for another anecdote about maternal impression. Soranus, Gynecology, 1.39 (Soranus 1988: 36). In medieval Europe, Soranus was known almost exclusively in a late antique Latin adaptation by Muscio, which did not include the passage on maternal impression (Soranus 1882). 43 Dino del Garbo, Expositio de natura fetus: ‘Et per istum etiam modum contingit aliquando quod filii bastardi magis assimilantur marito mulieris dato quod non sint sui filii quam legitimi filii […] Et ideo multi in hoc decipiuntur’ (Dino del Garbo 1502: fol. 77r). 44 See Lefebvre-Teillard (2008: 200 and n3) and Cavallar (2005: 399–401). For a later period, see De Renzi (2007). 45 Muscio had not included the anecdote on maternal impression in his Latin adaptation of Soranus’s Gynecology. Cf. supra, n78. 46 See also Urso of Salerno, Aphorismi cum Glossulis 24 (Urso of Salerno 1936: 54). On the power of the imagination and the emotions on the body in Urso of Salerno, see also Van der Lugt (2013). 47 See, however, the Problemata 10.10 (Aristotle 1991–4), on why offspring of animals resemble their parents more than human offspring theirs. The reply states that this might be the case because the minds of humans tend to be distracted during intercourse, contrary to other animals.

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48 For a clear presentation of some of these issues, see Robert (2014). 49 See also Nicole Oresme, De causis mirabilium ch. 4.1025–37 (1985: 352). 50 According to Groebner (2003), complexion only started to be used as an ethnographic category in the sixteenth century. Indeed, as pointed out also by Ziegler (2009: 183–7), medieval texts on physiognomy concentrate on the individual and treat ethnic groups only as an afterthought. Nonetheless in climatic theories, skin colour and complexion do operate to describe whole populations, even though the categories do not correspond to later divisions of humankind into four or five groups and although they are not yet as systematic. 51 For an overview of all dimensions of the notion of complexion, see the definition in the dictionary of the Parisian physician Pierre de Saint-Flour (1896: 26–7; s.v. ‘complexio’). See also the references in note 14 above. 52 For the relationship between the concept of non-natural things and heredity, see Van der Lugt (2008: 273–320). 53 On this point, see also Doniger (2003: 15–19). 54 Braude has studied the political, social and scientific reasons of this scepticism in an article he generously shared with me, but that to my knowledge has never been published: ‘Race and Sex: What Happened to Cross-Colour Generation in the Eighteenth Century?’ (Braude n.d.). 55 An English translation of the passage in question can be found in Staudenmaier (2014: 50–1). 56 For the history of this association since antiquity and an appraisal of older literature on the subject, see Goldenberg (2009). 57 See Hahn (2001a: 16–18). However, Black people are not always seen positively in vernacular literature. They are often portrayed as monstrous and vernacular literature takes very seriously the exegetical tradition of conversion as a change in colour (12–15). 58 Wolfram von Eschenbach still situates the land of Prester John in the East, but from the fourteenth century onwards, Prester John is often identified with the Christian king of the Ethiopians. Cf. The Image of the Black (L’Image du noir) (Devisse and Mollat 1979: 2.2.57– 8; Bindman and Gates 2010: 2.2.79–81). 59 See, for example, Glossa ordinaria, ad Num 12 (Glossa ordinaria 1480: no foliation); Petrus Comestor, Historia scholastica, liber Numerorum, ch. 16 (Comestor 1855: PL 198, col. 1227); Hugh of Saint-Cher et al., Postille, ad Num 12 (Hugh of Saint-Cher et al. 1621: 1, fol. 135); Nicholas of Lyra, Postille, ad Num 12 (ed. without place/date [Nicholas of Lyra 1482?: 1, no foliation]). See also Goldenberg (2009: 106–8). As shown by Hahn, medieval images represent Tharbis mostly as a white woman. The appearance of more black-complexioned Tharbises in the later Middle Ages may suggest growing consciousness of race as a crucial feature of identity. Cf. Hahn pp. 117–21 in this volume. 60 Marco Polo, Il Milione 3.18 (text of Francesco Pipino’s early fourteenth-century Latin translation): ‘In prouincia maabar omnes habitatores loci, uiri et mulieres, nigri sunt. Non tamen sic omnino nascuntur, sed arte superaddunt sibi nigredinem magnam propter decorem. Vngunt enim omnes paruulos ter in ebdomada cum oleo de sosiman et ex hoc efficiuntur nigerrimi ualde. Eum autem pulcriorem reputant, qui nigrior fuerit. Ydolatre, qui inter eos sunt, deorum suorum ymagines nigerrimas faciunt dicentes deos nigros esse et omnes sanctos, diabolum autem pingunt album dicentes omnes demones esse albos’ (1902: 175). 61 Mandeville’s Travels: ‘The folk that wone in that country [Egypt] are called Numidians, and they are christened. But they are black of colour; and that they hold a great beauty, and aye the blacker they are the fairer they think them. And they say that and they should paint an angel and a fiend, they would paint the angel black and the fiend white. And if they think them not black enough when they are born, they use certain medicines for to make them black withal. That country is wonder hot, and that makes the folk thereof so black’

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(Mandeville 1953: 1.33). This passage does not occur in the original French but is found in the German version (cf. Mandeville 1953: 33n1). 62 Here the argument is part of an Augustinian appraisal of the monstrous races and the relativity of the marvellous. Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis: ‘Nos autem nigros Aethiopes turpes reputamus, inter ipsos autem qui nigrior est, pulchrior ab ipsis iudicatur’ (Jacques de Vitry 1597: 216). On this relativity, see also Daston and Park (1998: 25–47) and Metzler ([1997] 2009: 84–5). 63 According to Gerald of Wales, the West is more favourable than the East and Ireland has the most temperate climate (Topographia Hibernica, dist. 1, chs. 34–40 [Gerald of Wales 1867: 68–73]). Albert the Great tends to describe Germany as the mean and the norm in his De animalibus (1.3.7 [Albert the Great 1916–20: 222–3) and De natura loci, 1.11 (Albert the Great 1980b: 18–19). See also Chandelier and Robert (2013: 497). 64 See Goldenberg (1999, 2003), Hunwick (2003, 2005), Avicenna, Metaphysica 2.5 (Avicenna 1978–85: 2.186–87) and Maimonides, Dux perplexorum 3.51 (3.52 in the Paris edition of the Latin text [Maimonides 1520: fol. 90r]).

Chapter 5 1 Trachtenberg surveys several traditions, including Jewish possession of horns, a tail (1943: 44–52) and a goat’s beard (46). Biller (1992, 2001) examines how a male menses or hemorrhoidal flow is established in thirteenth-century University of Paris quodlibets; Ziegler (2009: 187) tracks the flux in texts of physiognomy; on the relationship of the ‘bloody flux’ to Passion Friday, see Marcus (1997: 250). Johnson (1998) offers the fullest account of how Christian political theology accrues in stages the fiction of the bloody flow. Biller (2009: 177) offers Caesarius of Heisterbach and Berthold of Regensburg (‘ein stinkender Jude’) on the smell of Jews and Matthew Paris on the Jewish face (‘facies Judaica’); on Caesarius’s depiction of the ‘evil odour’, see also Marcus (1997: 255). For Jewish phenotypes and somatic features in medieval art, see Mellinkoff (1993: 1.127–9) and Strickland (2003: 95–155). Blood libels insist that Jews need Christian blood, especially for Passover rites, one reason for the ritual murder of Christian children (the flux efficiently overdetermines this: blood is also needed because Jewish men are supposed to bleed congenitally). The arguments in this chapter repeat materials from my earlier work. The chapter is also not, of course, a global view of race, and specifically treats the pre-modern Latin West. 2 Note the contradictions of the racial logic attaching to Jews: despite their identifying stench, face, etc., there was still a need for a badge to tell Jews apart from Christians. If Jewish bodies were, in fact, so different from Christian bodies, what need would there be for additional self-marking? The logic of strategic essentialism is thus defied, we see, by the ethnoracial logic of canonic and state impositions. For detailed discussions of the institutions and phenomena listed here, see chapter 2 of my Invention of Race (Heng 2018b) and England and the Jews (Heng 2018a). 3 See chapter 2 of my Invention of Race (Heng 2018b) and England and the Jews (Heng 2018a) for a detailed discussion of England as a racial state. For the racial state in modernity, see Goldberg (2002). 4 Though paragraph 8 of the 1275 Statute of Jewry gives Jews permission to interact with Christians for purposes of trade, paragraph 8 also bars Christians from living among Jews, whether for trade or for any other cause: ‘nul Crestien ne seit cochaunt ne levaunt entre eus’ (Statutes of the Realm 1810–28: 1.221a). What is this, if not a segregation order? 5 See chapter 6 of Heng (2018b) for details of a vision of Jew-created eschatological horror claimed by the popular medieval blockbuster Mandeville’s Travels.

