A Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age (The Cultural Histories Series) 9781350067455, 9781350067578, 1350067458

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Praise for A Cultural History of Race
General Editor’s Preface Marius Turda
Introduction Kimberly Anne Coles and Dorothy Kim
1 Definitions and Representations of Race Geraldine Heng
2 Race, Environment, Culture Adam Miyashiro
3 Race and Religion Dorothy Kim
4 Race and Science Rebecca Redfern and Joseph T. Hefner
5 Race and Politics Matthew Vernon
6 Race and Ethnicity Kathy Lavezzo
7 Race and Gender Dorothy Kim and Michelle M. Sauer
8 Race and Sexuality M. W. Bychowski with Robert S. Sturges
9 Anti-Race Asa Simon Mittman
Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE VOLUME 3

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 RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN AGE VOLUME 3

Edited by Kimberly Anne Coles and Dorothy Kim

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 Kimberly Anne Coles and Dorothy Kim have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover image: Titus Kaphar, Twisted Tropes, 2017 © Titus Kaphar 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 editors 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: Coles, Kimberly Anne, 1966- editor. | Kim, Dorothy, editor. Title: A cultural history of race in the renaissance and early modern age / edited by Kimberly Ann Coles and Dorothy Kim. Description: London, UK ; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: Cultural histories A cultural history of race ; volume 3 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021017346 | ISBN 9781350067455 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Race–History–to 1500. | Race–History–16th century. | Renaissance. Classification: LCC HT1507 .C87 2021 | DDC 305.8009/024–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017346 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6745-5 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

I llustrations

L ist

of

T ables

P raise

for

A C ultural H istory

vi viii of

R ace

ix

General Editor’s Preface Marius Turda

xi

Introduction Kimberly Anne Coles and Dorothy Kim

1

1 Definitions and Representations of Race Geraldine Heng

19

2 Race, Environment, Culture Adam Miyashiro

33

3 Race and Religion Dorothy Kim

53

4 Race and Science Rebecca Redfern and Joseph T. Hefner

73

5 Race and Politics Matthew Vernon

91

6 Race and Ethnicity Kathy Lavezzo

107

7 Race and Gender Dorothy Kim and Michelle M. Sauer

125

8 Race and Sexuality M. W. Bychowski with Robert S. Sturges

143

9 Anti-Race Asa Simon Mittman

165

N otes

188

B ibliography

194

N otes

224

I ndex

on

C ontributors

227

ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1 Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005

2

0.2 Titus Kaphar, Seeing Through Time, 2018

13

0.3 Titus Kaphar, Twisted Tropes, 2016

15

2.1 John Mandeville’s Travels (early fifteenth century)

34

2.2 The Psalter Mappa Mundi, detail of the ‘monstrous races’

40

2.3 Ranulf Hidgen’s World Map in Polychronicon

45

3.1 Historiated initial with the Virgin Mary striking the devil, in ‘The De Brailes Hours’

56

3.2 ‘Teste de Turke’ in London

61

3.3 Domino Sugar Factory, Williamsburg, 2014

65

3.4 Kara Walker, ‘A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby’, 2014

66

3.5 Kara Walker with Source Material, 2014

67

3.6 Kara Walker, ‘A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,’ 2014

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4.1 Map showing the location of the hospital and precinct of St Mary Spital, London. The black dot shows the location of The Central Foundation Girls’ School

80

4.2 Map showing the location of the East Smithfield emergency burial ground

81

4.3 Plot of the two-, three-, and eight-cluster solutions within the combined (MIN86 and SPT82 and SPT85: SPT) samples determined using mutually exclusive clusters calculated from the raw data

86

4.4 Plot of a three-cluster solution for hierarchical clusters within the combined (MIN86 and SPT85 and SPT82: SPT) samples calculated from the raw data

87

4.5 Individual density plots, by variable, for the three-cluster solution. Note: NAW = the nasal aperture width; PBD = the postbregmatic depression; MT = the malar tubercle

88

4.6 Example of an individual with White European ancestry

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4.7 Example of an individual with Black African ancestry

89

ILLUSTRATIONS

vii

5.1 Alterpiece of ‘Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas’ on the wall of the Santa Caterina d’Alessandria Church

95

6.1 Illustration from Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica (c. 1196–1223), of one man killing another with his axe

116

6.2 Hernán Cortés and La Malinche leading the Spanish army in Mexico

118

6.3 Portrait of Bartolome de las Casas

120

6.4 Illustration of the Spanish butchery of the ‘Indians’ by Joos van Winghe. From Bartolomé de Las Casas, Narratio regionum Indicarum per Hispanos quosdam deuastatarum verissima

123

8.1 The conversion of Silence’s gender

153

8.2 The conversion of the Sultan’s religion

155

8.3 John Mandeville Witnessing Monstrous Races to the East of Europe

160

9.1 Beato de Silos, ‘Silence’, Spain, 1109

166

9.2 Morgan Beatus, ‘Silence’, Spain, perhaps in Tábara, c. 940–5

167

9.3 The Psalter map, England, c. 1262

171

9.4 Detail of Monstrous Peoples, the Psalter map, England, c. 1262

172

9.5 The Psalter list map, England, c. 1262

173

9.6 Detail of Radicalized Winds. From the Psalter map, England, c. 1262

174

9.7 Giants and Blemmyes, The Book of John Mandeville, England, c. 1430

175

9.8 Detail of Eden, the Psalter map, England, c. 1262

177

9.9 The Hereford World Map, Hereford Cathedral, England, c. 1305

180

9.10 Eden, Adam and Eve, and the Cynocephali, the Hereford World Map, Hereford Cathedral, England, c. 1305

181

9.11 Detail of Monstrous Peoples, the Hereford World Map, Hereford Cathedral, England, c. 1305

182

9.12 Detail of Last Judgement, the Hereford World Map, Hereford Cathedral, England, c. 1305

183

9.13 Yinka Shonibare, ‘Creatures of the Mappa Mundi – Gigantes’, 2018

184

9.14 The Pyramid of White Supremacy, Equality Institute (8 September 2018)

185

TABLES

4.1 Classification matrix from an artificial neural network

81

4.2 Individual classifications of the East Smithfield (MIN86) and the Central Foundation Girls’ School (SPT82, SPT85: SPT)

83

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

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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 twentyfirst 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. 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

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

xiii

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.

xiv

Introduction KIMBERLY ANNE COLES AND DOROTHY KIM

The rider is not named in the title of the portrait Napolean Leading the Army over the Alps (Figure 0.1). Instead, the title alludes to the portrait that its composition reproduces, the depiction of Napoleon in Jacques-Louis David’s painting, Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at Grand-Saint-Bernard. Napolean’s army crossed the Great St Bernard Pass on 15 May 1800; Bonaparte followed five days later on a mule. The portrait is one for which he never sat, but he left instruction that he, an unconfident rider, should be portrayed as ‘calme sur un cheval fougueux’ (calm on a fiery horse). Such posturing is no doubt why there are sperm cells swimming over the baroque background of Wiley’s representation. Wiley’s depiction calls attention to the fact that these histories have been born in the imagination: who sits on the horse; what they are wearing; how they lead. These are the shared investments of both portraits. But the question of whose history is remembered is self-consciously rendered in Wiley’s painting. David’s portrait has bonaparte, hannibal, karolus magnus, carved into the rocks at the horse’s feet, situating Napolean’s campaign among previous conquests: Hannibal crossed the Alps in 218 bce, and Charlemagne led his army across in 773 ce. Wiley adds williams: also a conqueror. Wiley’s work both explores and exemplifies the fiction of cultural neutrality. ‘Painting is about the world that we live in’, Wiley has said, ‘Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them’ (Jackson 2003). The Black male subject at the centre of Wiley’s painting is wearing a camouflage shirt and pants reminiscent of fatigues – but it is street, not military, apparel. Just as Napolean in his portrait is outfitted in attire that the practicalities of crossing an Alpine pass would not have allowed, Wiley’s portrait also shows his subject in military costume. But the obvious displacement of Napolean for a Black man in contemporary street clothes simply calls attention to the strategies of David’s painting: Napolean is out of time and place – as is Hannibal and Charlemagne. History is how facts are interpreted, not how they occurred. And culture is always political in terms of what it depicts and what it excludes. This painting by Kehinde Wiley is an object lesson in why the restriction of race to certain historical periods is both methodically and politically problematic. Periodization cuts across operations of capitalism and arrangements of power. Race is constituted in response to capitalism – historically and culturally specific, but transhistorical by nature.1 Further, the consequences of racial strategies are borne into the present – which is precisely the point of Wiley’s image. Race is a strategy. Each time that we examine the strategies that naturalize structures of power, we better understand the strategies themselves – and how these polemics serve specific interests (political, economic, social). But the divisions

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE IN THE RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN AGE

FIGURE 0.1  Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005. Oil on canvas, 108 x 108 in. © 2020 Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum, partial gift of Suzi and Andrew Booke Cohen in memory of Ilene R. Booke and in honour of Arnold L. Lehman, Mary Smith Dorward Fund and William K. Jacobs, Jr. Fund.

of historical period serve the discourses of white supremacy, as Geraldine Heng (2011a), Sierra Lomuto (2020), Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade (see Gabriele 2020), and others have argued. Without the vocabularies to describe race, we cannot discuss it, and damning as ‘anachronistic’ the terms and relations of race as the means of identifying the strategy renders the pre- and early modern periods innocent of the charge (Heng 2011a: 323–4; see also Heng 2018b: 21). ‘It is not surprising’, David Nirenberg writes, ‘that those who define race as the application of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vocabularies of biological classification to human populations differentiated by skin color are certain that it cannot be found in earlier periods. Such definitions fail to make sense even of modern racial ideologies, which are themselves not only tremendously diverse but also change a great deal over time’ (2007: 74). Race is an opportunistic fiction applied

INTRODUCTION

3

where power relationships or economic agendas licence it: its generic features are the essentializing of human populations, usually with fantasies of the body, for the purpose of violent dislodging or economic exploitation. But as Ayanna Thompson has rightly noted, ‘a racialized epistemology does not have to be based on a semiotically charged interpretation of skin color so much as a semiotically charged interpretation of bodiliness’ (2008: 4). To periodize, then, is political. It does not allow us to talk about race as a strategy. It does not allow us to analyse racial strategies as political instruments that would then make us more alert to their present operations. And it does not allow us to talk about the recurrent consequences of race. To situate the past only in the past is to refuse to acknowledge the present work that it is doing. The declaration of innocence from race for the pre- and early modern periods also permits a fantasy of White European achievement (see Wekker 2016). In a piece titled ‘The Politics of the Medieval Preracial’ (2021: 2), Dorothy Kim comments on the issue of White innocence: Medievalists see themselves as the field that did not participate in chattel slavery, colonialism, and thus the formation of the term ‘race’ and general ideas of global oppression (because that was a problem invented by the early modern period)2 and thus imagine themselves in a field that is ‘ethical, color-blind, free of racism’ because it is somehow free of race. The less we are attentive to the cultural interactions, cross-cultural migrations and global dimensions of the late medieval and early modern periods, the less we are forced to recognize the violence, intolerance, power struggles and enforced suppressions that attend them (see e.g. Hankins 2020). The problem with the approach, of course, is to normalize White European experience as the default position, and to relegate the experience of Black Africans, Asians, Jews and Muslims to the margins of our shared history. White Europeans are recentred. White supremacists’ appropriation of the Middle Ages as a fantasyland of White purity bears out a difficult reckoning that the fields of medieval and early modern studies must make with the way they have produced knowledge about the past (see Lomuto 2016, 2020; Coles, Hall and Thompson 2019; Miyashiro 2019). Recognizing race in these periods is to have to acknowledge the people against whom social hierarchies and differential treatment were directed.

RACE, GENETICS AND BIOARCHAEOLOGY In Kehinde Wiley’s Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005) (Figure 0.1), he has the ‘conquering’ men of history carved into the rocks at the rider’s feet. The image begs that we turn to excavate, dig and unearth the connection between these foundational rocks with Wiley’s vision of the past. Not surprisingly, the issue of excavating the past, foundational methodologies and how the past is always an interpretive act from the lens of the present (with its theories, technologies, more nuanced ways of excavation) is a consistent thread in this volume. In particular, the new avenue in considering pre-modern critical race studies involves the fields that dig up the past and evaluate material evidence in the smallest and largest scales. Several chapters in this volume address a specific area and methodology in critical race theory (CRT): how critical race works in relation to genetics and bioarchaeology. Genetics and bioarchaeology are separate fields with different ways of discussing race. In genetics, these discussions have moved into discourse too similar to

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE IN THE RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN AGE

earlier twentieth-century eugenics. This discourse has rightly alarmed scientists; science, technology and society (STS) scholars; and history of science researchers. Race discussions in genetics have recapitulated an idea of race that is biologically essential and ultimately based on pre-civil rights definitions, especially pre-Second World War definitions. This alignment with antiquated definitions of race has the whiff of eugenicist/biological race essentialism and has caused unending debates in mainstream media publications including The New York Times and The Atlantic (see e.g. aimurray 2018; Holmes 2018; ‘How Not to Talk about Race and Genetics’ 2018; Kitchener and Yuan 2018; Reich 2018). Predicated on a definition of race that is a pre-civil rights one, one that is mired in a White supremacist, eugenicist, biological essentialism (see Omi and Winant 2015: 1–52), many discussions that want to equate race with genetic essentialism are too close to a rehash of these racist definitions. Current discussions of race explain that race is biopolitical and sociocultural both now and also in the pre-modern past (see Omi and Winant 2015; Heng 2018b). There has been a surfeit of discussion on race-essentialism due to the popularity of publicly available DNA kits – 23andMe, Ancestry.com, etc. – and how the creation of these genetic stemmata has funnelled popular conversation about DNA and race. However, the basis on which race and genetics has been intertwined and the consistent retrenchment in medieval history’s DNA discussions in relation to race have revealed how medieval history’s historiography in understanding CRT has stymied their involvement in these discussions. As historians continue to lapse into definitions of race that are based on biological essentialism (eugenicist definitions), the complicated and nuanced connection between race and biopolitics eludes almost all of these medieval historical discussions. For example, the consistent use of the term ‘ethnicity’ rather than ‘race’ in their writing about race and genetics exposes their misalignment with a wider methodology and discourse within historical studies. One of the biggest discussants of race and genetics has been the historian Patrick Geary. We use Geary here as a case because he has become the medieval studies spokesperson to the larger humanities and social sciences on the topic of race and genetics. Geary (2017) tackled the question of genetics and identity in his Princeton Institute of Advance Studies Institute Letter, ‘Genetics and Identity: Is Regional Identity Necessarily an Ethnic Identity?’ (2017). In it, he argues a perfectly legitimate point in discussing the advertisements for Ancestry.com: The ad is amusing and memorable, but it also reflects a disturbing trend in identity politics, namely the assumption that our genetic identity informs our ethnic identity, that it is somehow the essence of who we really are. The implication is that our cultural, social, religious, and political identities are secondary, dependent on our primary genetic identity, and we must bring them into harmony with our ‘real’ selves, which is knowable only through our DNA. (Geary 2017) He is accurate in describing the advertisement as simplistic in identifying a specific regional ancestral identity with ethnic identity (in this case, the ad moves from ‘I wear lederhosen’ to a kilt to indicate a shift from German to Scottish ancestry). What is most striking, however, in this passage is his use of the term ‘identity politics’ and then the absence of race in the litany of various identity positions discussed – ‘cultural, social, religious, and political’. Though ‘identity politics’ was historically first used in the