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6 I lack the space to detail how medieval Christian authors represented the Prophet of Islam as a consummate liar and heresiarch and generalized from his example to attribute deception to the collective character of Muslims, but see chapter 3 of Heng (2018b) for an in-depth discussion. 7 For the Byzantine Empire and the contact zones of the Mediterranean such as Sicily, southern Italy and Iberia, the enemy’s naming might continue in more varied form – Agarenes, Ismaelites, Moors and Saracens were all names that were used – but in the Latin West, Saracen remained the preeminent name of the international foe. 8 By contrast, Arabs and Near Easterners who were Christians were not called Saracens (Daniel 1975: 53) but were flexibly allowed a play of ethnoracial identity. The Muslim enemy, in its turn, did not group all Europeans under a singular collective rubric defined by Christianity. Arab and Persian historians continued to specify territorial, national and ethnoracial differences when they referred to Europeans as Romans, Franks, Greeks, Slavs and so forth (Lewis 1992: 379). 9 On how the Quran itself, Islam’s holy book, was framed, glossed, commented on and repudiated in the very process of its translation into Latin during the so-called Toledo translation project of the twelfth century, see Burman (2007). 10 It is important to point out that even hermeneutic blackness has gradations of meaning and consequences. In Christian political theology, we should distinguish between blackness linked to sin and blackness linked to the infernal. A blackness linked to sin registers a state of abjection that is in fact important to the discourse of salvation that is the cornerstone of Christian doctrine: the blackness of sin and sinners can potentiate redemption, forgiveness and ultimate glory. Sin can be a prerequisite for salvation. By contrast, since the infernal is not redeemable in Christian doctrine, blackness that is associated with the devil and hell is a more damning kind of blackness. 11 The importance of sin – whose colour is black – in salvational theology can lead, in medieval modes of religious expression, to what David Wallace (2002) wittily calls ‘competitive abjection’ between sinners self-proclaimed. Since the condition of being more-sinful-thanthou, and thus more-abject-than-thou, signals the potential of being more-saved-than-thou and ascending to greater heights of ultimate grace – so much does God love the worst sinners, who are the most abject of all – possessing blackness, at least in theory and in imagination, can sometimes be a good thing. Thus it is possible for the Saint Bernard, in his Sermon 25 on the Song of Songs, playfully to refer to Jesus, who among humans has the greatest access to the highest grace (his self-sacrifice being the ultimate abjection) as ‘obviously black’ and ‘black but beautiful’ (Walsh 1976: 56). For erudite theologians such as Saint Bernard, witty and paradoxical play with colour is the opposite side of the coin in the black–white colour discourse of the European Middle Ages. 12 For a detailed discussion, see chapter 4 of my Invention (Heng 2018b). 13 Mamluks as an institution were not an innovation of the thirteenth century. The Abbasid caliphate used Mamluks from the first half of the ninth century, and Mamluks continued to exist for a millennium afterward. Islamic Spain had Mamluks from the eighth to the early eleventh century (Phillips 2014: 57, 120), and Saladin was also known to have Mamluks in his military. But the apogee – and greatest triumph – of the Mamluk system was seen in the rise of the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt when the last Ayyubid sultan of Saladin’s short-lived line, Turanshah, was assassinated by his father’s Mamluk emirs in 1250. In a rapid, bloody series of succession struggles in which assassination figured prominently, the largely Turkic Bahri Dynasty was established as the first ruling dynasty of the Mamluk Sultanate, followed in the late fourteenth century by the Burji Dynasty made up primarily of Circassian Mamluks.

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14 I am deeply indebted to David Johnson and Geert Claassens, the translators of the Middle Dutch Roman van Moriaen, for sharing their translation.

Chapter 6 1 I wish to thank Professor Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand for her expertise in preparing a preliminary translation of Rudolf’s German.

Chapter 7 1 2 3 4

Not that whiteness is a stable or coherent category now: see, for example, Painter (2011). See Bernau (2010: 12) for the history of the legend. I am grateful to John Jenkins for pre-publication access. None of the texts gives the heroine’s original name. In the early SEL, she takes the baptismal name of Alisaundre. Given this instability, I follow Arabic convention in calling her Umm Thomas, Mother of Thomas. 5 See J. J. Cohen (2007: 77–108) on Gerald’s hybrid identity. 6 See Ramey (2011) for an analysis of the biological implications of the mixed marriages of romance.

Chapter 8 1 The case for the ‘invention’ of race in the European Middle Ages is made most comprehensively by Heng (2018b). 2 See Friedman (1981) on the ‘monstrous races’. 3 On reading Beowulf in relation to race and indigeneity, see Miyashiro (2017) and D. Kim (2019b). 4 On the use of the term ‘Saracen’, in both medieval texts and modern criticism, see Rajabzadeh (2019b). 5 For a groundbreaking analysis of racialization in the poem, see J. J. Cohen (2001). 6 For recent work on medieval intersex and hermaphroditism, see Ruth Evans (2018); for transgender approaches to medieval material, see Kim and Bychowski (2019). 7 For a treatment of the complexity of representations of Muslim women, see de Weever (1998). 8 On medieval treatments of cannibalism more generally, see Price (2003) and Blurton (2007). 9 For fuller treatment of medieval German representations of Muslim racial otherness, see Tinsley (2011) and Frakes (2011). 10 Much work on medieval race has foregrounded the King of Tars. See, most recently, Lomuto (2019a), Rajendran (2019) and Whitaker (2019a: 20–47). 11 On the complex attachment of meanings to whiteness in the later Middle Ages, see Kao (forthcoming). 12 See, for an extensive survey, Bindman and Gates (2010). 13 See Bennett’s (2018) recent reevaluation of the first century of sustained West African– Iberian interaction. For an account of American racism that puts Zurara at the origin of racist ideas, see Kendi (2013: 22–7). For a fuller reading of the chapter I discuss here, see Whitaker (2019a: 184–7, 195–7).

Chapter 9 1 The usual line illustrating the increasing complexity of ideas is drawn from Gregor Mendel to Ronald Fisher to modern genetics (Visscher, Hill and Wray 2008).

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2 One of the seminal collections of studies brought together under the rubric race-ing is Raceing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, edited by Toni Morrison (1992). Even a cursory look at recent titles in which the word appears provides evidence of the concept being applied to subjects as varied as sexuality, masculinity, science fiction, theatre casting practices and academic fields of study. 3 For in-depth treatments of the various issues sketched in this paragraph, see Turda and Quine (2018), Markus and Moya (2010) and Gould (1996). 4 American Theories of Polygenesis is a collection of original treatises that treat the topic, planned as seven volumes, the first of which was edited by Bernasconi (2002). 5 The classical reference has become Cavalli-Sforza (2000), but see now Fischer et al. (n.d.). See also Geary and Veeramah (2016) and Geary (2021). 6 For ancient history, the classical study is now Isaac (2004). 7 There is much relevant material throughout Cocchiara’s History (1981). 8 See, for instance, Wood (2013), Bell (2001), Graceffa (2009) and the essays in Reimitz and Zeller (2009). 9 Well known for this interpretation of French history is Augustin Thierry. For him and other historians of France after the Revolution, see Wood (2013: 94–112). 10 Wood (2013: 106–12) has further references. 11 For the history of the Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde, and the Monumenta Germaniae historica, see Fuhrmann (1996: 1–50) and Knowles (1962: 63–98). For a comprehensive overview until the beginning of the twentieth century, see Bresslau (1921). 12 On the intensification of this trend over the course of the nineteenth century, see HunterParker (2019). From a different angle, but equally enlightening, see Miller (2017: 123–39) on the MGH. 13 On Kossinna, see Grünert (2002). For a recent English study, see Maner (2018). 14 For a recent dicussion of the historiography, see Pohl (2018); for a discussion of the prehistorical period and anthropology, see Barth et al. (2005); on the German historiography, see Gingrich (2005: 69–119). 15 See below, pp. 176–7, with notes 19–21. 16 For a discussion of Freeman’s place in this sort of scholarship, see Hanchard (2018: 27–39). 17 For a summary of reactions and their wider significance, see Eric Adler (2016: 113–71). 18 This was one of the conclusions of a comprehensive study on ethnic groups (Stämme) in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages by Wenskus (1961). 19 For a recent overview, see Pohl (2018: 9–34). 20 See Halsall (2007), Pohl (2013a: 1–46) and Reimitz (2015: 6–11) for further references. 21 For the Toronto school, see Gillett (2002). This Toronto school needs to be differentiated from the Toronto School of peasant studies that is more famous among high medievalists; cf. Halsall (2007: 455–98) and Heather (2008). See also the comprehensive overview by Pohl (2018). 22 See the appeal for a rhizomatic and accretic epistemology by Whitaker in his introduction to this volume, pp. 25–6. 23 This approach was developed in a larger German research project: Nationes: Die Entstehung der europäischen Nationen im Mittelalter; see the project’s publication series: Nationes: Historische und philologische Untersuchungen zur Entstehung der europäischen Nationen im Mittelalter, edited by Helmut Beumann and Werner Schröder and published in 9 volumes from 1971 to 1991. Building on the results, but also re-evaluating and further developing the perspective is Schneidmüller (2010).

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24 A good start on the historiographical influence – and criticisms – of the Annales School is Clark (1999). 25 See, for instance, Delgado and Stefancic (2012), J. J. Cohen (2013: 109–22), Elias and Feagin (2016); for further references, see Whitaker’s introduction to this volume. For an interesting discussion of older and newer approaches to histories of racialization and race-thinking, see also Seth (2020). 26 For this approach, see Dinshaw (2012) and the influential study by Nagel and Wood (2010). 27 For a longer discussion of studying ethnicity as one form of social identity among others, see Pohl (2013b); for an attempt to further develop this approach with regard to the history of Frankish identity in the early Middle Ages, see Reimitz (2015).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Suzanne Conklin Akbari is Professor in the School of Historical Studies at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, USA. Her publications include Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (2004) and Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1500 (2009). She has co-edited Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West (2008, with Amilcare Iannucci), The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture (2013, with Jill Ross) and A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (2013, with Karla Mallette). She is an editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature. Christine Chism is Professor of English at UCLA, USA, where she is an affiliated faculty member in the Programs in Sexuality & Gender Studies and Medieval Studies. Her first book, Alliterative Revivals (2002), examined the coherence and diversity of a major strain of vernacular writing in fourteenth-century England. She has held a New Directions Mellon Fellowship (2003–5) which allowed her to strengthen her command of Arabic and to study medieval Islamic cultures. She is currently finishing monographs on Translation and Cultural Transmission in the Arabic and English Middle Ages and The Politics of Friendship in Medieval England. Thomas Hahn teaches in the English Department at the University of Rochester, USA. He has edited the collections Reconceiving Chaucer: Literary Theory and Historical Interpretation (1990), Retelling Stories: Structure, Context, and Innovation in Traditional Narratives (1997), Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice (2000), Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages (2001) and Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales (1995). He has received major NEH program grants for the Chaucer Bibliographies (University of Toronto Press) and the Middle English Texts Series, and is currently Consulting Editor for METS. Geraldine Heng holds the Perceval Professorship in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austen, USA, where she has joint appointments in Middle Eastern Studies and Women’s Studies. She founded the Global Middle Ages Projects and its website. Her publications include Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (2003), The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018) and England and the Jews (2019). She is currently finishing Early Globalities: The Interconnected World, 500–1500 CE, while serving as co-editor of the forty-volume Cambridge Elements series and co-editor of the book series Early Critical Race Studies from Penn. William Chester Jordan is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University, USA, and former Director of both The Shelby Cullom Davis Center and the Program in Medieval Studies. His publications include The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (1996), which won the Haskins Medal of the Medieval

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Academy, where he was President of the Fellows (2011–12) and President of the Academy (2014–15). He is a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has edited several major reference works, including the Supplement to The Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Steven F. Kruger is Professor in the Department of English at Queens College, CUNY, USA. His books include Dreaming in the Middle Ages (1992), AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science (1996), Approaching the Millennium: Essays on ‘Angels in America’ (1997), Queering the Middle Ages (co-editor, 2001) and The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (2006). His current project, The Perpetual Convert: The Identity Politics of Medieval European Religious Conversion focuses on how medieval subjects (mainly Jewish converts to Christianity) conceive their religious, racial, class, gender and sexual identities. David Nirenberg is the Dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, USA, where he also serves as the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, Medieval History, Fundamentals, Middle East Studies, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College. He is an affiliated faculty member in the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, Medieval Studies, and Renaissance Studies. His books include Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996), Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (2014) and Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics (2015). Helmut Reimitz is Professor of History at Princeton University, USA, and Director of the Program in Medieval Studies. Until 2008 he led the Early Medieval Department of the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. He is author of History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550–850 (2015) and co-editor of Cultures in Motion (2013, with Daniel T. Rodgers and Bhavani Raman), as well as Motions of Late Antiquity: Essays on Religion, Politics, and Society (2016, with Jamie Kreiner) and Historiography and Identity II: Post-Roman Multiplicity and New Political Identities (2020, with Gerda Heydemann). Sarah Salih is a member of the English faculty at King’s College, London, UK, and serves as Co-director of the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies. Her monographs include Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (2001) and Imagining the Pagan in Late Medieval England (2019). She has also co-edited Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe (2002), Medieval Virginities (2003), A Companion to Middle English Hagiography (2006), Julian of Norwich’s Legacy: Medieval Mysticism and Post-Medieval Reception (2009), Locating the Middle Ages: The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture (2012) and Medievalist Visions (2016). Maaike van der Lugt is Professeur des universités en Histoire at l’Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin and Directrice du laboratoire Dynamiques patrimoniales et culturelles, France, and an affiliate of L’Institute d’études culturelles et internationales. She has written Le ver, le démon et la vierge: Les théories médiévales de la génération extraordinaire (2004) and La nature comme source de la morale au Moyen Âge (2014). Her next book, Le foetus au Moyen Âge. Science, théologie et droit, is forthcoming. She has also co-edited L’hérédité entre Moyen Âge et époque moderne: persptectives historiques (2008).