INTRODUCTION

5

work of the Combahee River Collective in its articulation of intersectionality and Black queer feminism, it is currently a term that the neoconservative right wield as a weapon (see Combahee River Collective 1977b). The use of it here gestures to the logics of neoconservative philosophies that fail to address the term’s historiography or its current rhetorical and political uses.3 To be clear, to comment on the ‘disturbing trend in identity politics’ is to ignore the critical work of decades of Black, Indigenous, people of colour, gender, sexuality (LGBTQIA) and disability political work that has pointed out how political, social, religious and cultural identities are not equitably or evenly available to people who are racially marked, identify as LGBTIA, not male, disabled. Race cannot be divorced from these other situated categories of identity. This is clear from the effects of structural cisheteropatriarchal White supremacy on specific identity groups. Thus, in the United States, you can identify as religiously Muslim but how cisheteropatriarchal White supremacy works in harming Muslims as a religious identity will depend on how these other identities come into play. Geary’s use of identity politics reveals a lack of engagement with the critical literature in over six decades of CRT and especially queer Black feminist theory. Medieval history’s refusal to engage in the extensive bibliography and historiography of race in the social sciences and humanities deeply stymies the field’s ability to contribute in discussions about race and genetics in the social sciences. Geary in his IAS piece further makes clear how much the pre-civil rights definitions of race and ethnicity have made it impossible to have a substantive discussion in the social sciences (let alone STS) on race because of foundational issues in relation to basics – definition, CRT, the scholarship of the last sixty years. For example, how can one have a meaningful discussion about genetic tests such as AncestryDNA with statements that make clear either deep misconceptions about the terms ethnicity and race or statements that in fact lapse into fuelling the White supremacist weaponization of race and genetics? Geary (2017) explains further in his discussion on genetics and ethnicity (not race) that: Other genetic variations that determine body build, hair, skin, and eye color are more evident, while some, such as those that influence the ability of adults to digest milk or to withstand certain diseases may be even more significant from an adaptive perspective, if less obvious. But no specific set of genetic similarities determines how an individual or group will be identified – what will be seen as essential in classifying members of a group is ultimately culturally determined. Moreover, cultural and political identities can trump genetic origins. Groups that are very similar genetically may hold vastly different and even hostile cultural identities, while people with divergent genetic origins can share a powerful sense of common identity that is the essence of ethnic consciousness. In his listing of genetic physical variations, he is describing a list connected to racialization. Like many (modern and pre-modern) western European discussions, Geary fixates on epidermal race or race in relation to sight. His list is about how bodies are marked racially not ‘ethnically’. In addition, he uses lactose intolerance as an example without addressing the ongoing White supremacist ideological line that has weaponized genetics for White supremacy, specifically White supremacist rhetoric and propaganda around the consumption of milk (see Harmon 2018). Likewise, the current discussion of racism and Covid-19 should make clear how important race is in showing the foundation of

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racialized necropolitics in relation to how groups ‘withstand certain diseases’. Race, as so much research has explained, is biopolitical and sociocultural. The biopolitical and sociocultural contours of race cannot be separated. Medieval history’s White supremacist historiographic bubble makes the field’s contribution and participation in historical and social science discussions about race and genetics negligible, if not mostly illegible.4 For example, in 2018, the American Historical Association (AHA) organized a series of panels on race, DNA and history. This was written up in ‘What are You: Historians Confront Race, Genealogy, and Genetics’ in the AHA’s Perspectives in History (Bergen 2018). A description of a session, ‘Science and Difference in History’, featured excellent pieces that discuss how race is biopolitical and sociocultural. A paper by Michael Yudell makes clear that even before the civil rights era, Black intellectuals argued that race was biopolitical and sociocultural. Yudell explains that W. E. B. Du Bois pushed back against racist eugenicist assumptions that race was biologically essential by arguing that ‘the racialized “conditions of life” – poverty, a lack of education, unsanitary living and working conditions – led to racial disparities in health’ (Bergen 2018). This is in fact how discussions of how race as biopolitical and sociocultural work. This is what we see now in discussions of race and Covid-19 – that structural White supremacy and its necropolitical racism disproportionately kill certain racialized groups (Pirtle 2020). Yet, when the medieval historian enters into this discussion, he is not on the same page in relation to understanding critical race, social science theory and STS topics. Patrick Geary gives a talk in a session on ‘Racial Sciences: Old and New’ in which excellent STS and history of science discussions point to the already rigged racist categories used in the early construction of the Human Genome Project. Yet, he continuously refuses to use the term race, instead, he explains that AncestryDNA and 23andMe are ‘too eager to equate ethnic with geographic origins’. Thus, in several excellent panels that are basing their arguments on an informed understanding of critical race theory, we end up with the medieval historian having a separate conversation that seems not at all connected with basic terminology or historiography about race. With the groundbreaking work of Kim TallBear’s Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (2013), the social sciences have already had a discussion of the utter failure of popular genetic testing as a location for racial identity. Likewise, Alondra Nelson’s work in The Social Life of DNA (2016) explains how popular genetic testing is used to work through issues central to social questions now. She further explains how genetic testing can become a way to work on racial justice and particular reparations in relation to the United States’ history of transatlantic chattel slavery. In this way, Geary’s points are not new, they have been explained by several Black and Indigenous women social science scholars, but the lack of engagement with the critical literature on race and genetics just further shows a deep methodological issue in medieval history and medieval studies more generally. We would argue that medieval studies involvement in these discussions is necessary and important especially around issues of genetics and race. Shay-Akil McLean’s article, ‘Isolation by Distance and the Problem of the Twenty-First Century’ (2019: 86) explains the idea of the ‘genetic now’: ‘[C]onceived of as being sometime in the mid-15th century before Transoceanic European conquest and colonialism’ (Roseman 2014: 236). The genetic now function as what Kim TallBear (2013) called a pinpoint in time and space of biogeographic

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originality. This belief in biogeographic originality is antithetical to the fundamental principle of evolution: change over time. (TallBear 2013; Roseman 2014) Population genetics data are structured in a way to ignore the last few hundred years. For instance, geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (2005: 334) frankly discussed the biased distribution of genomic data from particular populations in the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP): ‘All five continents are represented in the collection, and all samples are from populations of anthropological interest – that is, those that were in place before the great diasporas started in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when navigation of the oceans became possible. This choice was important, because these diasporas caused significant population admixtures, especially in the Americas but also in other continents. Only genetic knowledge of the original populations that contributed to these admixtures can disentangle the various genetic complexities that resulted, and the HGDP fulfills these criteria.’ (McLean 2019: 86) McLean’s argument points to the issues in the ‘isolation by distance’ model that imagines different groups have shared characteristics that could be imagined as a race (though not used in racism) because of geographic and environmental factors. The ‘isolation by distance’ model exactly moulds onto long-historical medieval models of organizing the different ‘monstrous’ races because of geography and climate (Mittman 2015a). What McLean is pointing out is that the discussions in genetics about genetic variation in ongoing discussions of genetics and race is based on an idea of ‘biogeographic origin’ which is temporarily medieval (fifteenth century). Major projects such as the Human Genome Diversity Project are based on ideas of genetic biogeographic origin and genetic consistency that is tacked to an idea of temporality and medieval history. McLean also explains that this means the vision of a ‘genetic now’ is based in medieval time – and imagined as untouched from the upheaval of early modern transatlantic chattel slavery, genocidal empire and conquest, and the migrations accompanying these political moves of racial capitalism. It also imagines individuals not effected by racial capitalism and politics: settler colonial genocide, violent empires, transatlantic chattel slavery, segregation, sundown towns, miscegenation laws. Racial politics and capitalism dictated procreation for hundreds of years; ‘genetic variation’ cannot be imagined as ‘random’ and racial politics and capitalism dictate ‘genetic drift’ (McLean 2019: 87–8). However, this is not at all addressed in genetics discussions: One of the greatest tricks of race and racism is how it hides in time. The baseline for the questions we ask about human variation comprises what human variation may have been a few hundred years ago combined with a mishmash of different techniques ranging from the historical and linguistic to the archaeological and genetic. This use of the genetic now is an admission that the spatial distribution of human genetic variation has been radically altered over the last several hundred years. (McLean 2019: 86) But what does it mean if the ‘genetic now’ that so much of genetic discussion on population difference was never a geographically homogenous group and the genealogies of earlier racialized chattel slavery and also colonialism and conquest are already circulating in this period in its genetic population data? The work in pre-modern critical race studies

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is paramount and our continued push to understand a continuously racially-mixed population in Europe in the imagined ‘genetic now’ needs to be part of the conversation in genetics and archaeology. McLean further explains that race is always racism: A Du Boisian theory of the race concept argues that the salience of race depends on the analytical power of racism. In this view, racialization is the social reproduction of racialized distinctions or, more aptly put, race in action. Racialized groups are produced when people enact political control onto others in the forms of economic exploitation, dispossession, displacement, genocide, and chattel slavery. (McLean 2019: 89) In this way the histories and methods of biology, genetics, archaeology and bioarchaeology are not neutral or not structured by racism. As the talks at the AHA 2018 make clear, racism is embedded in genetics down to the categories used in the Human Genome Project. Finally in solidifying the definition of race and giving a different model that thinks through ecosystems, McLean explains: Race is a product of racism, always (Du Bois 1898, [1935] 1998; Roberts 2011; Wolfe 2016). Race, then, is racism, which I refer to as race/ism, is a political process of marking individuals and groups for the regulation of reproduction and inheritance of sociopolitical status. Race, as a set of classificatory regimes and practices, is not limited to its doctrines that maintain group-specific modes of colonial domination (Du Bois 1898, [1935] 1998; Roberts 2011; Wolfe 2016). How we collectively use race academically, publicly, and privately fails to communicate this meaning. Highlighting the relationship between race and racism requires a racial formation theory that does not legitimate the Euro-Western colonial narrative of ‘we made this land’ (Fanon 2004). Mainstream racial formation theory lacks a dynamic and contingent historical analysis. A settler-colonial consciousness troubles the categorizations of problematic beings. The inequities that we see are reproduced, and race is a colonial doctrine formed to justify and normalize those exploitative relations. Race/ism is the hegemonic managing of bodies. How humans treat one another is a dynamic ecological system and should be analyzed as such. (McLean 2019: 89) Thus, when medieval historians eschew the term ‘race’ because that clings to the biological, essential eugenicist definition and they state that there was no race in the pre-modern past, what they are doing is a form of White pre-modern studies innocence. What they are saying is that there was no racism in the pre-modern past and so they can preserve a bubble of White innocence. It is essential that premodern critical race studies discusses race and genetics. The philosophical logics of genetic science and its imagined understanding of the genetic now and genetic variation is situated in our temporal spaces. McLean writes: When we look for the causes of human genetic variation, we are tracing not racial groups but racism itself. The variation we see between racialized groups is the result of human demographic events and the official institutional and interpersonal

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management of the breeding of colonized subjects. We are looking at the effects a political, zoological typology has had that fashioned the world after a particular kind of human body defined by its hierarchical ordering in reference to other human bodies. We need to understand how a system of hegemonic heredity practices can affect patterns of human variation. All individuals get their genes from their parents, and parentage is mediated by racialization, since racism governs reproduction. Thus, genetic differences between racialized groups can occur even though racialized distinctions are socially constructed. There are material consequences for human social divisions, and we need an antiracist conception of human biology to help us understand the underlying processes involved. (McLean 2019: 91–2) Pre-modern critical race is premodern critical racism. Pre-modern critical race is biopolitical and sociocultural: social and cultural factors affect the body and its biology down to its genetics. As McLean underlines throughout race/ism governs genetic reproduction historically and that ‘If we are sorting people who are born into groups, then variation today is a product of racism rather than a basis for race. Thus, human variation is a product of coordinated and uncoordinated collective human actions, not a teleological phenomenon determining someone’s destiny’ (McLean 2019: 90). The ‘coordinated and uncoordinated collective human action’ include settler colonial genocide, transatlantic chattel slavery, geographic segregation, miscegenation laws (whether in Lateran IV or in what was finally repealed in Loving v. Virginia), etc. In addition, as Troy Duster’s works, Backdoor to Eugenics (1990) and more recently ‘A Post-genomic Surprise: The Molecular Reinscription of Race in Science, Law and Medicine’ (2015), explain: science, scientific structures and theories, scientific labs and scientific data are not neutral spaces in regards to race and structural racism. Instead, they adhere to ideas of colour-blindness, one of the main tenets of postracialism (Cho 2009). Duster discusses two different ways in which science has tried to reinscribe race and ethnicity into genetic research. First is the work around molecular admixture that Duster explains already has a structural flaw based on ideas of ‘purity’: There is yet a more subtle method of navigating around the problem of defining race, and it has become an increasingly standard operating procedure – the deployment of the idea of ‘admixture’. Of course the irony resides in the routine practice of treating four continental ancestral populations as the basis of admixture – and these four populations align with Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas before the arrival of Europeans and have the putative ‘purity’ prior to admixture… (Duster 2015: 12) The second way is a ‘back entry’ way that Patricia Hill Collins discusses in her analysis of critical race theory and critical science studies. She writes: Tackling a science that believes it is objective and politically neutral because it also believes it is colour-blind is extremely difficult. How might colour-blindness work in settings where, because it is assumed to be present, race is by definition absent, or at least of lesser importance? … In the first strategy, the ‘back into’ strategy, race is assumed to be absent until the researcher ‘finds’ it by happenstance. (Hills Collins 2015: 48)

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Hill Collins summarizes Duster’s work as primarily revealing ‘how race is being reformulated – this is the architecture of race that Duster aims to study’ (Hill Collins 2015: 51). She further is intrigued by how examining ‘colorblindness’ can move ‘attitudes and cultural products and to see its operation as a logic for scientific practice’ (51). She ends her piece by underlining the importance of critical race theory addressing science and its structures: Science is not a stepchild in the corner that can be safely ignored in favour of attending to other more important social institutions, practices and discourses. Instead, science is more like the elephant in the room of racial inequality, one that appears to be hidden in plain sight, primarily because we have socially constructed it away … Prematurely taking science off the hook hides its complicity in sustaining racial inequality. Ignoring science also relinquishes its potentially important contributions to challenging racial injustices. (Hill Collins 2015: 51–2) Critical race theory has begun to address the most recent wave of scientific ‘reinscription’ of race back into discussion especially in the genetic and biological sciences. Discussions of pre-modern critical race must also contend with these areas of research. Moving forward, recognizing that race is biopolitical and sociocultural requires the researcher to similarly recognize that race is embodied. Thus, structural White supremacy affects racialized bodies regardless of whether this is how the White supremacist gaze racializes bodies; racialization is achieved through the senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch or even on the molecular level in relation to genetic analysis (see Kim 2019). Genetics is a subfield of molecular cell biology; epigenetics is how “behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the ways your genes work” (CDC).5 Race/ism can affect your body and things, like trauma, can be passed down (see Youssef et al. 2018). For example, race/ ism can affect Black mothers not just during pregnancy (nutrition access, racism in care, etc.), but it ‘can change the baby’s epigenetics’ (CDC) which can affect a baby’s later health. For instance, if structural White supremacy has made clear in 2020 that the disproportionate number of deaths from Covid-19 in Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities are predicated on how White supremacy harms these communities because of racism, then we must understand that Covid-19 and other pandemics affect people’s bodies on a molecular level. We can analyse the genetic evidence of the effects of White supremacy in racialized groups now (as public health and epidemiologists are doing in relation to Covid-19) and in the pre-modern past. So instead of discussing and hyper-focalizing on DNA (particularly popular genetics tests), it would make more sense to re-examine the discussions of race and embodiment in relation to genetic analysis for the pre-modern past in the arena of bioarchaeology. It is here where we can analyse in numerous ways how biological evidence for the racialized body can reveal how racialization has harmed and/or killed. This is not then the method of imagining genetics and race as a discussion of eugenicist essentializing biology, but rather how we can see the evidence of the differential harm done to groups and their bodies and what that may tell us about racial identities, the impacts of pandemics, disease and racialized violence and conditions on mortality. Bioarchaeology allows us to align our analysis of race in relation to genetic and biological analysis with Du Bois’s statement: ‘the racialized ‘conditions of life’ – poverty, a lack of education, unsanitary living and working conditions – led to racial disparities in health’ (quoted in Williams and Sternthal