CONTRIBUTORS

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Cord Whitaker teaches at Wellesley College, USA, and has previously been a member of the faculty at the University of New Hampshire. He was a Member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study in Historical Studies (2019–20) and a Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (2019). He has held fellowships as well from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and NEH. His publications include Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (2019). He is a member of the Steering Committee of Medievalists of Color and is finishing The Harlem Middle Ages: Color, Time, and Harlem Renaissance Medievalism.

INDEX

Aaron 73, 95 Abraham 38, 78–9, 101, 121 Abraham ibn Ezra 69, 130–1 Aethicus Ister, Cosmographia 57 Africa 34, 48, 54, 110, 156, 165 European contact with 81, 89 as setting for Parzival 121–2 See also Ethiopia and Ethiopians; world, division of; West Africa; North Africa; sub-Saharan Africa and peoples Africans 19–21, 31, 52, 65, 82, 84, 106. See also Black Africans; Black people Afrocentrist movement 21–2 Ahmed, Sara 33, 45, 144 Akbari, Suzanne 11, 24 al-Andalus 31, 40, 78, 148 Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana 115–17 Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus) 50, 53, 82, 84, 87–9, 91–2 Albina 142, 149, 151 Alexander the Great 54, 56–7, 59–60, 134–5 Alexander von Roes 84 Ali ibn al-Abbas al-Majusi. See Haly Abbas Ali ibn Ridwan. See Haly al-Januwī, Sīdī Riḍwān 71 Almohads 43, 69–71, 76 Alonso de Cartagena, Bishop 75–6 al-Rundī, Ibn ʿAbbād 71, 73, 76 alterity 34, 36, 39, 47, 140, 150, 178 Americas 48, 75, 77, 156, 171, 175, 177 Indigenous peoples 17–22, 52, 63–5, 102, 107–8, 175 theories of pre-Columbian Africans 19–22 ancestors 71–2, 91, 102, 121–2, 139, 154 Andrews, Tarren 47, 65–6 Androgyne (Mandeville) 159–60 Angles 137, 139 Anglo-Saxonists, International Society of 4–5, 26 animality 154, 158, 162–3 Annales School 177 anthropology 22–3, 48

Antichrist 98, 101 Antioch 105, 108, 115 antiquity 7, 56, 81, 106, 113, 154 late 101, 171, 175–6 anti-racist scholarship and activism 2, 5, 16–17, 45, 116–7 anti-Semitisms 30, 33, 46, 68 apartheid 14, 172 appearance. See qualities and traits Arabs 72, 78, 96, 101–2, 129 Aragon 43, 74–5, 128 Archisynogogus 35–6 archaeology 175–6 Arendt, Hannah 51 Aristotle 68, 76, 83, 85, 87–8, 90–1, 96 Arnau de Vilanova, Speculum medicine 85, 89, 96 art history 2, 8, 10, 16 Arthurian literature 35, 43–4, 107, 109–11, 121–2, 166 Asia 31, 34, 38, 55–8, 63, 168 in Mandeville 45, 50, 159 See also world, division of assimilation 30, 38, 145, 147, 151. See also racial management strategies atavism 91, 94 Augustine, Saint 10–11, 35–6, 42, 92 Averroes (Ibn Rushd) 48 Avicenna 85, 87, 89–90, 93, 96. See also Ibn Sina Baghdad 8, 31, 121 Balboa, Vasco Núñez de 19 Baldwin I (Baldwin of Boulogne) 115–16 baptism 75, 77, 113, 143, 177 textual representations 39, 107, 145, 148, 151 Barcelona 75, 96, 129 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum 23, 48–50, 52–4, 56–7, 59, 61, 106 Bartlett, Robert 5–6, 10, 138, 178 Beatus of Liebana, Apocalypse 58–9

INDEX

Becket, Thomas, story of parentage 142–5, 147–8, 151 Bede 139, 142, 145, 148–9 Benedictbeuern Christmas Play 35–6 Benjamin of Tudela 41 Beowulf 155–6, 159 Bernal, Martin 175 Bernard of Clairvaux, Vita Sancti Malachiae 103–4 Bernstein, Robin 14 bestiality 140–1, 144, 155, 162, 172. See also sex (act); sexuality; transgressions and excesses, sexual Bevis of Hampton 117, 144 Bhabha, Homi 114, 122 Bible 36, 58–59, 79, 92, 102, 117, 154, 170 biblical Hebrew (language) 129–30 binaries 11, 50, 56, 84, 162, 171, 174, 176 Black/black and white 85–86, 120, 122–3, 130, 132–3, 147, 166, 169 biology 12, 52, 138, 148, 153 births 10, 91, 94–5, 114, 143, 148, 166 Bitterroot Salish 66 Black Africans 33, 170 and climate 81, 89–90, 94 early representations in the Latin West 81–2 geographic determinism 88–9 medieval terminology 83–4, 86, 94 negative representations 81, 95–6, 106, 111 See also Africans; Black people Black holy figures and Black sinners in medieval art 81–2, 105–6, 110, 166 blackness 7, 14, 21, 29, 122, 130, 132 in Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea 169–70 epidermal, connected with sin 110–11, 113–14 hermeneutic 105–7 in medieval scientific beliefs 87–8 Black people 21, 29, 33, 48, 81–3, 88–90, 94–6. See also Africans; Black Africans Black studies 21–2, 25 Bleeke, Marian 8–10 blood 45, 63, 104, 109, 128 descent and inheritance 38, 55, 71, 74–7, 147, 172 medieval scientific beliefs 49, 85–90, 94 menstrual 89–90, 94, 98, 162 textual representations 35, 40, 106, 122, 142, 150 Boccaccio, Giovanni 35, 123–4 bodies 41, 106, 153–5, 163–4

231

English 139–40 of Jews 35–7, 98–100, 144, 162 in medieval scientific theories 11, 49–50, 52–4, 58, 84–8, 90, 93–4 textual representations 35–7, 144, 151, 164 See also racecraft Bodin, Jean 52 Book of the Covenant (Sefer ha-Berit). See Kimhi, Joseph Brahmans 39, 45, 89, 114, 133, 135 Bridget, Saint 123 Britain 44, 122, 131, 133, 139, 142, 175 Bünting, Heinrich 65 Caesarius of Heisterbach 162 Cain 154–6, 159, 170 cannibalism 37, 160–1, 164–5 Cantar de Mio Cid 33, 42–3 captives 126, 132, 144, 168–9 caste 74, 116–17 Castile 42–3, 74 categories 78, 96, 158, 169, 171–2, 176–8 human vs animal 141, 154–5 racial 10, 14, 56, 61–2, 104, 137–9, 153 Cathenoise 123–4 Catlos, Brian 42–3 Caviness, Madeline 105, 166 Chanson de Roland 33, 35, 39–40, 143 chansons de geste 106, 117, 177 character (attributes) 33, 55, 78, 81, 85, 87, 91, 94, 106 Charlottesville 1–4, 7, 14 Chaucer, Geoffrey 33, 148–9 children 70, 100, 122–3, 136, 139, 142, 144–5, 159 in Albert of Aachen’s Historia ­Ierosolimitana 116–17 Black from white mothers 81, 90–2, 95 in blood libel 98–9 in medieval scientific theories of ­resemblance 81, 87, 89–92, 94–5, 100, 116–17 monstrous 138, 141–2, 148, 151, 154, 166 role in racing 14–15, 37–9, 100 China 21, 63, 145 chivalry 35, 43–4, 48, 111–12, 121–3 Christ 76, 79, 81, 98, 104–6, 109, 132, 139, 162 Christians and Christianity 98–107, 109–14, 117, 128, 133, 150, 177 biocultural discourses 69, 71–2, 74–9

232

Christians as white 105–7, 109, 177 in MS illuminations 115, 125–7, 132 in the Saracen Legend 143–9, 151 textual representations 34–9, 43–4, 107, 111–12, 122, 130–31, 161–2, 166 See also Jews, Christian views of circumcision 36, 162 class 105–6, 109, 111–12, 126, 174, 177–8 climate theory 49–50, 52–9, 61, 86–90, 94, 96, 106, 155, 165. See also skin colour, ethno-geographic and climatic ­explanations; world, division of clothing 27, 58, 62, 103, 114, 116, 135 headscarf or headgear 62, 118–21, 127–8, 145 requirements for Jews 69, 118, 120, 163 requirements for Muslims 163 of women 144, 146, 148, 159 colonialism and colonization 32, 46, 56, 67–8, 102–4, 142, 173 settler 30, 34, 52, 61, 65, 102, 107–8 colour 109, 155, 172 black 94–5, 105–7, 166 of the foetus 92–4 white 53–4, 105–7, 166 See also skin colour; race, politics of colours of the body, five leading 84–5 medieval systems for the body/skin 84–6, 89, 95, 166 Columbus 17–19, 21, 48, 68, 108, 136 commentaries 48, 60, 73, 85, 87, 92 complexion 7, 118, 121, 172 idealized, ‘white and red’ 130, 144, 166 light 14, 55, 121, 139–40 medieval scientific explanations 61, 85–8, 90–1, 94, 96 See also skin colour conflict 71–2, 75, 89, 174 conquest 41, 56–7, 61, 73, 90, 104, 118 Constance 140–1, 143, 148 Constantinople 27 Constantinus Africanus (Constantine the African) 49–50 control strategies 30–1, 69, 99–100 conversion 106, 113, 139, 161–2, 166, 177 heritability of characteristics 69–70, 73–4, 76–8 in racial management strategies 42–3 in the Saracen Bride story 143–5, 147–9 See also Jews, conversion of Cree 63–4

INDEX

crusades and crusaders 31, 59, 81, 101–2, 108–9, 126, 143–4 First Crusade 104–5, 115–17, 161 culture 12, 14, 23–4, 47–65, 67–8 of medieval studies 3–4, 17 See also reproduction, biological and ­cultural / religious cultures 23–2, 32–3, 35, 40–2, 121 Africanist vs Indigenous 20–2 Cushites 130 De animalibus. See Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus) De causis proprietatum elementorum. See Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus) De generatione animalium 87, 90 Delacroix (Liberty Leading the People) 64 demonization 30, 34, 110 demons 95, 105–6, 130, 142, 144, 150–1, 158 De natura loci. See Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus) De proprietatibus elementorum 87 descendants 21, 78, 89–90, 95, 142, 151, 154, 174 of Cain 154–5 of Ishmael (Ismael) 73, 101–2 of Jewish converts to Christianity 74–7 of Jewish converts to Islam 69–72 of Muhammad 71–2 of Noah 52, 58 descent 53–4, 71, 76, 78, 151, 172–3 Muslims of Jewish 72–3 peoples of African 19, 31, 33, 175 Persian 31, 78 from Trojans 55, 137–8, 142, 147 De sphaera 49 devils 79, 92, 95, 105–6, 123, 158 Devisse, Jean 105–6 diaspora 19, 41, 65 difference 10, 40, 42, 97, 119, 153, 163 bodily or somatic 47, 49, 97–8, 103, 158 cultural and religio-cultural 14, 41, 98, 103, 145 gender and sexual 62, 142, 153–4, 159 human 35, 97, 138, 151, 155–6, 178 managing 12, 28, 31–3, 45, 97, 138 racial 41, 43, 51, 61, 65, 122, 127–8, 134, 145, 149, 154–5, 158–9, 163, 166, 170 religious 12, 42, 51, 68, 128, 145, 147, 162

INDEX

skin colour or epidermal 118–19, 121, 154, 158, 165–6, 170 visible/visual 107, 116, 145, 165 disabilities 29, 71, 77, 165 discriminations 68–77, 138 distinctions 69, 153–6, 158, 163–4 diversity 10, 50, 131, 145, 155 bodily 11, 52–4, 57–8 natural 23, 48–9 racial 16–17, 137 religious 73, 125, 127 domestication 37–8 domination 30–1, 41, 173 economies 35, 42–3, 108 Egypt 7, 21, 31, 35, 108–9, 116–18 Egyptians 89, 117, 120, 130 Eirik the Red’s Saga 17, 107 El Cid. See Cantar de Mio Cid embodiment 37, 153–4, 165–6, 173 England 33, 44, 103, 139, 148, 151, 163 as racial state 69, 98–100 Englishness 139, 145, 173 environment 52–4, 88, 94 epic 40, 42, 143, 155, 161, 177 epistemologies 22, 24–5, 40–1, 66 Indigenous 17, 24–5, 47, 63, 66 epithets 27–8, 70–7, 79, 115–17, 158, 170 erasures 18, 21–2, 29, 46, 144 essence 12, 78, 101, 173 essentialisms 12, 45, 62, 97, 101 strategic 12, 28, 41, 45, 97, 111 Ethiopia and Ethiopians 83, 105, 120, 124, 155, 158, 169–70 in medieval ethnography 113–14, 117–19 in medieval European imagination 58–61 in medieval scientific theories 49, 52–4, 57–8, 86–9, 94 ethnicity 14, 45, 58, 61, 83, 105, 113–35, 138 vs race in medieval studies 5–7, 10–11, 18, 171, 175–8 ethnographies 39–41, 48, 54–61, 113–14, 117, 133–6. See also travel narratives ethnonationalisms 62, 137 ethnophilia and ethnophobia 109–10 Eucharist 37, 162 Eusebius 113 exclusion 71–3, 173 exegesis 36–7, 95, 113 exile 38, 42–3, 52, 61, 142, 156 Exodus, the 118, 130

233

exploiting. See racial management strategies expulsions 33, 73–4, 98, 145, 163 facies Judaica 98 fairies 149–51 faith 44, 75, 77–8, 133–4 family 37–39, 43, 71, 79, 90, 128, 147–8 Fanon, Frantz 25, 56 fantasies 10, 33, 35, 37, 59, 123, 143–4, 155 far-right and fascist groups and movements 1, 8, 14–16, 26, 62–3. See also Nazis; white supremacy fathers 38–9, 43–4, 73–4, 90–1, 111, 121–2, 154, 159–60 features 10–11, 21, 54–5, 122, 144, 154–6, 169 ‘African’ 83–4, 119 monstrous 49, 52 femininity 110, 137, 140, 142, 148, 159, 161–2 feudalism 38–40, 111–12 Fez 70–2, 76 foetor Judaicus 98, 163 foetus 92–4 food 38, 90, 94, 107, 174 cannibalism 160, 164–5 France 33, 40, 44, 81, 125–6, 173–4 Franks 40, 55, 105, 116, 143, 174 Fulton Brown, Rachel 8–10 Galen 85–8, 93 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 25 gender 62, 137, 140–51, 158–9, 161–3 genealogies 38, 71–2, 74, 76, 79, 101, 155 intellectual 17–18, 25–6, 171 Genesis 79, 92, 102, 117, 154 Genoa 108 genocide 14, 38, 42, 104, 116, 172 Geoffrey of Monmouth 139, 142 geography 45, 49–50, 61, 65, 98, 100, 139. See also land Gerald of Wales 39, 48, 54–7, 61, 103, 140–1, 147–8 Gericault, Theodore, Raft of the Medusa 65 Germans and Germanness 54–5, 62, 84, 173–4, 176 ghetto 33, 98 giants 38, 106, 117, 130, 134, 140, 142, ­150–1. See also monsters and ­monstrous races Giles of Rome 91, 93 Girolamo Manfredi 83 God 73, 77–9, 102, 111, 113–14, 133–4, 154–5