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2010). If pre-modern critical race is about the discussion of differential biopolitical and sociocultural treatment, we must contend with how that differential treatment harms the bodies of different groups of people and what bioarchaeological evidence can tell us about the effects of White supremacist systems on these bodies in the pre-modern past. The work on pre-modern critical race and bioarchaeology has already begun. In the 2019 volume, the Bioarchaeology of Marginalized People, Rebecca Redfern and Joseph T. Hefner (in a collaboration between the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology, Museum of London and the Michigan State Department of Anthropology) published the chapter ‘“Officially absent but actually present”: Bioarchaeological Evidence for Population Diversity in London during the Black Death, AD 1348–50’ (2019). The authors confess that though they have for over fifteen years told anecdotes to each other about finding people of ‘black ancestry and dual heritage’ in medieval cemetery populations, they had never formally recorded them and thus, ‘we significantly contributed to their “official absence” and further served to marginalize them from mainstream knowledge and academic discourse’ (Redfern and Hefner 2019: 70). The events of the Leeds International Medieval Conference in 2017 and the far-right obsession with the medieval past made these researchers realize that ‘it is more important than ever to ensure that everyone is “present and correct” (S.N. 2017)’ (70). The goal of their chapter is to [examine] the ancestry of a subsample of 41 individuals buried in the Black Death cemetery of East Smithfield, unite these data with published light stable isotope work on childhood residency (Kendall, Montgomery, Evans, Stantis, & Mueller, 2013) and extant mitrochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data (Klunk & Poinar, personal communication, 2017), and to combine these data with the osteological evidence for disease and indicators of stress. (Redfern and Hefner 2019: 71). They also undertake to use different methodologies that could usefully answer their questions about marginal identities including using Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional theory to help build two new ‘osteobiographies’. As they explain: This theory recognizes that different forms of oppression, inequality, and injustice (amongst others, racism, sexism, disability, and socioeconomic statuses) interact and interrelate, and importantly raises the suggestion that there is no one experience of identity (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013; Nash, 2008). That is to say, the experience of a person with Black ancestry in Medieval London would have varied according to their gender and age, if they had been born in the city or not, if they were free or a servant/enslaved, whether they were rich or poor, and if they had a physical impairment or not. There is no one way of being, as Lorde (2007, p. 138) wrote, ‘[t] here is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.’ (Redfern and Hefner 2019: 71–2) They compared their bioarchaeological findings with documentary evidence including the materials from the England’s Immigrants project 1330–1550, as well as sources such as Richard of Devizes’s (1192) chronicle, which complains about the ‘undesirable moors’ in London. They also consult a short article that discusses King Henry III’s writ regarding Roger de Lyntin, a Sicilian knight, and a fugitive, enslaved, Muslim Ethiopian man (Redfern and Hefner 2019: 77).

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What they found was that by using the theoretical approach of intersectionality … [t]he analysis of ancestry groupings in the city identified several individuals with Black African ancestry or dual heritage, a result which supports the limited 14th century AD primary source evidence. Our research suggests that these and later sources may actually be under-representing population diversity in the city, given that in our sample of 41 individuals, 29% were people with non-white European ancestry. (Redfern and Hefner 2019: 106) They also explained that the odds were high that the majority of the non-White European ancestry group would have been enslaved men and women or formerly enslaved men and women. In their contribution to this volume, Redfern and Hefner continue this work, and use bioarchaeological and forensic anthropology techniques to produce evidence that at least one-third of the London population from the mid-fourteenth to sixteenth centuries did not have White European ancestry: some of these people were mixed race and others had inhabited England since early childhood. All would have been racialized. The sheer numbers suggest many points of contact. Even so, the analysis of Black history and Black community is consigned to the margins of difference. ‘The invisibility of the black’ in work on the early modern period, Imtiaz Habib writes, ‘is the visibility of early modern English material cultural achievement’ (2008: 272; see also Chapman 2017). He might just as well have laid the charge to medieval studies. But it need not be a continued mistake of our methodological approach. If the reality of early modern England – or, at least, London – was that one-third of its inhabitants were not White Europeans, how does this change our understanding of the developments of race and White settler colonialism? Most importantly, how do we look at the various intersections that cross late medieval and early modern cultural moments, and what do we make visible in our analysis of them?

RACE AND CULTURAL HISTORY To return to Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, Wiley returns to the centre of David’s portrait of conquest the subject that has been removed from the story. He points in the direction of other histories – most directly towards the consequences of White European history. Titus Kaphar is another Black American artist whose work engages with the historical past. In Seeing Through Time (2018) (Figure 0.2), Kaphar redirects our attention from the European woman who is its ostensible centre, to the attendant Black boy. Black servants and slaves were used in early modern and eighteenth-century portraiture as an index of wealth and luxury. But Kaphar’s painting refuses the boy’s status as a luxury item: instead he peers into the painting to meet the gaze of a young woman staring back. Kaphar intended the subject to be a contemporary woman staring into the past, but she could also be the past of the boy – or the basis of the aristocratic woman’s wealth. This kaleidoscopic view exposes some central facts of race: White European wealth is accumulated in the exploitation of other people; White European identity is constructed against other people who inhabit the world they want to claim for themselves; the exclusion of the history of these other people is, in many ways, the transcript of race. And these facts persist to the present.

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FIGURE 0.2  Titus Kaphar, Seeing Through Time, 2018. Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in. © Titus Kaphar Studios.

Indeed, these facts persist in the present instruction of the past – to what we are attentive, and to what we choose to deny our attention. As Kim has pointed out concerning the use of the term ‘race’ in pre-modern periods, the view that scholars should only use terminology that was used exactly as it was in the historical period of discussion … is a[n] … intellectually strange methodological approach since this would preclude the entirety of those working on the premodern past to eschew terminology like ‘Middle Ages’, ‘gender’, ‘class’, let alone other terms in the social sciences and

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sciences that have theories that change and develop even as these fields can identify the contours of them in the past. (Kim 2019: 6)6 In fact, ‘ethnicity’ is no less anachronistic a term to pre- and early modern histories, having achieved its present meaning as a collection of cultural practices in the twentieth century. ‘Race’, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes, is the apposite term to the social arrangements that we seek to describe because it ‘foregrounds the inextricability of corporeal and group identity, as well as the uneven structures of power within which identities are made solid’ (2013: 112). The fact that we press some anachronistic terms into service and reject the use of others amounts to what we are willing, as scholars of these periods, to discuss at all. The imposition of certain historical structures on how we study culture further impedes our analysis. The borders of these periods are policed as though structures of power and economics do not overrun them. Periodization proves restrictive to studying the culture, politics and nascent capitalism that contribute to developments of race. This is precisely because race is transhistorical in its nature, even if it has historically specific manifestations: the motivations to which race responds are not specific to a local history, even if its expressions at any given time are local and particular.7 Heng has written about England as ‘the first racial state in the West’ in its organized campaign of violence against its Jewish population before their expulsion in 1290 (2018a: 10). By 1218, Jews in England were required to wear badges on their clothing to identify them. Jews were ghettoized, their movements throughout the country tracked and restricted, their property was owed to the state and systematically taxed or taken outright, and violence was regularly visited upon them by state and social actors.8 While these constraints ‘would resonate eerily with the treatment of minority populations in other countries, and other eras’, as Heng writes, race is not evolutionary in its terms. Rather, it is the mechanisms of race that ‘[link] into relationship moments of medieval and modern time’ (9).9 Jews arrived in England, quite possibly at the invitation of William the Conqueror, in the wake of the Norman Conquest. But whether invited or not, they were used for their financial skills. Surveillance, sequestration and subjugation all served the goal of economic exploitation. Because the commercial impulses that ground the production of race at any historical moment do not substantially change, the motivation and mechanisms of race transgress any boundary of historical period. What is different on each occasion of its production are the circumstances: what is the financial objective; who are the targets; what colonial enterprise is being endeavoured. Even in our discussion here, we have had to commit to the awkward terminology of periodization, and to demarcate the study of the late medieval and early modern. But this volume attempts the transhistorical approach of appraising the strategies of race. The paintings of Wiley and Kaphar are both demand and demonstration of the need for a transhistorical approach to race. In Twisted Tropes (2016) (Figure 0.3), the painting by Kaphar that is on the cover of this volume, the crumpled canvas of the portrait of a European aristocratic couple gives attention to the small framed image of a Black female. Her clothes imply a contemporary relationship with the couple: she appears to be dressed in eighteenth-century European clothing; her pearl earring signals the wealth of the family she serves. ‘For 400 years, the … girl on the side was always there’, Kaphar said of the common device in his painting, ‘But you were never supposed to contemplate her personhood – her wants, needs and desires’ (Brown 2019). But decentring the White European couple does more than throw her history into relief: it exposes culture as the

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FIGURE 0.3  Titus Kaphar, Twisted Tropes, 2016. Oil on canvas with antique frame, 53 x 57 x 11 in. © Titus Kaphar Studios.

chief conduit of fictions of race. And it reminds us that what we choose to foreground in cultural artefacts is itself a political act.10 And so: what might a transhistorical analysis of race reveal about any historical manifestation? Beyond the economic agendas that underwrite race, we can perceive the materials of manufacture at the site of its making. The race concept draws its political power from what is already at large in the culture. As Jonathan Burton notes: ‘Race scavenges and improvises, calibrating to the moment whatever ideas are available’ (2018: 220). This is not least because its production from available ideological discourses – legal, political, religious – provides the sense of continuity and inevitability that naturalizes its social and political fiction. But this is also because any racial ideology ascribes natural explanations and conditions to a set of cultural practices – it grounds discriminations that are religious, regional or cultural in the body. This volume looks at the cultural strategies that are the mechanisms of racial production. Racism is intrinsic to the literary and cultural practices that we teach in the late medieval and early modern periods. It is the history embedded in the artefacts themselves. Each chapter attempts to isolate an element of the various constituent practices of the premodern race concept. Along with this introduction, the volume follows the schema of this entire Bloomsbury Cultural History of Race series that includes nine chapters on specific prescribed topics. Within these frames, the various chapter writers have taken up the task to push the discussion forward and particularly to have a transhistorical discussion, as is the set-up of this series, with especially contemporary critical race theory and new areas of critical race inquiry that we hope is legible to scholars who work in various pasts, current presents and useful to those who are thinking about the future.

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Geraldine Heng opens with ‘Definitions and Representations of Race: Race as a Transhistorical Category’. In it she expands on her work in The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages. She explains that Like other concepts theorized by contemporary scholars studying modern eras – such as Orientalism – race has seemed to some like a theoretical imposition imported backward from the present into deep historical time. Accordingly, pre-modernists grappling with historical phenomena that looked distinctly racist or Orientalist have in the past resorted to a vocabulary of respectful deference to modernity, carefully naming their phenomena ‘proto-racial’ or ‘proto-Orientalist’, and favouring a vocabulary of greater generality and benignity instead. In lieu of race, we have had ‘ethnicity’, ‘alterity’ or ‘otherness’; instead of racism, we have had ‘ethnocentrism’, ‘xenophobia’, ‘discrimination’, ‘prejudice’ or just ‘fear of otherness and difference’. This issue of definition and this difficulty with transhistorical categories that she has explained has created a cottage industry of substitute euphemisms that has made it difficult for the pre-modern past to usefully do critical race analysis on our archives. She explains: ‘The absence of trenchant tools, analytic resources and a vocabulary adequate to the task at hand thus made it impossible to acknowledge the magnitude of the racial phenomena, racial institutions and racial practices that occurred in the European Middle Ages, long before a terminology stamped with the name “race” had formally coalesced in the Latin West.’ Different fields in medieval and early modern studies will continue to be unable to do this analysis so necessary in our pre-modern archives because of this stumbling block in relation to definitions. Adam Miyashiro addresses ‘Race, Environment, Culture’ in his chapter. He examines how pre-modern ideas of natural history has inflected the organization of racial categories in relation to environment, biology and geography. He focuses on this work in medieval encyclopedic compendia that then affected both romance, travel and other literary productions in the fourteenth century. In this way, Miyashiro is teasing out the possibilities of how race and pre-modern ecocriticism intersect. Dorothy Kim’s chapter, ‘Race and Religion: Race and the Devotional Sensorium’, destabilizes the consistent ocularcentrism of pre-modern race discussions to focus on the other senses, but particularly on smell, sound, flavour. This is a chapter about different methodologies and analytical points of view grounded in sensorial histories that help make explicitly clear how religious categories can be racialized. Rebecca Redfern and Joseph T. Hefner’s chapter ‘Race and Science: A Case Study of Bioarchaeological and Forensic Perspectives on Population Diversity’ is in fact about how bioarchaeological method works in analysing the pre-modern past. As they explain in their case study from London, England, By applying archaeological science, bioarchaeological and forensic anthropology techniques to the study of human remains, it has been possible to obtain new evidence about medieval Londoners from the mid-fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, showing that at least a third of people did not have White European ancestry, some of whom were mixed race and others of whom had spent their early childhoods in England. The impact of this bioarchaeological and forensic anthropological study is undeniably a bombshell that will effect the contours or redefining how we must address

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pre-modern critical race in our numerous cultural productions. As Dorothy Kim explained in her MLA 2020 talk, ‘Toxic Chaucer’, the discussion of racialized men and women in our literary texts cannot be seen as a projected fantasy but about the real, lived men and women who were part of the streets and urban life that Chaucer interacted with daily. Matthew Vernon’s chapter, ‘Race and Politics: Unkynde Monstrous Races and “Curled Darlings of Our Nation”’, re-examines the continuous issue with definitions and the hesitancy of working on race in the pre-modern archive. In fact, his chapter highlights, the malleability of race in the medieval imagination. The epistemic regimes scholars frequently impose onto medieval and early modern texts do not comport with the far more flexible and dynamic conceptions of race that a medieval or early modern writer would construct due to the necessities of encounter or having to live with people read as outside a ‘normative racial’ perspective. In so doing, Vernon relies on the work of critical race theory and particularly the work of racial biopolitics to examine these issues and particularly the blurred business of racemaking in the pre-modern past. Kathy Lavezzo’s chapter, ‘Race and Ethnicity: Circum-Atlantic Colonialisms’, examines the complexities of discussions of race and nation that address more recent discussions of race, nation and ethnicity in the work of Stuart Hall and Benedict Anderson. She digs into the archive of medieval Irish colonialism and into colonialism and the Americas in the work of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s Democrates secundus sive de justis causis belli apud Indos (A Second Democritus: on the Just Causes of the War with the Indians aka Democrates alter) which was a response to Bartolomé de las Casas Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies). Dorothy Kim and Michelle M. Sauer’s chapter, ‘Race and Gender: Pre-modern Critical Intersectionality’, bases its discussion on Patricia Hills Collins’s recent reconsideration of Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory and examines again how recent pre-modern feminist criticism has attempted to use intersectionality without its politicized, Black feminist and queer origin structures. They examine three areas to think of pre-modern intersectionality works: in the archives of the court cases of Jewish women in England; the life writing of Teresa of Cartagena and her status as a disabled converso; and in the examination of the Life of Mary of Egypt in the Byzantine court in discussing race and the transgender turn. In Chapter 8, M. W. Bychowski (with Robert Sturges) examines ‘Race and Sexuality: Conversion Therapy, Christian Conversion and Chivalric Romance’, and considers how the histories of transgender embodiment and racialization are interwoven by the logics of White supremacy. By analysing the intersecting histories of gender deviance and colonialism, anti-Blackness and the gendered idealization of Whiteness, Bychowski (with Sturges) reveals how moments of transgender becoming do not preclude an adherence to White supremacist ideologies in the case of the Roman du Silence or The King of Tars. In the last chapter, Asa Simon Mittman addresses ‘Anti-Race: The Need for ColorSightedness in Medieval and Renaissance Studies’ to examine the politics of racial silence and the uses of anti-race ideology (often referred to with the ableist term ‘colourblindness’) to declare that discussing race is somehow racist. He tackles the pernicious persistence of scholarly arguments that are based on White silence and the accusation