234

Gog and Magog 38, 142 Gomes Eanes de Zurara Chronicle of the ­Discovery and Conquest of Guinea 167–70 González Lauck, Rebecca 22 Granada 73, 126 Greenlanders’ Saga 17, 107–8 groups 5–6, 94, 119–20, 124, 172–3, 177 Guillaume of Bourges 158 Guthlac, Saint 150 Gymnosophists 45, 89, 133–5 Hagar 78, 101–2, 121 Haggadah Ashkenazi 127–30 Rylands 128–30 Sarajevo 128 hagiography 140, 142–4, 148, 151 Hahn, Thomas 5–6, 10, 25, 138 hair 7, 121, 127, 155–6, 172–3 Haly (Ali ibn Ridwan) 86, 90 Haly Abbas (Ali ibn al-Abbas al-Majusi) 85, 87–8 Haslip-Viera, Gabriel 21–2 heat. See climate theory Hebrew Bible/scriptures 58, 79, 113, 154, 170 hegemonies 12, 30–2, 39–41, 159 Heinrich von München 121 Hendricks, Margo 17–18, 25–6 Heng, Geraldine Empire of Magic 11–12 Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages 7, 13, 16–17, 28, 33–5, 45, 50–1, 69, 97, 138, 143, 178 Henry the Navigator 167 heredity 52–5, 61, 68, 71, 79, 89–91, 94, 96 heritage 18, 44, 61–2, 145, 156 Hermaphrodite 159 Herod 39, 167 hierarchy 7, 41, 95, 172, 174 of peoples for differential treatment 7, 11–12, 14, 28, 97 Hippocrates 92–3 historiography 51, 171, 175–6, 178 Holy Land 59, 143–4, 147 Holy Roman Empire 2, 31 Honorat Bovet 121, 124–7, 166, 168–9 hooks, bell 39 horse breeding 68, 74 Hugh of Lincoln 33, 99 humanness 154–56, 158, 164–5

INDEX

humours (in medieval physiology) 50, 85–6, 88, 95 hybrid beings and hybridity 42, 109, 154 Iberia / Iberian Peninsula 69, 72–3, 75, 77–8, 106, 118 Ibn ʿAqnīn, Joseph ben Judah 70 Ibn Battuta 27–8 Ibn Ḥarzūz 72 Ibn Qutayba 78–9 Ibn Rushd (Averroes) 48 Ibn Sina 48–50. See also Avicenna Ibn Zikrī, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥman 72–3, 76–7 Iceland, Icelanders and Icelandic sagas 17, 102, 107–8 identities 3, 14–15, 59, 61–2, 136–9, 174–9 cultural 17, 82, 123, 136 ethnic 5–6, 62, 114, 138, 175–6 mixed-race 120–1, 147–8 national 62, 174 raced 101, 104, 121, 127, 133, 135 racial 30, 62, 107, 114, 145, 147–8, 166 religio-racial 98, 105, 166 religious 50, 99, 101, 104–5, 120, 128, 130, 145, 148–9 rhizomic 26, 179 ideology, modern racial 7, 10–11, 13–15, 22 Image of the Black in Western Art (Bindman and Gates; Devisse) 105 imagination 58, 75, 77, 93, 143, 163 imitatio Christi 41, 45 immigrants 58, 75, 77, 81, 91–4, 143, 163, 178 imperialism 16, 30, 173 India 21, 52–4, 57, 110, 113–4 in Mandeville 52–4, 131, 156, 159 in Parzival 95, 121–2 Indians 52, 62, 90, 114, 124, 131–6, 155 in Albert the Great 88–9 in Mandeville 131, 133–4 in MS illustrations 135–6 indigeneity 61–2, 66, 138–9, 149, 171, 178 engagement in medieval studies 17–18, 24, 47–8, 66 Indigenous 17–18, 20–2, 29–30, 47–48, 52, 54, 62–3, 107, 175 inferiority 52, 72, 96, 117, 173 infidels 36, 70, 99, 101, 103 intelligence 48, 87–8, 95–6, 172 Ireland 102–4 Irish 39, 44, 56, 103–4, 137, 140–1, 175 Isaac 38, 73, 78

INDEX

Ishmael (Ismael) 73, 78, 101–2, 121 Ishmaelites (Ismaelites) 101–2 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 49, 83–4, 86–7, 92, 102 Islam 44, 69–74, 76–9, 101–2, 104, 108–10 Israel 30, 59, 73 Israelites 72–3, 76, 79, 154 Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae (Travel through Holy Scripture). See Bünting, Heinrich Jacob 38, 92 Jacob Ben Elʿazar 130 Jacques de Vitry Historia orientalis 95 Jans Enikel 121 Jean de Joinville 41 Jean de Meun (Jehan de Meun) 125–7 Jerome, Saint 92, 101, 105, 111 Jerusalem 31, 34, 37, 60, 104–5, 115–16, 131 Jesus 79, 132 Jewishness 70, 162 Jews 11, 33, 105, 129–30, 143–4, 172 appearance of 6, 163, 165 and blood libel 98–9, 162, 164–5 Christian views of 42, 76, 79, 98, 118–19, 140, 158, 162–5 conversion of 69, 74, 76–7, 98, 100 descendants of 71–2, 74–6 expulsion of 33, 69, 74, 126, 163 forced to wear badges 69, 98–100, 127 in medieval England 69, 98–100 in MS illuminations 118–21, 127, 164 and Muslims 30, 71, 144, 158, 162–3 Muslim views of 70–3 textual representations 36–7 Jim Crow 14 Joel ben Simon (Ashkenazi Haggadah) 129–30 Johannitius (Hunain ibn Ishaq), Isogoge 84–7 John of Hildesheim 13 John of Sacrobosco’s Sphera, commentary on 89–90 Jojo Rabbit 34 Jones, Camara Phyllis 29 Josephus 34, 60, 117–18 Journey of the Magi 65 Judaism 35–37, 68–75, 77, 162 Julius Valerius, Epitome 56–7 Jutes 137 Khanmohamadi, Shirin 23, 25, 39–41 Kim, Dorothy 17–18, 25–6, 45, 163 Kimhi, Joseph 36–7

235

kin and kinship 31, 38, 63, 66, 78, 154–6, 159, 165 King of Tars 12, 17, 107, 141, 148–9, 166 Kinoshita, Sharon 25, 39, 41, 143 Kublai (Kubalai) Khan 34, 110 Lancelot-Grail cycle 35, 43 land 48–50, 52–8, 61–3, 65, 69, 149–51 Indigenous 24, 30 laws and legislation 33, 71, 77, 98, 100, 138, 162–3, 173 Lenape 63 Leutze, Emanuel 64 Levant 31, 102 Life of the Buddha 45 lineage 31, 69–80, 92, 101, 148, 154, 173 family 37–8, 71 of Jewish converts 69–71, 73–4, 76 Lomuto, Sierra 12, 16–17 London 140–1, 143–7, 150–1 Lorde, Audre 18 Lydgate, John, Fall of Princes 123–4 lynching 117, 173 Madonna. See Virgin Mary Maghreb 70–1 Magi 9, 13, 58–60, 65, 146, 166–7 Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon) 69–70, 96 Maître François 135–6 Malory, Thomas, Le Morte D’Arthur 35, 166 Mamluks 31, 108–9 Mandeville, John, Mandeville’s Travels (Book of John Mandeville) 34–5, 44–5, 52–4, 56–7, 127, 131–5, 156–7, 159–60, 163 mapping, racial and religious 39–41, 76–80 maps 58, 62, 65, 83 maqamāh 128, 130 Maracle, Lee 24, 66 Marco Polo 34, 41, 45, 95, 110 markers, somatic 7, 11, 82–3, 94, 163, 166, 172–3 marriages 38, 70, 73, 111, 118, 160 intermarriage 42–3, 70–3, 75, 79, 121–2, 130, 138, 162, 173 in romance 111, 121–2, 148–9, 166 in the Saracen Bride story 143–5, 147 See also unions, mixed-race Martínez de Toledo, Alfonso 75, 78 martyrs 40, 99, 140, 166 masculinity 140, 142–3, 150, 159, 162 Maskil and Peninah 130

236

massacres 73–4, 99, 115–17 maternal impression 92–5 Matthew Paris Chronica majora 158–61, 165 Maurice, Saint 81–2, 110, 166 Mauritania 83–4 Mayyāra, Maḥammad b. Aḥmad 72–3, 76–7 Mecca 31, 70, 79 medical traditions, sources, and texts 49, 53, 84, 87, 89, 92–4, 96, 173 medievalisms 1, 5, 7, 16, 26 Medievalists of Color 2–4 Mediterranean (region) 77–8, 81, 96, 108, 138 men 93, 98, 106, 111–12, 141, 143, 161–3, 172 Middle Ages early 86, 170–1, 175–8 high 84, 171, 176–8 late 12, 121, 133, 176 Middle East 115–16 migration 68–9, 74, 79, 138, 174 milk 38, 84, 89, 106–7, 165 Milton, John 38 miracles 36, 93, 162, 166 Miriam 95 mirroring, mirrors and mirror images 39–40, 44, 143, 148, 151 miscegenation 172 mistikôsiwak. See Monkman, Kent Mittman, Asa Simon 10–11 Miyashiro, Adam 18, 47, 61–2 mobs and mob violence 98–9, 160 modernity 11, 13–17, 62, 74, 153–4, 170 Mongol Empire 31, 108, 110, 158 Mongols 34, 38, 41, 45, 110, 158–61, 165 as savages 158, 160–1 Monkman, Kent 63–5 monsters and monstrous races 10–11, 14, 36, 49, 52–3, 92, 154–6, 158–9 Moors 33, 74, 84, 95, 101 in MS illuminations 106, 115–21, 123–30, 132–3 textual representations 118, 122, 130–1, 170 Morrison, Toni 14, 30, 39 Moses 71, 73, 95, 106, 117–21 Moses the Ethiopian 114 Muhammad, Prophet 33, 70–3, 79, 101 murder 33, 98, 104, 114, 142, 156, 161–5 Muslims 27–8, 69–74, 77, 84, 101–2, 104–5, 128 and Jews 30, 71, 144, 158, 162–3 in MS illuminations 115–21, 124–30, 132–3 textual representations 39–41, 43–44, 122, 126, 130–1, 143, 161

INDEX

nation and state 48–54, 66–7, 115–17, 135–9, 171–8 formation 30, 64, 69, 98–100, 142, 145, 149 natural philosophers and physicians 48, 81–82, 84–6, 89–90, 92–3, 95, 153 Nazis 16, 62, 68, 174–5 Near East 108, 121 New Testament 58–60, 79, 113 Nicholas Trevet (Anglo-Norman chronicle) 149 Nirenberg, David 33, 50, 67 Nishnaabeg 63 Noah and his sons 41, 52, 58–9, 113, 154, 156, 159, 170 norms 29, 33, 67, 95–6, 145, 155, 159, 163 North Africa 31, 69–71, 76–7, 83–4, 116 Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière (Chartres Cathedral) 8–9 Numidians 132–3 Old Testament 33, 58, 76, 92, 95 one-drop rule 21 On the Races of India, and the Brahmans ­(Palladius) 114 Orientalism 31, 39, 41 Origen 113 origins 29–30, 58, 75–80, 90, 95, 101, 137–8, 142, 174–5 ‘other ways of knowing’ debate 22–3 Ox-man of Wicklow (from Gerald of Wales) 140–1 pagans and heathens 101, 103, 106, 109, 121–2, 133–6, 140, 143, 147–8 Passover 128–9, 165 patriarchy 39, 141, 145, 151 Paul, Saint 42, 79 persecution 42, 68, 177 Peter Comestor 117–18 phenotype 29, 31, 45–6, 52, 123, 128, 135 Philippa of Catania 123–4 physiognomic and medico-physiognomic ­traditions 7–8, 11, 21, 32, 58, 83–7, 96–7 physiology 48–9, 52–3, 93, 98 Pictavia 53–4 Pietro d’Abano, Liber compilationis ­phisonomie 86, 89 piety 71–2, 77–8, 114 pilgrims and pilgrimage 31, 99, 105, 115, 143, 147

INDEX

Pliny the Elder, Natural History (Historia naturalis) 13, 49, 56, 87, 155–6, 159, 163, 165 Portugal 74, 102, 168 power 54, 56, 68, 71, 74–5, 97, 100, 115–17, 178 Prester John 34, 59, 95, 110, 121–2, 131 privilege 31, 41, 71, 78, 116–17 properties. See qualities and traits prophecy 71, 73, 78–9, 113 Ptolemy, Quadripartitum (Tetrabiblos) 49, 85–7, 89 purity 31, 38–9, 106, 110, 139 racial 74–5, 77, 137, 172 Pygmies 52–3, 134, 156 qualities and traits 7, 30, 85, 96, 101, 153 based on environment 48–50, 52–7, 61, 88 heritable 53–4, 74, 91, 147, 151 Queen Mary Psalter 144–8 Qurʾān 67, 71–2, 77, 79 race biological/genetic theories of 10, 38, 61–2, 94, 153–4, 171–4, 178 constructions of 7, 13, 15, 17, 47, 153, 165, 170 definitions of 10, 28, 30, 97, 178 epidermal 54, 106–7, 110–11, 118, 124, 127 formation of 30–2, 40–2, 101, 109 gendering 137, 140, 142–3, 147, 149–50 hierarchy 7, 12, 14, 28, 97, 172, 174 mixed- 79, 81, 84, 90–1, 94–5, 121, 138, 147–8 politics of 98–111 as verb. See racing ‘race’, development of English word 28–9, 37–8, 74–6 racecraft 30, 32–41, 44, 137 race-making and race-thinking 7, 9–16, 28, 30, 50–1, 97–9, 101–5, 171–2, 177–8 textual representations 56, 61, 114, 121 race studies critical 17–19, 21–2, 28–30, 47, 50, 97, 171, 176–7 critical medieval 1–2, 7–8, 10–13, 18, 25–6 pre-modern and pre-modern critical 17–18, 25 racialists and racists 34, 45, 172–3, 177 racialization 47, 50–2, 54, 56, 109–10, 116–17, 163, 171–2. See also religion, racialization of