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that discussing race is racist. It is fitting that the volume ends with grappling both with anti-race ideology while discussing how one works on anti-racism as a scholar and in the classroom. The images of Wiley and Kaphar demonstrate that to alter a history that has for centuries exclusively centred White Europeans, we need to change the way we look. Shay-Akil McLean opens ‘Isolation by Distance and the Problem of the Twenty-First Century’ with a short quote from Toni Morrison. We would like to end this introduction here, but with Morrison’s full quote from her 2004 Wellesley College commencement speech: [C]ontrary to what you may have heard or learned, the past is not done and it is not over, it’s still in process, which is another way of saying that when it’s critiqued, analyzed, it yields new information about itself. The past is already changing as it is being reexamined, as it is being listened to for deeper resonances. Actually it can be more liberating than any imagined future if you are willing to identify its evasions, its distortions, its lies, and are willing to unleash its secrets. (Morrison 2004)

CHAPTER ONE

Definitions and Representations of Race Race as a Transhistorical Category GERALDINE HENG

[H]ow can I continue to insist that racism and premodern forms of ethnocentrism differ? —David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (1993: 74) Soon after a pilgrim militia from the Latin West captured Jerusalem in 1099, in that invasion of the Levant we now call the First Crusade, Guibert de Nogent, the learned abbot of Nogent-sur-Coucy, wrote an elaborate chronicle of the Latin occupation of the East from his perch in early twelfth-century France. Jubilantly, Guibert names the now-Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem a ‘new colony’ (novae coloniae) of Christendom, selfconsciously invoking the imperium of Rome as Christendom’s predecessor, in whose magisterial footsteps Christendom would now follow, in its own extraterritorial enterprise (Guibert de Nogent 1879: 245). Guibert’s evocation of Roman colonization as the template for Christian colonization, however, marks not just historical continuity – as the abbot’s elation supposes – but also a historical break. Guibert’s chronicle, the Gesta Dei per Francos – literally, the deeds of God through (the medium of) the Franks – registers that break: because God, now, is the author of the colonial enterprise, and Christianity is the authorizing discourse for invasion and occupation. Medieval colonialism, we thus see, is neocolonialism: religion, in the form of Christianity, has inserted a difference between two eras of colonization, creolizing the old template of the Roman Empire, so that a new colonial vernacular, a medieval vernacular, is produced. This creolized medieval vernacular will prove indispensable to all the later European colonial expeditions – Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, Spanish, Belgian – that would arrive around the world, not like Rome, but like Christendom, wielding the sword and the Book to found their own, Christian-coloured, empires in the modern era. We see from this one simple example the reverberating consequences of defining the meaning of historical phenomena accurately, as instantiations from one era are ported

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over into another era and are repeated – but never repeated identically as before, and always with difference. The allegory of naming and difference here also shows us how to think about race in transhistorical terms.

WHAT IS RACE? DEFINING RACE AS A TRANSHISTORICAL CATEGORY Scholars of pre-modern literature, history and art from antiquity through what used to be called the Renaissance, have long struggled with the concept and phenomenon of race. Like other concepts theorized by contemporary scholars studying modern eras – such as Orientalism – race has seemed to some like a theoretical imposition imported backward from the present into deep historical time. Accordingly, pre-modernists grappling with historical phenomena that looked distinctly racist or Orientalist have in the past resorted to a vocabulary of respectful deference to modernity, carefully naming their phenomena ‘proto-racial’ or ‘protoOrientalist’, and favouring a vocabulary of greater generality and benignity instead. In lieu of race, we have had ‘ethnicity’, ‘alterity’ or ‘otherness’; instead of racism, we have had ‘ethnocentrism’, ‘xenophobia’, ‘discrimination’, ‘prejudice’ or just ‘fear of otherness and difference’. The absence of trenchant tools, analytic resources and a vocabulary adequate to the task at hand thus made it impossible to acknowledge the magnitude of the racial phenomena, racial institutions and racial practices that occurred in the European Middle Ages, long before a terminology stamped with the name ‘race’ had formally coalesced in the Latin West. When the Jewish minority population of England was tagged with badges, herded into towns with a surveillance system for monitoring their livelihoods, imprisoned en masse for coinage offences, judicially murdered by the state for the trumped-up lie that they mutilated and crucified Christian children, slaughtered by Christian mobs, targeted for conversion by the state, repeatedly taxed to the edge of penury, subjected to a branch of government created specifically for their surveillance and, finally, deported from England in a last manipulative exploitation of their diminishing usefulness – when so totalizing a racial apparatus is marshalled against a target minority population, a label of ‘pre-modern prejudice’ hardly suffices as a description of the dimensions of horror endured by Jewish subjects. In fact, English Jews lived under the conditions of a racial state, the first racial state in the history of the West (Heng 2018a, 2018b: ch. 2). Revealingly, racial biomarkers were also attributed to Jewish bodies: a special stench (foetor judaicus); a peculiar facial physiognomy (facies judaica); even horns and a tail. Jewish men were said to bleed congenitally from their nether parts, like menstruating women. Stigmatized as conspiring with the Antichrist, charges of bestiality, blasphemy, diabolism, deicide, vampirism and cannibalism were laid at the door of Jews in the countries of Europe. Naming the biopolitics of how this minority population was characterized as merely anxiety over ‘alterity’ does not begin to address the abjection stigmatizing the bodies of this medieval race in Latin Christendom.1 Reading the archives of pre-modern and early modern Europe through the tools of critical race theory surfaces recognition of other forms of racial atrocity. The people we today call the Romani, who emerged from north-western India in the eleventh century and migrated westward, were enslaved by the monasteries and boyars of south-eastern Europe from the late Middle Ages well into the high modern era. Until this diasporic

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peoples were finally manumitted in the nineteenth century, ‘Gypsy’ was the name of an abjected and despised slave race (Heng 2018b: ch. 7). Sub-Saharan Africans were depicted in visual art as merciless torturers of Christ, and killers of the sainted John the Baptist. A carved tympanum on the north portal of the west façade of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Rouen (c. 1260) presents the malevolent executioner of John – with his right arm menacingly raised over the Baptist and brandishing a sword – as a phenotypic Black African. The thirteenth century, Jean Devisse shows us, abounds with images of this kind, in statuary, sculpture, illuminations and a variety of visual art. The encyclopaedia of Bartholomeus 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: white being, we are told, a mark of inner courage, while the men of Africa, possessing black faces, short bodies and crisp hair are ‘cowards of heart’ and ‘guileful’. Cantiga 186 of Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, commissioned by Alfonso X of Spain, 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. Black is also the colour of devils and demons, and the colour of sin, allowing Saint Jerome to doom the collective population of Ethiopia as a land of sinners (Devisse 1979: 61).2 Is cultural production of these kinds merely ‘proto-racial’? The killing fields of international war furnished yet another crucible of racial formation not adequately served by descriptions of ethnocentrism. Among the twelfth-century documents of the crusades, the great theologian Bernard of Clairvaux, who co-wrote the Latin Rule of the Templars, pronounced in his De Laude Novae Militiae (In Praise of the New Knighthood) that the slaughter of Muslims did not constitute homicide as such, the killing of humans, but merely malicide: the extermination of incarnated evil. Muslims were not merely unspeakably vile, abominable and accursed, as Pope Urban II, the instigator of the First Crusade, had said; they were in fact not to be seen as human beings at all, but as evil incarnate, evil personified. Saint Bernard accordingly 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 2009: 188). Authors in the Latin West did not even call the adherents of Islam ‘Muslims’ but, instead, Saracens, a name never applied by Muslims to themselves. Adapting a clever lie originally told about Arabs by Saint Jerome, that august patriarch of the Latin church, the naming of all people of the Islamic faith as Saracens (Saraceni) universally damns a diversity of populations as wily, deceitful liars who faked, through their name, a descent from Sarah, the legitimate wife of Abraham, and not from Hagar, the bondwomanconcubine, to avoid opprobrium (Heng 2018b: 110–12; see also Rajabzadeh 2019). Damning diverse populations of the enemy as scheming liars, in the very act of telling a scheming lie about them, is more than an act of ‘discrimination’: it is a textbook example of race-as-religion, of religious race. If pre-modernists were hesitant or slow to adapt the tools of analysis they needed, for fear of the charges of presentism and anachronism that would be laid at their door, critical race theorists themselves – modernists whose scholarship frequently focused on the eighteenth through twenty-first centuries – were equally reluctant to accept that race existed before the modern era (Heng 2011a).

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The miscellany of race theorists by and large insisted, again and again, that there was no race or racism before modernity: racial categories only emerged in the modern era (variously defined) as a by-product or correlative of modern socio-economic and political phenomena.3 Before the eras of modernity, only ‘premodern discriminations’ existed because ‘theology’, not ‘biology’, was the magisterial discourse of the West (Balibar 2003). Why was biology an indispensable ground of reference for race? Canonical race theory of the past three-quarters of a century in fact understood that race was, at base, a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences. Under a range of historical pressures and occasions, racial categories could be contingently filled by a miscellany of human groups. History attested that biological differences weren’t needed: in the United States alone, the Irish – White, Christian, physiologically indifferentiable from other Europeans – were a population that went into, and out of, race, witnessing the malleability of racial identification, and urging the conclusion that racial categories were without permanent content or foundation, whether of a biological or other kind. Indeed, no critical race theorist would have quarrelled with Anne Stoler’s oft-quoted and still salient example, in her 1997 study of the colonial Dutch East Indies: Race could never be a matter of physiology alone. Cultural competency in Dutch customs, a sense of ‘belonging’ in a Dutch cultural milieu … disaffiliation with things Javanese … domestic arrangements, parenting styles, and moral environment … were crucial to defining … who was to be considered European. (Stoler 1997: 197) Why, therefore, did canonical race theory, well into the twenty-first century, continue to insist on biology as the ground of racial reference, thus setting apart the European Middle Ages as a pre-racial, pre-political era that could be consigned to oblivion in the long history of race? Twentieth-century critical race theory emerged out of vigorous rejection of retrograde nineteenth-century theories of race. The nineteenth century, an era of expansive European imperialism characterized by the hierarchization of non-European races in service to the ends of empire, derived its instrumental theories of race from pseudoscientific discourses promulgated in the eighteenth century. In the United States, the pseudoscience of the Enlightenment conduced especially to supporting the chattel slavery of African Americans on whose labour the plantation economy of the southern states depended. Science and pseudoscience, in these centuries of high-modern race, focused avidly on the human body, busily sorting and categorizing bodily differences, so as to identify and characterize races and produce racial hierarchies, systematizing whole racial theories that were later discredited in the twentieth century. Ironically, twentieth-century critical race theories, emerging energetically to contest the pernicious discourses of the high-modern racial era, nonetheless remained marked by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century suppositions of the pre-eminence of biology and the body in dispositions of race. Despite the brilliance and variety of critical race theories in the last three-quarters of a century, racial formations not configured by biology, the body, DNA, blood and heritability, in non-modern eras – when religion, rather than science, was the magisterial discourse investigating and producing human differences – thus continued to be discounted as non-racial, and merely ‘theological’ ‘discrimination’.

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In my book The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, I summarize the history of resistance to premodernity as the time of race, as well as interventions by premodernists themselves (Heng 2018b; see also Heng 2011a, 2003: chs 2 and 4). Both in the book and here, I propose a stripped-down, basic definition as a 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. With a definition like this as a basic working 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 differences selected for essentialism will vary in the longue durée of human history, from the pre-modern eras well into late modernity and 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. Because biology has been apotheosized as the ultimate ground of racial reference, it is important to note that religion – the paramount source of authority in the European Middle Ages, and also for a number of historical periods and populations in postmedieval eras – can function both socioculturally and biopolitically: defining, biologizing and essentializing entire communities 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. In The Invention of Race, I critically discuss the emergence of racial thinking, racial acts, racial laws, racial institutions and racial phenomena, across a range of registers and crucibles of instantiation: invasion and occupation, nation-formation and stateformation, the hermeneutics of political theology, the imperatives of mercantile capitalism, holy war, settler-colonization, economic adventurism, empire-formation, contact and encounter, slavery, the consolidation of universal Christendom, and epistemological and epistemic change. The book critically treats Jews and Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Mongols and the Romani as ethnoracial constituencies that emerged, and were identified, and characterized, over a range of crucibles of instantiation. Here, I concentrate on varieties of racial form, racial dialect, racial logic and racial strategies that repeat with difference across the ages: adaptations across time that suggest the persistence of a transformational grammar of race from premodernity well into the modern period. Concurrently, I stress the importance of registering differences between periods and eras: for instance, while Roman colonization, medieval colonialism and the maritime empires of the early to high modern eras deploy ethnoracial strategies as their forces march across their known worlds, their differences also require recognition (on ‘ethnorace’ and the ‘ethnoracial’, see Goldberg 1993: 70–8). In similar fashion, the

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transhistorical phenomenon of slavery – an institution closely associated with racial formation in the United States – has had varied configurations, conditions and meanings across macrohistorical time.

RACIAL LOGIC, RACIAL FORM, RACIAL DIALECT: THE TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR OF RACE ACROSS TIME IN THREE EXAMPLES Theories of climate in dispositions of race Descending from antiquity all the way to the modern period, theories of climate, Denise McCoskey attests, offer a repeating arsenal in the amassing of racial dialect. As early as the second half of the fifth century bce, the infamous essay Airs, Waters, Places, traditionally attributed to Hippocrates – and glossed by McCoskey as an ‘extensive treatise on environmental theory’ aimed at ‘asserting a fundamental division between the continents of Asia and Europe’ (2012: 46) – already offers fully fledged the racial logic of climate, environment and geography as grounds that predispose fundamental differences among humans from which group character can be assigned to differentiate between the inhabitants of continental regions. Climate and environmental theory is later adjusted by the Romans in line with their specific imperial project. Since the geographically extensive Roman Empire, McCoskey urges, required the conceptualization of racial difference ‘along a scale, rather than through a strict binary’ (2012: 25), environmental theory now needed ‘to explain the “natural” superiority of the Romans and to rationalize the continuing extension of their imperial reach’ (48). Unsurprisingly, it was decided that ‘Romans were charged with improving the condition of other, less favourably situated groups by placing them under the civilizing mantle of Roman rule’ (48). In the medieval period, encyclopaedias such as De Proprietatibus Rerum, as we have seen, busily incorporated theories of racial character and raced behaviour based on climate, geographic location and the physiognomic mix of bodily humours and temperaments thought to devolve from climate and geography. Racial form configured by geographic location also transacted with another popular inheritance from antiquity: the Plinian tradition of monstrous races and freaks that were located, on medieval world maps, in Asia and Africa, regions depicted as teeming with human freaks of many kinds, from unclean cannibals to physically deformed grotesques. In a world map such as the well-preserved Hereford, a remarkable survival from thirteenth- or fourteenth-century England, Europe is visualized via architectural features such as fortifications and cathedrals – the built environment of civilized urban centres – and bordered by natural features such as rivers, while global races swarm in other vectors of the world. Cartographic depiction of pygmies, giants, hermaphrodites, troglodytes, Cynocephali, Sciapods and other quasi-human, misshapen, deformed and disabled peoples inherited from classical tradition thus harnessed the inheritance of antiquity to a medieval survey of the world that rendered Europe the civilized territory of urban life – a web of cities – while distilling global races and alien nations through a Plinian grid of human monstrosity. As a result, the ‘Monstrous Races tradition’ inherited from antiquity furnished, as the art historian Debra Strickland put it, an ‘ideological infrastructure’ for understanding the meaning of ‘other types of “monsters”, namely Ethiopians, Jews, Muslims, and Mongols’ (2003: 42).