237

racial management strategies 32, 41–5 racing 27–35, 37–46, 50, 105, 137, 140–1 racism 35, 39, 44, 73, 77–8, 80, 100, 138 definitions of 7–8, 29, 69, 80, 103–4, 106, 111 in medieval studies / medievalism 1–3, 5, 22, 175, 177 modern 5, 11–12, 14, 29–30, 67–9, 103, 153, 171, 173, 177–8 Raleigh, Walter 118, 156 Rambaran-Olm, Mary 4–5 ransom 126, 132 rape 35, 39, 150, 160–1 Rassenkunde / Rassenlehre 174–5 rationality 67, 153–4 Rauf Coilyear 35, 43 Raymond d’Aguilers (Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Iherusalem) 105 Raymond of Champagne 123–4 regimes 30–2, 40–2, 117, 175 religion 32, 133, 143, 161 politics of race and 101–2 racialization of 12, 40, 51, 61, 67–80 and skin colour 105, 112 reproduction, biological and cultural / ­religious 32, 35, 51, 68, 74, 76–80, 135, 141, 159 resemblances, familial 90–2, 94 Rhazes, Abu Bakr al-Hazi (Razi) 7–8 Robert of Gloucester 139 romances 106, 117–23, 130, 177 Roman de la Rose (Romance of the Rose) 124, 166 Roman van Moriaen 43–4, 111, 122–3 Rome 38, 50, 55, 102–3, 126, 149, 173, 176 Rudolf von Ems, Weltchronik 117–21 runes, associated with racism 2, 62 Saba (Sabareia) 117–19 saints 75, 105–6, 111, 139, 143, 166 Saladin (Salah al-Din; Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub) 31, 34–5, 108 salvation history 59–60 San Tomasso, church mosaic 132–3 Saracen Bride and Saracen Legend 142–5, 147–9, 151. See also South English Legendary Saracens 11, 50, 105–6, 158, 177 in MS illuminations 121, 124–8, 168–9 as term 84, 101–2, 105 textual representations 38, 106, 109, 122, 143–4, 148–9, 164

238

Sarah 78, 101–2, 145 Satan 38, 79, 92, 95, 98, 101 savages and savage peoples 88–9, 95, 103–4, 116, 156, 158, 160–1, 163 Saxons 54–5, 137, 139, 142 Sayings of the Fathers 114 scapegoats 40, 117 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture 19 science 7, 81–95, 101, 173–4 Scotland, Scots 86, 102, 137, 139 Second World War 67–8 Seder 128–9 segregation 71, 73, 98, 172 senses, the 154, 163, 165 servants 81, 84, 100, 128, 134, 143, 147, 163 sex (act) 114, 153–4, 159, 162–3. See also ­bestiality; transgressions and excesses, sexual sexuality 74, 89, 96, 142, 153–69, 172 Sheba, Queen of 58, 60 shurafāʾ (sg. sharīf) 71–3 shuʿūbīyah controversies 77–8 Sicily 31, 123–4 siedlungsarchäologische Methode 174 Siege of Jerusalem 34, 37 Simon Bening, Prayer Book of Cardinal ­Albrecht of Brandenburg 58, 60, 65 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake 48, 63 sin and sinners 29, 95, 105–6, 110–11, 113, 133 Sir Orfeo 149–50 skin colour 43, 81–6, 105, 111–12, 158, 165–6, 169–70 black 58, 81–8, 91–2, 94–5, 105–6, 110–11, 113–14, 116, 148, 165 brown or brownish 7, 85, 88, 170 dark 8–9, 11, 14, 49, 83, 95, 144, 166 ethno-geographic and climatic explanations 11, 49, 58, 61, 81, 86–8, 90, 94, 96 linked to sin or sanctity 95, 105–6, 110–11, 113, 133 mixed black and white 95, 107, 122, 147, 166 in MS illuminations 115, 119–21, 127–8, 135 racialization of 7, 32, 46, 54, 68, 82, 154, 163 swarthy 7, 85–6 white 7, 11, 53, 58, 81, 84, 86–7, 89, 105–6, 109, 117, 144, 148, 166, 169 See also complexion slavery 14–15, 30, 51–2, 77, 109, 170, 172

INDEX

slaves 15, 64, 68, 78, 81, 84, 90, 96, 101–2, 108–9, 114, 123–4, 128, 170 slave trade 54, 67, 90, 96, 108, 167, 170 sodomy 140, 162 Solomon 58–60 South English Legendary 139, 142–7, 150–1 Sowdan of Babylon. See Sultan of Babylon Spain 31, 33, 38, 42, 76–7, 81, 84, 128 Spanish Inquisition 73–4, 76 Spenser, Edmund 104 sperm 88, 90–1, 93–4 state See nation and state 98–100, 115–17, 174, 177 stereotypes 96, 119, 123–4, 127, 143 stock 37, 74–5 subjects 23, 37–8, 56, 77, 100, 116, 122 sub-Saharan Africa and peoples 77, 81, 83, 86, 128 Sultan of Babylon, in Mandeville’s Travels 44, 126–7 of Damascus, in The King of Tars 107, 148–9 of Egypt 35, 108–9 Sultan and Sultaness of Damascus, in The King of Tars 149 Sultan of Babylon 38, 158, 161, 165–6 superiority 15, 43–4, 78, 111, 116–17, 140, 143, 173–4 surveillance 27, 98–9, 125 Syria 108–9, 142 taboos 71, 110, 164, 174–5 Tarbis (Tharbis) 118–21 taxonomies 23, 51–2, 165 Terre des Sarrazins 41 theology 44, 95, 98, 101, 104 Thomas of Kent, Roman de toute chevalerie 48, 56–8, 60–1 Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla ­wa-Layla) 108 Ṭibb al-nufūs (Hygiene of the Souls) 70 token. See racecraft Toledo 75, 77–8, 130 toleration. See racial management strategies Toronto School 176 torture 35, 37, 99, 104 trade 17, 42, 107–9. See also slave trade transgressions and excesses, sexual 141–2, 159, 162. See also bestiality; sex (act); sexuality travel narratives 10, 23, 34, 61, 95, 156. See also ethnographies tribes 14, 27, 38, 62, 67, 77, 105, 177

INDEX

Trojans and Troy 55, 137, 142, 147 Turks and Turkey 31, 35, 43, 101, 109, 126 Umayyad rulers 33, 148 Umm Thomas (Thomas Becket’s mother) 143–8, 151 unions 58, 155 mixed-race 81, 84, 90, 95, 121, 138. See also marriages, intermarriage United States 1, 3, 22, 30, 69, 171, 175–7 ‘Unite the Right’ rally 1, 3–4, 16 Urso of Salerno 93 Van Sertima, Ivan 20–2 Vernon, Matthew X. 56 Vienna School 176 Vincent of Beauvais 49, 84 Vinland sagas 17, 107–8 violence 2, 37, 39, 42, 117, 172–3 imputed to Jews, Mongols or Muslims 160–2, 172 racial 28–30, 32–3, 99, 151 of racing 28–30, 45–6 sexual 160–2 Virgil 122, 142 Virgin Birth 36–7 Virgin Mary 8–9, 58, 76, 98, 106, 146 Volk 174, 176 Wales and the Welsh 48, 54–6, 61, 102 Washington Crossing the Delaware. See Leutze, Emanuel

239

weapons 17, 107, 119, 145 Welcoming the Newcomers. See Monkman, Kent West Africa 77, 167–8 Western Roman Empire 174, 176 Whitaker, Cord 16, 25, 47, 50–2, 177 white gaze 39–40, 45 whiteness 1, 3, 29–31, 49, 105, 107, 132, 137, 149, 166 constructed 14–15, 29 English / insular 139–40 white people 16, 63, 86, 95, 139 white supremacy 1–4, 8, 11, 14–16, 18, 29, 61–2, 177. See also far-right and fascist groups and movements; Nazis Wicked Child 128–9 Wilkerson, Isabel, ‘caste’ and racialization 116–17 William of Mirica 87 William of Rubruck 34, 159–60, 165, 168 Witelo 95 wives 39, 43, 73, 101, 108, 121, 158–60, 165 Christian 121, 148–9, 166 Wolfe, Patrick 30 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival 95, 107, 109–10, 121–3, 134, 147, 166 woman of Elis 90–1, 94 women 39, 87–95, 98, 107, 114–17, 138, 141–50, 159–62, 172, 177 Wonders of the East 10 Wooden Boat People. See Monkman, Kent world, division of 49, 57–8, 65, 86, 154

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