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In the early and high modern period, doctrines of environmental and geographic determinism also prove indispensable for European imperial rule. Dutch colonial masters in the Indonesian East Indies subscribed to the belief that ‘[Asian] slaves were better suited than European recruits for the kind of labor required in the hot climate of Southeast Asia’ (Clulow 2019: 57). The subcontinent of India drew an unflattering comparison with Europe: India, it was thought, had been subjugated because her climate had made its inhabitants supine and fatalistic, while the bracing weather of northern Europe had produced a dynamic race, fit for conquest and exploration. (Harrison 2000: 1; McCoskey 2012: 169) A dynamic European race, fit for conquest and exploration, meant that empire was not the only beneficiary of race-based, geographical-climatic theory. Plantation slavery also crucially benefited from climate theory as a justificatory rationale: In the antebellum American South … [the] ideology was critical to the southern justification of slavery: ‘(t)hat Africans could apparently … endure such labor better than whites was proof positive to some that different climates had moulded the races differently and to others at least that Africans were historically better “acclimated” to hot climates’. (Mart Stewart, quoted in McCoskey 2012: 169) Across the early modern world, from island Southeast Asia to continental America, climate-based racial theory was deployed to justify and extol the use of slave labour. As they ramified, theories of climate and geography also shaded readily into how human responses to climate and geography should be judged, conducing to a logic of civilizational evolution that configured a distinctive racial form under the imperatives of colonialism. Gerald of Wales, accompanying his Anglo-Norman masters in England’s twelfthcentury invasion and occupation of Ireland, derisively opines in his Topographia Hiberniae (Topography of Ireland) that the native Irish, practicing transhumance in a beneficent environment, were barbarous and uncivilized, since they had ‘not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral living’ (Gerald of Wales 1861–91: 5:151; 1983: 101). In colonized Ireland, native labour was transformed into lack, moralized by English colonizers as laziness and self-indulgence, and assigned to the character of an entire people. English chronicles issued a chorus of censure: ‘[T]he soil of Ireland would be fertile if it did not lack the industry of the dedicated farmer; but the country has an uncivilized and barbarous people … lacking in laws and discipline, lazy in agriculture’ (William of Newburgh, quoted in Davies 2000: 124): The Irish people are … a people getting their living from animals alone and living like animals; a people who have not abandoned the first mode of living—the pastoral life. For when the order of mankind progressed from the woods to the fields and from the fields to towns and gatherings of citizens, this people spurned the labors of farming. (Gerald of Wales, quoted in Bartlett 1982: 176) Even in the twelfth century, we notice, modernity – symbolized by England as a poster child of agricultural cultivation, trade and commerce, and urbanization – is posited

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against a pre-modernity located in the colonies, and rendered as a prior moment of human development that England had long left behind. Caricatured as a primitive land – an underdeveloped Global South lying to the west of England – Ireland was accordingly positioned as a colonial project in need of evolutionary improvement, to force the irrois savages (savage Irish; Lydon 1972: 83) to emerge one day from their barbaric cocoon into a state of civilization. This was an agenda, Robert Bartlett observes, that ‘would not be out of place in nineteenth-century anthropological thought’ (1982: 176). The logic of evolutionary progress by which colonizers justify their extraterritoriality and craft their right to colonial rule – so much in evidence in later centuries in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, the West and East Indies, the Americas and elsewhere – is pronouncedly a racial logic, and exercises ‘the language of colonial racism’ (Bhabha 1994: 86). Racial logic of the evolutionary kind, from the Romans onwards, seems to promise (or even mandate) progress. Yet racial logic’s ostensible goal of a subject population’s achievement of a civilizational maturity that would guarantee their equality with their colonial masters is never attained, but merely floats as a vaunted possibility on an ever-receding horizon. The not-yet of racial logic then becomes perpetual deferment, a ‘not yet forever’ (Ghosh and Chakrabarty 2002: 148, 152). Thus we find four centuries later that England’s authors – Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland is especially eloquent – are still derisively bemoaning the pre-modern, backward, savage, uncivilized Irish. Writing in 1577 on Irish inability to move beyond ‘barbaric rudeness’ and stasis, Sir William Gerrard held that the Irish of his day, ‘lived as the Irish lived in all respects before the conquest’ four centuries ago (Davies 2000: 136). By Spenser’s time, of course, the Latin Christianity of the Irish could also serve as damnable religious difference: now abhorred as ‘Papists’, the Irish were easily demonized as ‘Atheists or infidels’ (Spenser 1992: 10:136).4

Christianities: The exclusionary logic of religion in the production of racial form The long history of Christianity, with its schisms, heresies, reform movements and other breakaway formations – and the determination that there can only be one Christianity, in the singular, with a singular dogma, not diverse Christianities – acquires a slippery, tenacious logic that configures multifarious features in racial formation arching across the eras. Differences between Christianity and Judaism, and Christianity and Islam, of course, conduced to the production of Jews and Muslims as racialized religious populations in medieval and post-medieval eras. But if differences between Christianity and other religions have been productive of race, differences within Christianity have proven equally conducive to virtual race-making. Gerald of Wale’s characterization of the colonized Irish as a barbarous, savage race pivots not only on socio-economic evolutionary logic but also on a characterization of the Irish as the wrong kind of Christians. Ireland had in fact converted to Christianity a century and a half before England, and Irish Christianity was Latin Christianity, not a religious formation deemed heretical or schismatic in Gerald’s time. Nonetheless, English invasion of Ireland required a theological hermeneutic that insinuated difference of a fundamental kind between the Roman Catholicism of the colonized (rendered as inferior, defective and deviant) and the Roman Catholicism of their Anglo-Norman masters (assumed as superior and normative). No less than the magisterial Bernard of Clairvaux in his Vita Sancti Malachiae (Life of Saint Malachi) declared the Irish to be ‘uncivilized in their ways, godless in religion,

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barbarous in their law, obstinate as regards instruction, foul in their lives: Christians in name, pagans in fact’ (quoted in Bartlett 1982: 169; my emphasis). Given that the Irish members of Latin Christendom were pagans in fact, Pope Adrian IV, writing to Henry II of England in 1155, could then authorize the English monarch to occupy Ireland, ‘with a view to enlarging the boundaries of the church … and for the increase of the Christian religion’ (Muldoon 2003: 73).5 If Roman Catholic Irish could be deemed pagans, despite their adherence to the Church of Rome, disputants of Rome’s dogma fared far worse. The thirteenth-century Franciscan missionary William of Rubruck, ensconced a world away from the Latin West and eager to spread Christianity’s reach, concluded, remarkably, that the alien Mongols of the Eurasian steppe were less vile and abhorrent than fellow Christian clergy who were Nestorians – Christians of the Church of the East – at the court of the Great Khan Mongke (Heng 2018b: 316–21). A century later, John of Monte Corvino, the archbishop of Khanbalik (Beijing) who dedicated his life to conversion of the Asian heathen in China, opined the same about his fellow Christians, the Nestorians (320). As outcasts from the Roman Church, it little mattered that the followers of the patriarch Nestorius (condemned as a heretic by the Council of Ephesus in 431) had in their diaspora spread the Christian message far and wide throughout West, South and East Asia, accomplishing the very work of Christian conversion around the world to which Franciscans and Dominicans, late-comers to global missionary work, aspired. The status of the Christians of the Church of the East as outcasts, heretics – religious faithful who were set apart, absolutely and fundamentally, from the membership of the Roman Church – sufficed to produce the racial-religious form that would define them as a virtual ethnorace for their Latin counterparts. In Europe itself, heretics – defined as anyone whose faith deviated from dogma – were prosecuted in inquisitions, tortured, branded, tagged with badges, with hundreds (if not thousands) executed at the stake. Do ‘heretics’ harden into a virtual race at specific historical junctures in the Latin West? The vocabulary and apparatus of heresy are deployed in signal instances of persecution and abjection: from the trials of the Order of the Temple in France, to the execution of Joan of Arc, heresy is operationalized as the preferred mechanism of sorting by which the Latin West cast out, condemned and put to death. Popular movements of ‘heretical’ Albigenses and Cathars evolved into the targets of holy war, as if they had been Muslim infidels. At Béziers, where they were massacred in droves during what’s now known as the Albigensian Crusade – by one account, twenty thousand were slaughtered – the papal legate is said to have called for all to be killed, leaving to God the business of sorting out the victims. Putative heretics were hounded and persecuted in inquisitions from the thirteenth century onwards, till long past the end of the medieval period, with torture, exile and execution being some of the favoured outcomes. The history of febrile internal division that conduced to the demonization of an otherwise non-physiologically differentiable population through the production of absolute intrareligious differences does not end. In the early modern era, the internecine war between Protestants and Catholics within a single nation, England, suggests an intractable historical continuity in the instrumentality of religion for the discovery of intractable differences. The intimate other within a religion was repeatedly found to be as abhorrent and condemnable as the infidel other, and differences within a religion could harden to become as absolute and fundamental as the differences between religions.

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In projects where absolute distinctions were needed, a vocabulary of feminization and Orientalism has performed as a strategic resource in the creation and manipulation of a resilient racial dialect across time. Such resources have a long pedigree: Edith Hall calls Aeschylus’ Persians, the oldest extant Athenian tragedy and first performed in 472 bce, ‘the first unmistakable file in the archive of Orientalism’ (Hall 1995: 99; McCoskey 2012: 149). Focusing on the Persian Queen Atosa, widow of the defeated Darius and mother of Xerxes, and set at Susa shortly after the Greek triumph over the Persians at Salamis, the play characterizes the defeated Persians through their weapons, their subscription to monarchic despotism, their gold and, above all, their Persian queen. An Oriental woman is the human face of the defeated Persians, feminizing and racializing the enemy. Herodotus’ Histories, of course, have long been infamous for characterizing Persians as a luxurious, effeminate and self-indulgent race, in contrast to their traditional enemy, the manly and virile Greek race, especially as represented by Sparta. In our own time, Herodotus’s Histories finds its apotheosis in the racial logic of the 2006 Hollywood blockbuster, 300, a movie that depicts the 479 bce Battle of Thermopylae between Spartans and Persians. Spartans, across a millennium and a half, have continued to be vigorous, manly, tragic representatives of the West, while Persians continue an effeminate, luxurious, sensual, effete Orientalized race. The unstable status of Greek Christians in the European Middle Ages is an instructive example of how racial form can oscillate between contradictory poles and be exploited for strategic instrumentality. Technically, the Great Schism that took place between Rome and Constantinople in 1054 rendered Greek brethren-in-Christ schismatics and heretics to the Latin West. Nonetheless, the characterization of Greek Byzantines as authentic Christians had to be resurrected, and their schismatic and heretical status overlooked, when in 1095 at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II preached the urgent necessity of rescuing fellow Christians in the East and Christian lands from the Muslim infidel, in a papal exhortation that led to the armed mass excursion we now call the First Crusade. Once the militia from the West are in the Levant, however, the spiritual mission of brotherly rescue rapidly evaporates as the pilgrim-militants begin to recapture territory in the East that should be restored to their Greek brethren-in-Christ. Instead, the schismatic status of the Greek Christians in Outremer is quickly reinstated, and a racial dialect of feminization and Orientalization is speedily invoked by Latin Crusaders eager to retain for themselves the Greek territories that were reconquered from the Seljuk Turks.6 Accordingly, in 1098, while the militia is still in medias res en route to Jerusalem, a letter to Pope Urban II signed by all the leaders of the First Crusade already damns the Greeks – on whose behalf the Latin pilgrim militia from the West was supposedly fighting – as ‘heretics’ (Hagenmeyer 1901: 164). The Gesta Francorum et Aliorum Hierosolymitanorum (Deeds of the Franks and Other Pilgrims to Jerusalem), one of three eyewitness Latin chronicles of the First Crusade, and written by a crusader during the First Crusade itself, correlatively mocks Greek Byzantines as an effeminatis gentibus (effeminate people; Hill 1962: 67) – unironically repeating, with difference, the old Greek mockery of Persians. Other chronicles follow suit, deriding Greek Byzantines – who comprised the last remnants of the Roman Empire that had constituted a bulwark of Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean for a millennium – as muliebres (effeminate creatures) who behaved like muliebriter (women; Wright 1985: 129). With Latin chronicles and vernacular romances inveighing against the Byzantines, the characterization in the West of Eastern Christians

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as womanish and effeminate efficiently conjoins the schismatic status of Greek Christians and their possession of fabled Byzantium. It should hardly surprise us when the Fourth Crusade is diverted to Constantinople in 1204, and that Queen of Cities is despoiled of its legendary riches and relics. After all, the chronicler Robert de Clari says to the bishops of Soissons, Troyes and Halberstadt, the Greeks deserved it, because they were ‘worse than the Jews’ (Heng 2003: 81).7 Feminization and Orientalism, in tandem with the vocabulary of heresy, prove indispensable resources over the centuries for the creation of a resilient racial dialect of durable tenacity and persistence.

The logic of the ‘cut’ in the grammar of race To racialize the neighbour who resembles one’s own people physiologically and in religious dispensation, and the fellow Christian whose Christianity must be cast out as absolutely and fundamentally different, requires the instrumentality of a diversionary action through which difference can be insinuated, an action that has sometimes usefully been called – for example, by the historian Kathy Biddick (2000) – a ‘cut’. In medieval Christendom, a prime example of a cut in historical genealogy that produces racial form is seen when a de facto epistemic break is instituted in the history of the Jews. To separate and distinguish the Hebrews and Israelites of the Old Testament – a people medieval Christendom wished to continue to admire and cite in theology, doctrine and cultural production – from the medieval Jews who lived cheek by jowl contemporaneously with Christians in the heartlands of Europe (and a people to whom Christians owed many kinds of fiscal, cultural and theological debt), a de facto cut was implicitly insinuated into the history of the Jews, to perform as an epistemic break in Jewish genealogy separating past from present, and representing the people of the present as fundamentally unlike those of the past. The logic of this cut – the insertion of a key distinction between the Jews of the past, and the Jews of the present, to deny the genealogical continuity of a people – instrumentally neutralized contradiction and allowed for the emergence of race. Revealingly, Christendom’s insinuation of difference between despised contemporaneous Jews and admired biblical Hebrews is an example that has been repeated in the long history of race. Denise McCoskey finds the Romans of antiquity devising a similar tactic in their treatment of the Greeks of their time: The Romans sought at times to downplay Greece’s enormous cultural influence by showing strong distain for contemporary Greeks, thus driving ‘an ideological wedge between the inventors of civilization and the Greeks of their own day’. (McCoskey 2012: 74) Yet a cut can also fail as a technology of distinction in other eras, when a plethora of competing interests may be at stake. In Shakespeare’s Othello, the insertion of a distinction between the eponymous Black Moor who is a Christian warrior against the infidel Turks, and Black Moors who are only infidel enemies, fails to secure safety for the once-enslaved, Black Christian converso general Othello against the machinations of an internal enemy within Christendom named Iago. Refusing a distinction between Christian converso Moor and infidel Moor, the character Iago – is his name abbreviated from Santiago Matamoros, Saint James the Moor Killer, patron saint of the Reconquista? (Moore 1996) – signals

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the arrival of an era in which epidermal race abuts against religious race, slavery, English nationalism and war in complex intersectional configurations in the long history of race.8

DEFINITIONS AND PERIODIZATION IN RACE MATTERS: EMPHASIZING DIFFERENCE ALONGSIDE REPETITION Defining race as a transhistorical category requires an accompanying acknowledgement of differences in the character and functionality of racial institutions in different eras. Periodization matters: the racial institution of slavery, for instance, is a key example. Slavery as an institution in the medieval period assumed a variety of forms and was an equal opportunity condition for all races. The slavery endured by the Romani in Wallachia and Moldavia spanned centuries from the late medieval well into the modern era, but Romani domestic and field slavery in south-eastern Europe differed considerably from Egypt’s Mamluk military slavery of the mid-thirteenth through early sixteenth centuries. For the Mamluks – an elite military comprising primarily Turkic and Circassian slave boys who were plucked from continental Eurasia, and raised among other slave boys as professional warriors – the Sultan of Egypt and Syria could only be drawn from the ranks of former slaves. For the most powerful Islamic polity of the southern Mediterranean and Levant till the ascendancy of the Ottomans, the requirement of having once been a slave was thus an indispensable condition of eligibility for the highest office in the land. In parallel fashion, prized Caucasian female slaves in Islamic Spain or in the Levant could rise to become the revered mothers of caliphs, sultans and emirs – or, in the case of the remarkable Shajar ad-Durr, arguably to become the only Mamluka in the threecentury history of the Mamluk dynasties. In Dar al-Islam, extraordinary social mobility meant that being a slave could be an important first step to power, wealth, status and authority – an avenue of upward mobility importantly open to women. This is not the case for plantation slaves in the later American south. Pre-modern slavery can thus be distinct from early modern and modern slavery, especially the plantation slavery of North America, and distinct also from the mutating forms of slavery (including child sex trafficking) that dog the twenty-first century. Caucasians, and eastern and western ‘Europeans’ were sold at slave markets alongside all other races throughout the Middle Ages, marking medieval slavery off from later, Africasourced plantation slave labour in the early modern and modern periods. Household slaves were common and typical in the pre-modern period; plantation and field slaves were statistically less attested. In the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade, slaves could become trusted commercial agents acting on behalf of absent entrepreneurs (Ghosh 1992, 1993); and, outside the lands of Christendom, manumitted slaves might become generals, admirals, diplomats and governors. The sheer variety of medieval slavery’s conditions and opportunities thus attest to very specific differences within the medieval period, as well as between the medieval and later periods in the phenomena that characterized the institution we call slavery. Continuities in some modalities of slavery across medieval and early modern time, but also discontinuities between the racial slavery of these historical periods, remind us that in discussions of race, distinctions must be honoured with acknowledgement that periods can be marked off differentially by institutions and phenomena that can recur, but recur with varied manifestations, over la longue durée.

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This is not to say, of course, that racialized groups and populations cannot be studied for their historical continuities within a transformational grammar of race across macrohistorical time. Africans, the Romani, Jews and Muslims all constitute racialized populations across the longue durée whose treatment variegates over time, with racial instrumentalities being renewed, adjusted, adapted or transformed. We have also seen that religious dogma can conduce to the devolution of differences that are deemed absolute and fundamental across several centuries, in varying and transformational processes of othering so that coreligionists can repeatedly be cast out and treated like a virtual race. In demonstrating the historical persistence of racialization across temporal eras and instrumentalities of othering, my final example are the Cagots: abject communities of people living on the peripheries of towns and villages on both sides of the western Pyrenees throughout Béarn, Aquitaine, Navarre and the Toulousain. Key representatives of an ethnoracial group whose stigmatization extends over deep time, from the tenth through the eighteenth century, these impoverished, subaltern Christians who were not physically or linguistically differentiable from the townspeople by whose margins they lived accrued a variety of racial form over time.9 Daniel Hawkins’s MA thesis, Chimeras that Degrade Humanity: The Cagots and Discrimination (2014), tracks how Cagots – who were also called capots, cassots, gésitains, crestiaa, gahets and agots, as well as other names – were shunned, despised and abhorred by their neighbouring townsfolk from medieval into modern time. Citing legislation from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century that segregate Cagots into residential quarters and occupations, and restrict their day-to-day behaviour (Hawkins 2014: 6), Hawkins shows how Cagots were refused entry into taverns and denied the use of public fountains; forbidden to sell food or wine, or touch food in the market; forbidden to work with livestock, carry arms or walk barefoot; and, though they were Christian, also denied the sacraments. Cagots could not marry outside their kind, and had to keep to designated places in churches while they were alive. But their segregation was not being confined to the living: Cargots were also confined to designated places in cemeteries once they were dead. Cagots had to wear a badge of red cloth on their chest, sometimes in the shape of a duck or goose foot, and were subject to many punitive laws. Racialization of them also took biopolitical form: Cagots were said to lack earlobes, to possess an infectious odour and to give off great heat. ‘When the south wind blew, their lips, jugular glands and the duck foot marked under their left armpit all swelled. Their stench was well known’ (Hawkins 2014: 7). The early modern period did not see their release from subalternity: In 1629, André du Chesne wrote of ‘a people commonly called capots and gahets that everyone detests like lepers, with stinking breath. All are carpenters or coopers, the remains of the race of Giezi, or some say the Albigeois heretics, separated from the community by their homes in life and in the cemetery after death’. (Hawkins 2014: 7) Many of the prohibitions that set the Cagots apart from everyone else appear obsessed with them as sources of pollution or contamination: a phenomenon that scholars who study the Dalits, or untouchables of India, and those who study leprosy, would find familiar. Explanations abound for why the Cagots were reviled and cast out from society. Perhaps they once formed groups shunned for leprosy – Hansen’s disease – and it was fear of infection, or the moralizing of lepers as sinners damned by God, that caused their

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original segregation: the stigma then continued to be attached to their descendants over the generations. Symbolizing depravity, people with leprosy were also associated with heresy, R. I. Moore tells us. They were expelled from cities such as Paris – in 1321, 1371, 1388, 1394, 1402 and 1403 – and they were also massacred. Following rumours of a poisoning plot in 1321, one chronicler says, ‘they were burnt in almost all of France’ (Hawkins 2014: 15). Or, another explanation goes, Cagots may have been the descendants of Muslims, and the memory of their origins as infidel outsiders persisted across time. Or they had been the poor of Christ, pauperes Christi, the abjectly impoverished who struggled to scratch out a living. Hawkins finds that fifteenth-century records even insinuated that Cagots were related to Jews, that other community of racial subalterns who had to wear a badge, and were also subject to laws designed to set them apart. By 1721, Cagots are still being harassed: at a church in Biarritz, a carpenter and his son were roughed up by three municipal councillors, who refused to permit them their choice of seats, citing ‘a 1595 arrêt forbidding “gots”, “capots” and “gahets” from mixing with others or moving from their designated seats in church’ (Hawkins 2014: 2). When, after an investigation, the carpenter and his son were vindicated two years later by the Parlement of Bordeaux, a public riot by a ‘mutinous’ and ‘tumultuous’ crowd broke out in Biarritz, preventing the arrêt from being posted, and a popular uprising threatened to occur (2–4). The association of the Cagots with leprosy alerts us to a matrix in which disease and disability produced differences that were moralized, judged and construed as absolute and fundamental. If the ‘monstrous races’ tradition inherited from antiquity provided an ‘ideological infrastructure’ for interpreting ‘other types of “monsters”, namely Ethiopians, Jews, Muslims, and Mongols’, as Strickland urges (2003: 42), the Plinian monsters of tradition also uncannily seem to resemble deformed and disabled humans: their bodies too large, too stunted, too sexually overdetermined by their genitals, or missing a leg or an eye, or with corporeal features located in the wrong places. Disabled and non-normative bodies seem to form the basis of the caricatures that constitute the ‘monstrous races’ of tradition, among whom the Cagots – who might once have been lepers, diseased or disabled, the abject poor, Muslims, Romani or Jews – can be viewed as a historical example of a population deemed monstrous and abhorrent for reasons not of their making. The example of the Cagots, along with that of Jews, Africans, Muslims, the Romani, Christian communitas and even human ‘monstrosities’ persistently imagined as real, shows us that the infrastructure of ethnoracial formation in deep historical time repeatedly intersected with, and was dependent on, infrastructures of class, disease, disability, gender, sexuality and religion. Is it any wonder that race has been so long lived?

CHAPTER TWO

Race, Environment, Culture ADAM MIYASHIRO

Environmental explanations for physical and behavioural differences between human communities have been present among the Western tradition since antiquity. Ancient Mediterranean concepts about the composition of the world, such as its tripartite division into Asia, Africa and Europe, coupled with Aristotelian concepts of environmental zones, constructed the medieval idea that environmental habitus and geographical location were among the major determining factors that accounted for racial, physiognomic and behavioural differences. The concepts that we associate with the term ‘race’, such as corporeal and behavioural differences, has origins in the ancient and medieval tradition of ‘natural history’, a broad category of pre-modern ‘scientific’ writing that encompassed everything from botany and biology, to geography, medicine and history. The construction of so-called ‘biological’ definitions of race in medieval Europe were bound up with ideas about time and space and ‘universal history’. What was known as ‘natural history’ in late antiquity, would later appear as proto-encyclopaedic compendia of knowledge in medieval Europe, and conveys ideas about the race into late-medieval popular romance literatures and travel narratives. This chapter will examine the role of natural history as a discourse which worked to define racialized difference within the epistemological frameworks of compendia literature. Then, the attention will shift to how these ideas of race were transmitted to broader readerships in the fourteenth century. Literary texts such as the Alexander Romance, the Old French Chanson de Roland, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Middle High German Parzival, the Middle English King of Tars, and John Mandeville’s Travels (Figure 2.1), among many others, portray Blackness in both sympathetic and antagonistic roles, and frequently associate black skin with immorality and unnatural behaviour. Blackness is also closely associated with Islam well into the early modern period (as seen in Shakespeare’s Othello). Natural historical texts, for instance Vincent of Beauvais’s twelfth-century compendium, Speculum maius (The Great Mirror), and Ranulf Higden’s fourteenth-century Polychronicon convey, in non-narrative and proto-encyclopaedic form, environmental causes for Blackness and racial difference. The periodization of race in modernity typically focuses on pseudoscientific theories developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. Early modernist scholars, for instance Kim Hall, Ania Loomba and Sujata Iyengar, have successfully shown that early modern constructions of race, as shown in plays such as Shakespeare’s Othello, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest, have located early modern colonialism in Ireland and the Mediterranean, as well as the Americas, as generative of a

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FIGURE 2.1  John Mandeville’s Travels (early fifteenth century). British Library, MS Harley 3954, fol. 42r. © The British Library Board.

more consolidated form of racism (Hall 1995; Iyengar 2004; Loomba 2007: 595–620). Both Simon Estok (2011) and Gabriel Egan (2006) locate Othello’s racialized body as a form of ecopolitical construction: in Estok’s analysis, Othello’s monstrous dehumanized body ‘helps us to understand the struggles the early moderns had in defining the precise boundaries of nature’ (Estok 2011: 69; emphasis in the original). That Othello in his own words locates his fictional biography in Act 1 of the play in an Africa constructed by

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medieval literary texts (John Mandeville) – among the ‘the Cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose head do grow beneath their shoulders’ (Oth 1.3) – should indicate the extent to which medieval travel narratives shaped early modern ideas of racial difference. Cannibalism has been coded as part of the post-colonial ecocritical landscape. Peter Hulme, in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, discusses the ‘rich metaphorical hinterland in which the term [cannibalism] flourishes: appetite, consumption, body politics, kinship, incorporation, communion’ (1998: 4–5). Cannibalism is a radical othering of Native or Indigenous practice, in which it is assumed that the cannibal renders human life into bare, biological life when it is made as food. Cannibalism becomes pictured as ‘remains’, bones, fragments and remnants that recall the humanity of both the victim and the perpetrator. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin put it in Postcolonial Ecocriticism that ‘if colonialism can be said to have its own origin myths, none is more powerful than the suppression of the threatening “other” – the disavowed animal rival, the cannibal gnawing at the human heart’ (2015: 186). The boundaries between animal and human, the breaking of the taboo of eating human flesh, with its anxiety about Christian practices surrounding the Eucharist (a symbolic form of theophagy), point towards the political theology of the homo sacer (Agamben 1998) in pre-modern law with the split body between bios and zoe.

NATURAL HISTORY As the representation of the monstrous in Western discourses frequently operates in the spaces between human and inhuman, in colonial cultural contacts the spatially differentiated ‘other’ cultures become invented (imagined and inventoried) as ‘primitive’, ‘aboriginal’ and ‘barbarous’. Their cultural traits are ‘naturalized’ through their interconnections with geography and the natural landscape, as the amorphous term ‘Natura’ becomes the ordering principle in the world. George Economou defines ‘Natura’ in the classical sense, saying that it could represent the sublunary world, the moment of contact between the world-soul and matter, or the proper movement, both individual and collective, inherent in all creatures in the world of becoming; it could be identified as the creative principle in the universe and thus venerated as a deity, and it could signify the entire universe, the all, as portrayed in Stoic poetry, which was the most direct antecedent of the medieval Natura. (Economou 2002: 54) According to Economou, the goddess Natura was seen as a threat to the philosophical foundations of early Christianity. In response, early Christians ‘took measures to place definite limitations on the potency of nature which they accomplished largely through making nature the creation and servant of God’ (Economou 2002: 54). Economou maintains that it was the Christian poet Prudentius (348–405) who first claims ‘the old gods and the worship of nature’ to be the work ‘of the Father who created everything (I.9–13)’ (54). The classical tradition of natural history is similarly assailed by early Christian world history, only to be rehabilitated through the discourse of the episteme in Isidore of Seville’s (c. 560–636) Etymologiae sive origines.

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In early Christianity, natural history embodies the language of difference and discord, but retains its discursive authority in mapping otherness. The taxonomic model of natural history foregrounds culture as history, while occluding and demarcating nature as prehistory. In its overarching scheme as discursive and aesthetic project, natural history’s foundational premise is maintained in its representations of monstrous, deviant and subservient bodies that are found in peripheral spaces. Pliny the Elder’s monumental Historia Naturalis (completed around 77 ce) initiates the codification of Natura that would remain strong in the Western tradition.1 His work shows similarities to other Roman and Greek encyclopaedic texts, but as Andrew Wallace-Hadrill points out, Pliny is the first to shift Natura towards a cultural definition: Despite its monumental extent and its apparently rambling structure, the Natural History has a coherence, indeed a passionate single-mindedness of purpose, that is reminiscent of, and parallel to, that of Lucretius. Pliny’s subject, clearly stated, and frequently reiterated, is Nature. But it is Nature in a context, or perhaps rather Nature as a context: the natural world stands in contrast to and in relationship with the human world. The history of Nature is thus simultaneously a history of Culture. The Natural History of the earth is by inversion the Unnatural History of Man. (Wallace-Hadrill 1990: 81) In the first century, Mediterranean writers such as Pliny see Britain as positioned upon the periphery of the Western world, near Ultima Thule, a place which Pliny states to be ‘ultima omnium quae memorantur’ (the farthest of all which are mentioned; Pliny 1947: 198). Britain and Ultima Thule boast no ‘monstrous’ races, however, despite their relative isolation in the north-west. It is at the most easterly margins of the known world that monstrous races are found, specifically ‘India Aethiopumque’ ( ‘in India and Ethiopia’; Pliny 1947: 518). The Historia Naturalis records these anomalies as part of the flora and fauna of distant places, apparent not only in human monstrosity but also in botanical and zoological hyperbole: ‘maxima in India gignuntur animalia: indicio sunt canes grandiores ceteris. Arbores quidem tantae proceritatis traduntur ut sagittis superiaci nequeant’ (the largest animals are born in India: in proof, the dogs are larger than all the rest. The trees are indeed recounted as being of such a great height that arrows cannot overshoot them; 518). Turning to the Greek authority Megasthenes, Pliny describes a hybridized bestial human race after establishing the position of the Antipodes on the mountain called Nulus: ‘in multis autem montibus genus hominum capitibus caninis ferarum pellibus velari, pro voce latratum edere’ (however, on many mountains a race of men with the heads of dogs are covered with the hides of wild animals, [and] speak in a barking voice; 520). Pliny gives another account of dogheaded creatures: ‘Nomadum Aethiopum secundum flumen Astragum ad septentrionem vergentium gens Menisminorum appellate abest ab oceano dierum itinere viginti; animalium quae cynocephalos vocamus lacte vivit, quorum armenta pascit maribus interemptis praeterquam subolis causa’ (A second Ethiopian nomadic tribe facing the river Astragus towards the north, called the Menismini, is twenty days’ journey from the ocean; it lives on the milk of the animals which we call dog-headed apes, herds of which it keeps, killing the males, except for the purpose of offspring; 526). Pliny then offers a rationalization of these peculiarities: ‘Haec atque talia ex hominum genere ludibria sibi, nobis miracula, ingeniosa fecit natura’ (Ingenious Nature made these and such types of men as toys for herself and wonders for us; 526).

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For Pliny, however, Eastern bodily monstrosities are intimately connected with the land and geographical features. It is the presence of the deviant body which demarcates the margins of the world as both an actualized and virtual space. The situation of these three dog-beasts, represented alternately as hyperbole, hybrid and livestock, denotes the various degrees of naturalization of these genera. The larger than average Indian dog supposes a link with the size of the trees; the flora matches the fauna, as they are equally symptomatic of their distorted space. The dog-headed men who live in mountainous areas appropriate ‘natural’ traits from each of their principal parts: though they wear clothes, they can communicate only through barking and are thus an admixture of the human and bestial. When the marginalized, antipodal other has relative subject-agency, it becomes mitigated through retaining the natural features of the bioscape. As livestock, however, the cynocephalos becomes a part of the bio-landscape itself, commodified by the production value of its milk and becoming animalia in the Roman legal sense of property. The large Indian dog, whose monstrosity lies only in its proportion, and the domesticated Cynocephali (dog-headed creatures) both lack language, yet are associated with human civilization. As each creature is naturalized to its surroundings, they are all equally appropriated as miracula and ludibria, having their origination in Natura, but remaining subhuman. Pliny’s monstrous races, especially the Cynocephali, become a point of contention for Augustine and a point of departure for early Christian historiography. Augustine’s response to the mythographic trajectory initiated by Pliny uses Christian genealogy to efface these aberrancies. In De civitate Dei (written 413–427), Augustine directly comments on one of Pliny’s aberrant races: Quid dicam de Cynocephalis, quorum canina capita atque ipse latratus magis bestias quam homines confitetur? Sed omnia genera hominum, quae dicuntur esse, credere non est necesse. Verum quisquis uspiam nascitur homo, id est animal rationale mortale, quamlibet nostris inusitatam sensibus gerat corporis formam seu colorem sive motum sive sonum qualibet vi, qualibet parte, qualibet qualitate naturam: ex illo uno protoplasto originem ducere nullus fidelium dubitaverit. (Augustine 1981: XVI.8) (What shall I say of the Cynocephali, whose dog-like head and barking proclaim them beasts rather than men? But it is not necessary to believe in all the races of men which are purported to exist. Truly anyone anywhere who is born a man, that is a rational, mortal animal, no matter how unusual the form, colour, gesture, or sound of his body, or how [unusual] in some power, some part, or some natural quality, may be to our senses, no Christian will have doubted that his descent originates from that one protoplast.2) For Augustine, these monstrosities waver between the categories of homo and bestia: ‘nam et simias et cercopithecos et sphingas si nesciremus non homines esse, sed bestias, possent illi historici de sua curiositate gloriantes velut gentes aliquas hominum nobis inpunita vanitate mentiri’ (for if we did not know that apes, long-tailed monkeys, and sphinxes are not men, but beasts, those historians, boasting about their novelty as if it were some races of people, would be able to fabricate them for us with unrestrained falsity; Augustine 1981: XVI.8). Augustine concludes his critique by stating, ‘aut illa … omnino nulla sunt; aut si sunt, homines non sunt; aut ex Adam sunt, si homines sunt’ (either these things … are without doubt non-existent; or if they are [existent], they are not men; or if they are

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men, they come from Adam; XVI.8). The naturalization of the human, then, becomes a process of etymology instead of geographical resonance and appropriation, as Augustine also condemns belief in the Antipodes: ‘Quod vero et antipodas esse fabulantur … nulla ratione credendum est’ (And because, in truth, the antipodes are invented … with no reasoning is this credible; XVI.9). Again, if there are people ‘a contraria parte terrae’ (from the opposite side of the world), they too are descended from the protoplast (‘ex illo uno protoplasto originem’) or they are not human (XVI.9). Echoing Plutarch, Augustine here calls attention to the fictiveness inherent in the classical conceptualizations of world geography, positing that the historici (the historians) have produced fabula using mendacious and problematic discourse centred on their choice to lie (mentiri). The delineations between the fabula, historia and mentiri are more fully expressed in Augustine’s two treatises De mendacio (395) and Contra mendacium (422). As a careful reader of Cicero, Augustine may have also noted Cicero’s proclamation in De legibus that in the histories of the Greek historians Herodotus – whom Cicero calls ‘patrem historiae’ (the father of history) – and Theopompus ‘sunt innumerabiles fabulae’ (there are innumerable fables; Cicero 1928: I.1.5). The problem of monstrosities becomes a discursive transgression, bound to a textual fabric and perhaps symptomatic of the origins of historical discourse itself. Although early Christian discourses, such as those of Augustine, Orosius and Isidore, attempt (in accordance with Edenic or Noachic genealogies) to deny the existence of monstrous beings, they too reinforce the deliberate othering of certain human cultures and experiences as aberrant, deviant and non-normative. In turn, as we will see, the mundane – that which is experienced in the mundus or the world – appropriates monstrous forms that are associated with invasion, colonization, degeneration and criminality. Classical monstrosity, with its giants, dwarves and man-beast permutations, anticipates the mundane monstrosities to be found within foundational historical and literary texts of the medieval tradition. In Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae sive origines (completed around 600), the governing force of etiology shapes this compendium as a kind of phenomenal ‘natural history’ rooted in discursive practices. Isidore shifts Pliny’s scope of ‘natural history’ into the virtual space of epistemology by focusing on linguistic origins. He thus recuperates the Plinian tradition by reconstituting natural history as something other than historiography, and evades the Augustinian critique that accused writers of distorting images of monstrosity. But Isidore’s shift to bring monstrosity into the realm of knowledge exposes its fictional and fabricated constitution and bring it into alignment with a Christian worldview. Many consider Isidore’s Etymologiae a pivotal work in the movement from classical antiquity to the early Middle Ages, as Henri Marrou has argued (1966: 39–40), yet Isidore’s debt to the Plinian, and thus anti-Augustinian, vision of the world cannot be overlooked. The Cynocephali, asserted as real by both Pliny and Aulus Gellius, rejected by Augustine, and never mentioned by Orosius (1882), reappear in the Etymologiae, under the rubric of ‘De portentis’: Sicut autem in singulis gentibus quaedam monstra sunt hominum, ita in universo genere humano quaedam monstra sunt gentium, ut Gigantes, Cynocephali, Cyclopes, et cetera. … Cynocephali appellantur eo quod canina capita habeant, quosque ipse latratus magis bestias quam homines confitetur. Hi in India nascuntur. (Isidore of Seville 1911: XI.iii)

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(However, although there are some monstrosities of men in each race, yet there are some monstrosities of races of entire species, as Giants, Cynocephali, Cyclops and others. … Cynocephali are called that because they have dog’s heads, and their barking reveals them more as beasts than men. They are born in India.3) The Cynocephali are mentioned again by Isidore, under the heading ‘De bestiis’: ‘Cynocephali et ipsi similes simiis, sed facie ad modum canis’ (And the Cynocephali themselves [are] similar to apes, but with the face of a dog; Isidore of Seville 1911: 47). The almost exact mirroring of Augustine’s language is employed in a conflation of various attributes of these monstrous beings. Like the variety of dog-beasts in Pliny’s Historia naturalis, which shift in place from India to Ethiopia and in quality from beast to subhuman or livestock commodity, Isidore’s Cynocephali move from monstrous to beastly. He mentions nothing regarding Augustine’s argument, and since he is not producing a historical account, his description would fall beyond the focus of Augustine’s attack. Isidore does not supply a lexical etymology, but further classifies these as types of terrigenas, ‘licet et terrae filios vulgus vocat: quorum genus incertum est’ (the public calls them the children of earth, and it is permitted: their race is uncertain; XI.iii). Isidore elsewhere attempts a merger of Plinian and Augustinian logic by stating that monstrosities ‘non sunt contra naturam, quia divina voluntate fiunt, cum voluntas Creatoris cuiusque conditae rei natura sit’ (are not against nature, because they were made by divine will, when the will of the Creator founded the nature of each thing; Isidore of Seville 1911: XI.iii). He further elaborates upon the vocabulary of monstrosity: Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura. Portenta autem et ostenta, monstra atque prodigia ideo nuncupantur, quod portendere atque ostendere, monstrare ac praedicare aliqua futura videntur. (Isidore of Seville 1911: XI.iii). (Portents thus are not made against nature, but against what is known to be nature. However, portents and omens, monsters and prodigies are named, therefore, because they seem to portend, show, reveal, or predict something coming.) The classical discourse of the monstrous races, as displayed in Pliny and Isidore, had an influential role in shaping medieval views on corporeal, genealogical and geographical difference insofar as those views stressed the boundaries between the natural and unnatural. The images consolidated in these early encyclopaedic works appear throughout the medieval period in almost every form of literary production, from chronicles to travel narratives to theatre and poetry. However, as the standard representations of the monstrous races encounter differences of time and culture, they morph to suit the needs of authors and compilers who deploy the monstrous body for a variety of reasons and in a number of contexts. Vernacular abridgements of the classical descriptions of monstrous races appeared throughout early medieval Europe – frequently under the rubric of the ‘Mirabilia mundi’ or ‘wonders of the East’, but they also became closely connected to the monstrous bodies of Germanic folklore, which featured attributes similar to those of the monstrosities of antiquity (Figure 2.2).

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FIGURE 2.2  The Psalter Mappa Mundi, detail of the ‘monstrous races’. BL Add. MS 28681, fol. 9r. © The British Library Board.

HIGDEN AND RACE AS ENVIRONMENT The fourteenth-century encyclopaedic tradition offers a much more complex view of the world and shows us how the discourse of natural history was employed to racialize non-European, and particularly African, populations. Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, a ‘chronica multorum temporum’ (a chronicle of many times; Higden 2012: 1.26) in

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seven books (book 1 is a description of the world, books 2–7 the six ages of the world), completed in 1342, was immensely popular among historians and intellectuals in the fourteenth century. It was translated twice into English, first by John Trevisa in 1387, and then by an anonymous fifteenth-century translator. The translator John Trevisa also translated Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things), a thirteenth-century Latin encyclopaedia that was influenced by Vincent of Beauvais’ earlier encyclopaedia, Speculum Maius. John Trevisa’s English translation of the Polychronicon was printed by the late fifteenth-century printer William Caxton in 1482. As Kathleen Tonry notes, ‘the Latin text remained well-known into the fifteenth century, and yet it was Trevisa’s English translation that moved the Polychronicon into the orbit of writers as diverse as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, William Langland, John Mirk, Henry Bradshaw, and, of course, William Caxton’ (2012: 173). Higden asserts the importance of classical knowledge in his First Preface to his Polychronicon.4 He is not averse to including the ‘figmenta gentilium’ and ‘dicta ethnicorum’ (‘figments of the gentiles’ and ‘sayings of the ethnics’; Higden 2012: 16) – ‘ethnicorum’ and ‘ethnica’ were translated by John Trevisa as ‘lawles’ and ‘heþen’ (16– 17), while the fifteenth-century translator has ‘ethnikes’ – as the knowledge of wondrous places serves the Christian religion (16). Using the language of the body to underscore the naturalizing of his writing, Higden explains that just as the wondrous places are ‘inserantur’ (grafted; 16) here and there throughout his ‘opusculo’ (16; “little work), he avoids excerpting ‘membratim’ (piecemeal; 16) from elsewhere – Trevisa has ‘parcel mele’ while the anonymous translator has ‘broken in to smalle membres’ (17) – by constructing his history linearly (‘lineamentaliter’), so that absurdity and playfulness precede serious matters, and paganness precedes Christian religion: ‘ita seriosis ludicra [alt. ludibria], ita religiosis ethnica’ (16). Higden’s terms ‘inserantur’ (‘plant’, ‘graft’ or ‘implant’; 16), ‘membratim’ (piece by piece; 16), and ‘concorporatis’ (put together; 16) all suggest the fragmentation of knowledge and its rejoining through a textual body. Higden leaves a large gap between what is credible or not. Although in the Preface he remarks that ‘mirabilia vero non sunt omnino discredenda’ (truly not all marvels are to be discredited; 16), yet in book 2, chapter 2, he rejects the Plinian monstrosities such as the Cyclops and Sciopod as not credible: ‘Ad quod dicimus, quod omnia hominum genera qui dicuntur esse credere non est necesse’ (To this we say that it is not necessary to believe all of those races of men who are said to exist; Higden 2012: 204). The echo of Augustine here is clear (see above). Yet in the description of Ethiopia, there are ‘Garamantes’ and ‘Troglodytas’, some races eat serpents and others, lacking heads, have mouths and eyes in their chests; these are unnamed but are obviously the Blemmyae (158). Some have a dog for a king, ‘cujus motu augurantur’ (they augur by his movements; 158), and there are various fabulous beasts, including dragons ‘ex quorum capitibus et cerebro gemmae extrahuntur’ (from whose head and brains gems are extracted; 158). Trevisa interjects twice in the descriptions of Ethiopia to say that it is the ‘londe of Blomenn’ (45), and that because of the burning of the sun, ‘hatte Ethiopia of þe colour and hewe of þe men of þe lond, þat beþ blewe men’ (called Ethiopia because of the colour and hue of the men of the land, that is ‘blue men’; 157). The term ‘blewe men’ designates Black Africans (blue being equated to black), a phrase also found in Layamon’s Brut – ‘Of Ethiope he brohte þa bleomen’ (Layamon 1963: line 25380) – and also used by Icelandic scribes to describe Black Africans in geographical texts. Sverrir Jakobsson has noticed that in Icelandic geographical literatures Vinland (the Norse colony on Labrador Island) and Africa are construed as neighbouring places:

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As early as the Historia Norvegiae, an attempt was made to locate it [Vinland] somewhere close to known lands in the south. Greenland is said to be ‘a Telensibus repreta et inhabitata oc fide catholica roborata terminus est ad occasum Europæ, fere contingens Africanas insulis, ubi inundant oceani refluenta’ [discovered and populated by the inhabitants of Thule and confirmed in the Catholic faith. It is the western boundary of Europe, almost touching the African islands, where they are washed over by the ocean] …. In Icelandic encyclopedias, on the other hand, it is more a case of Vínland touching Africa: ‘Sudr fra Grenlandi er Helluland, þa er eigi langt til Vinlandz ens goda, er sumir ętla at gangi af Affrika, ok ef sva er, þa er úthaf innfallanda á milli Vinlandz ok Marklandz’ [South from Greenland is Helluland, then Markland and then it is not far to Vínland the Good, which some believe is attached to Africa, and if so, then there is an ocean flowing between Vínland and Markland]. (Jakobsson 2001: 99–100) Jakobsson claims, analysing the Icelandic geographical descriptions, that ‘the Skrælings are “black” and live in Africa’, yet points out that ‘they were not “blámenn” [Negroes], a term used for black Africans’ (2001: 100). Jakobsson explains that the ‘black’ Skrælings are illiligir [malignant] and have illt hár [evil hair]. They are clearly classified as illþýði [villains], a word whose meaning changed gradually in medieval writings. In the oldest Icelandic manuscripts, illþýði is used to signify criminals, robbers and pirates. But we also find references to Turks and Negroes as evil peoples, and this time the term clearly applies to a certain type of foreigner. Pirates, berserks and giants are frequently referred to as villains in Icelandic saga writing around 1400, along with Negroes. (Jakobsson 2001: 100) Mauritania, in North Africa, is also a Black country, according to Higden: ‘Dicitur autem Mauritania a mauron, quod est nigrum, quasi nigrorum patria’ (However, it is said that Mauritania comes from mauron, that is black, as it is the patria of Black men; Higden 2012: 168). Higden and Trevisa’s comprehensive view of Africa deserves quotation in full. This is Higden, citing Priscian and Pliny: Book I, Capitulo VII: De partium orbis descriptione Plinius, libro sexto. Tenendum est quod Asia sit quantite maxima, Europa minor, sed part est in populorum numerosa generositate; Africa vero et situ et populis partium est minima. Priscianus, in Cosmographia. Idcirco qui res humanas evidentius agnoverunt duas tantum orbis partes accipiendas censuerunt, scilicet Asiam solummodo et Europam; Africam vero censuerunt Europae finibus deputandam, quia et spatio latitudinis eget et malo climati subjacet, laborat quoque corrupto aere, feris, et venenis. Idcirco qui eam tertiam orbis partem posuerunt, non spatiorum mensuras sed divisionum rationes secuti sunt, et tanquam situ pessimo languidam partem ab optimis resecarunt. Itaque Africa natura sui minus habet spatii, et inclementia coeli plus habet deserti. Et cum Africa sit modica, plus tamen terrae in ea solis ardore quam in Europa frigoris rigore manet inhabitata. Cuncta namque animantia sive germinantia tolerabilius ad summum frigoris quam ad summum ardoris accedunt. Item, Plinius, libro sexto. Inde est quod Europa corpore majores, viribus fortiores, animo audaciores, specie pulchriores efficit populos quam Africa. Nam radius solaris per continuam permanentiam super Afros exhauriendo

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eorum humores efficit corpore breviores, cute nigriores, crine crispiores, et per evaporationem spirituum facit animo defectiores. E contra est de septentrionalibus populis, in quibus frigore exterius poros oppilante pinguescunt humores; et inde fiunt homines corpulentiores, candidiores, et interius calidiores, ac per hoc audaciores. (Higden 2012: 1.48–52) Trevisa’s translation: De partium orbis descriptione. Plinius, libro sexto; Priscianus in Cosmographia. Capitulum septimum. Asia is most in quantite, Europa is lasse, and pere in noumbre of peple; bot Africa is lest of alle þe þre parties boþe in place and in noumbre of peple; and þerfore somme men, þat knowe men and londes, acountede but tweie parties of þe erþe onliche, Asia and Europa; and þey acountede þat Affrica longeþ to Europa, for Affrica is narwe in brede; and yuel doers, corrupte ayre, wylde bestes and venemous woneþ þerynne. Þerfore þey þat acounteþ Affrica þe þridde part acounteþ not by space and mesure of lengþe and brede, bot by dyuerse disposiciouns better and worse, and departeþ Affrica from Europa and Asia, as a sore membre þat is nouȝt from membres þat beeþ hole and sounde and in good poynt at þe beste. Also Affrica in his kynde haþ lasse space, and for þe sturnesse of heuene he haþ þe more wildernes. [And though Affryca be lytil, it hath more wyldernes] and waste londe, for grete brennynge and hete of þe sonne, þan Europa, for all þe chil and greet colde þat ofte is þerynne. For why all þat lyueþ and groweþ may bettre endure wiþ colde þan wiþ hete; bote mesure rule boþe. Plinius, libro sexto. Þerfore it is þat Europa norischeþ and bryngeth forþ men huger and gretter of body, myȝtier of strengþe, hardier and bolder of herte, and fairer of schap, þan Affrica. For þe son beme al wey abideþ vppon þe men of Affrica, and draweþ oute þe humours, and makeþ hem schort of body, blak of skyn, crips of heer, and by drawing oute of spirites makeþ hem coward of herte. Þe contrarie is of norþeren men, in þe whiche colde wiþ oute stoppeþ smale holes and poorus, and holdeþ the hete wiþ ynne; and so makeþ hem fatter, gretter, and whitter and hatter with inne, and so hardier and boldere of herte. (Higden 2012: 1.49–53) (Asia is the largest in size, Europe is smaller, but equal in the number of people. But Africa is least of all the three parts both in place and in number of people; and therefore, some men, that know people and lands, count only two parts of the earth only, Asia and Europe; and they calculate that Africa belongs to Europe, because Africa is narrow in breadth; and evil doers, corrupt air, wild and venomous beasts live there. Therefore they determine that Africa, the third part, counts not by space and the measure of length and breadth, but by various natures better and worse, and separates Africa from Europe and Asia, as a sorry member that is not from sections that are whole and sound and in good point at the best. Also Africa in its nature has less space, and because of the severity of heaven he has more wilderness. [And though Africa is small, it has more wilderness] and waste land, because of the great burning and heat of the sun, than Europe, because all the chill and great cold that is often therein. Because all that lives and grows may better endure with cold than with heat; but measure rules both. Pliny, book six. Therefore it is that Europe nourishes and brings forth men larger and greater of body, mightier of strength, hardier and bolder of heart, and fairer of shape, than

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Africa. For the sun beams always linger upon the men of Africa, and draws out the humours, and makes them short of body, black of skin, curly of hair, and by drawing out of spirits makes them coward of heart. The contrary is of northern men, in which the cold outside plugs small holes and pores, and holds the heat within; and so makes them fatter, larger, and whiter, and hotter within, and so hardier and bolder of heart.) In this traditional tripartite division of the world, Africa is the decrepit member whose sovereignty could perhaps be supplanted by Europe – indeed, Africa is seen as the eastern/ southern part of Europe by extension of its borders. Questioning the separateness of ‘Africa’ suggests the totalizing imperial oversight of the mappa mundi on the part of the unidentified but supposedly knowledgeable authorities who know ‘Africa’ is not measured by length and breadth, ‘bot by dyuerse disposiciouns better and worse’. In medieval texts, the Blackness of the African peoples is said to have multivalent causes and associations. The natures of people are determined by their natural surroundings: according to Bartlett, in this perspective ‘heat and cold are especially formative: Indians are good at mathematics and magic, because a little heat leads to mental subtlety, but blacks are stupid because they are exposed to too much heat. Human Blackness and Whiteness are linked to the heat and cold of the environment’ (2001: 47). The explanation of the sun’s great heat as the root cause of Blackness goes back at least to Isidore’s Etymologies (9.2.105), but even though he cites Pliny and Priscian, Higden’s Africa description is probably based on Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things) (Akbari 2000: 23–4). The sun’s heat is said to be responsible for the enervated, degenerate state of Africans, who are ‘schort of body, blak of skyn, crips of heer, and by drawing oute of spirites [the sun] makeþ hem coward of herte’. This concept is positioned against the superior, northern European body, which is fatter, larger, whiter and hotter within, increasing men’s virile qualities – a notion that continues throughout the early modern era, specifically in Andre Thevet’s Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, printed in 1558 and translated into English in 1568 as New Found Worlde (Vaughan and Vaughan 1997: 23). Trevisa adds that ‘yuel doers’ (evil doers) live in Africa, a phrasing not found in Higden’s original or in the anonymous fifteenth-century translation, a move which imputes a negative physiognomy to skin colour.5 Likewise, not all European bodies are necessarily ‘white’. Ireland, like Africa, also lies at the margins of the world, and receives equally pejorative treatment in the Polychronicon (Figure 2.3). Higden’s situation of Ireland as an extremity of the world contains a panoptic vision in which monstrosity of behaviour corresponds to a location’s geographical distance from the centre: Inter haec et hujusmodi advertendum est, quod mundi extremitates novis semper quibusdam prodigiis pollent; ac si natura licentius ludat in privato et remoto, quam in propatulo et propinquo. Unde et in hac insula plurima sunt miranda et stupenda. (Higden 2012: 1.360) Among þese wondres and oþere take hede þat in þe vttermeste endes of þe world falleþ ofte newe meruailles and wondres, as þei kynde pleyde wiþ larger leue priueliche and fer in þe endes þan openliche and nyȝ in þe myddel. Þerfore in þis ilond beeþ meny grisliche meruayles and wondres. (Trevisa in Higden 2012: 1.361)

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Among which thynges hit is to be aduertede that the extremites of the worlde schyne in newe wondres and merualies, as if that nature scholde schyne and play more in priuate places and remouede then in open places and also nye [Translator does not render the last sentence of Higden]. (Anonymous in Higden 2012: 1.361).

FIGURE 2.3  Ranulf Hidgen’s World Map in Polychronicon. British Library, Royal MS. 14 C.IX, ff.1v–2. © The British Library Board.

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(Modern English: Among these and other wonders take heed that in the uttermost ends of the world there are often novel marvels and wonders, as though nature played more freely in the private and in the remote (areas), than in the open and nearby. Therefore in this island there are many such marvels and wonders.) Higden, citing Solinus and Gerald of Wales, finds that the Irish are ‘gens hujus terrae sit Barbara, inhospita, bellicosa, fasque nefasque pro eodem ducens’ (a race whose land is barbarous, inhospitable, warlike, taking both right and wrong for the same thing; Higden 2012: 1.350). They manifest their ‘barbarity’ in various ways: first, they are cruel and blood-thirsty, as they ‘drinkeþ firste blood of dede men þat beeþ i-slawe, and þan wassheþ here face þerwiþ’ (1.353) and ‘eueriche drinkeþ oþeres blood, what it is i-sched’ (Trevisa; 1.357). They are neither strong in battle nor trustworthy in peace (1.356). They do not pay their tithes, and have divergent lifestyles: ‘Þese men beeþ of yuel maneres and of leuynge’ (Trevisa; 1.355). For instance, Higden reports that the Irish ‘non incestus vitant’ (do not avoid incest; 1.356), and they are antipodal in their gendered norms: ‘In hac gente quamplures viri sedendo, mulieres stando urinam emittunt’ (Among that race, many of the men urinate sitting, women standing; 1.358). Just as Africa’s climate deteriorates the Africans, Trevisa’s translation of Higden proposes that prolonged exposure to the ‘unnatural’ culture of Ireland can rub off on foreigners, rendering ‘natura’ as ‘kynde’, as will the Brut chronicle. Inter quos adeo in naturam converti praevaluit pravae consuetudinis longus abusus, adeo convictu mores formantur, ut etiam hoc vitio proditionis alienigenae huc advecti fere inevitabiliter involvantur. (Higden 2012: 1.358) Among hem longe vsage and euel costume haþ so long i-dured, þat it haþ i-made þe maistrie, and torneþ among hemself traisoun in to kynde so fer forthe, þat as þei be traytoures by kynde, so aliens and men of straunge londes þat woneþ longe among hem draweþ aftir þe manere of hir companye, and skapeþ wel vnneþe but þey be i-smotted wiþ þe schrewednesse and bycomeþ traytours also. (Trevisa in Higden 2012: 1.357–9) (Among them, for so long evil custom and practice has endured, that it is an outrage, and turned amongst themselves treason into nature so far, that as they are traitors by nature, so foreigners and men of distant lands that live long among them follows after the manner of their company, and escape with great difficulty lest they be afflicted with shrewdness and become traitors also.) Unless they leave the island, it is inevitable that visitors to Ireland will be naturalized to their surroundings, that is, they will become treacherous, incestuous, rife with kinwarfare, and idle. The anonymous translator puts it best: ‘there is moche peple of that londe destitute in theire membres thro the deformite of nature’ (there are many people of that land deformed in their members through the deformity of nature; Higden 2012: 1.359). Transforming oneself from one nature to another – whether in behaviour or in corporeal form – is associated in Ireland and Wales with witchcraft, or the ‘craft of nygramauncie’, so that old women can take on various forms to steal milk or

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make money selling bewitched pigs (Trevisa in Higden 2012: 1.359). This form of monstrosity, however, is different from that of the monstrous races and mythical beasts because it is only minimally location bound, and by implication can occur anywhere, for in the second book of the Polychronicon it is associated with wondrous individual births. Higden states that ‘fiunt quandoque monstruosae transformationes hominum in bestias, quod fit magicis carminibus seu herbarum veneficiis’ (sometimes monstrous transformations of men into beasts occur, accomplished through either magic charms or magic herbs; Higden 2012: 2.208). The recombinatory strategies of Higden and Trevisa canonize for an English clerical and lay audience the prevailing historical construction of racial differences between Europeans and non-Europeans. Where the Irish and Welsh are seen as deviant in behavioural and social norms according to Higden and Trevisa’s English cultural centre, Black Africans were represented as in between the human and the monstrous. At times declared as part of the Noachic family tree (through Ham), Africans characterized by Blackness came to signify the ultimate corporeal difference to Europeans, with a skin colour which elides the possibility of full humanity, yet recapitulates their quasi-monstrosity. Themselves existing between perceived notions of normative humanity and the monstrous, Europeans became ambivalent towards Black Africans – no longer a wonder, they were subject to derision and subjugation, justified through the Cham genealogy: as Higden reports, ‘A Chus usque nunc Æthiopes dicti sunt Chusei’ (From Chus until now, Ethiopians are called Chusei; Higden 2012: 2.254), while Trevisa add his own comment that ‘Chus was Cham his sone; and Cham was Noe his [sone]’ (2.251). The compendium tradition and the ancient tradition of ‘natural history’ had a tremendous impact on the poetic and literary texts of the late Middle Ages, as is evident in a text such as the Middle English Kyng Alisaunder, a fourteenth-century English romance version of the Alexander Romance. The Alexander Romance served for centuries, since the third-century Hellenistic Greco-Egyptian version attributed to a writer known as the Pseudo-Callisthenes (1991), as a primary example of how literary texts conveyed geographical information to readers around the world. As a text that originates in an Afro-Asiatic context centred around the city of Alexandria, two detailed narrative descriptions of India and Ethiopia are contained in the early fourteenth-century Middle English romance Kyng Alisaunder that allowed English readers and writers to imagine lands beyond their immediate grasp. Widely popular before the fifteenth century, today, three manuscripts contain this poem: the Auchinleck MS (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Adv MS 19.2.1), Lincoln’s Inn MS 150 (London) and Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 622 (Oxford). Two fragments have also been located at the University of St Andrews (Smithers 1961: xi). Kyng Alisaunder is a loose rendering of the thirteenthcentury Anglo-Norman Roman de Toute Chevalerie, with an alternative source in Walter of Châtillon’s twelfth-century Alexandreis. The Kyng Alisaunder romance chronicles the life of Alexander the Great from his birth to his death by poisoning, leaving his empire to three of his generals. With the longest version running 8,021 lines, the romance traces Alexander’s conquests in Asia Minor, India and Africa, with frequent allusions to geographical lore found in ancient and medieval encyclopaedias and maps. The travel narratives of India and Africa were interpolated into the Roman de Toute Chevalerie and Kyng Alisaunder from Pliny’s Natural History, Solinus’s third-century Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium (Collections of Marvelous Things) and Isidore’s Etymologies (Smithers 1961: 18–19). These Latin authorities drew much of their information from earlier Greek accounts of India. According to James S. Romm, ‘in the

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Greek experience of India, nearly all major accounts of that distant land came from agents of the imperial rulers who invaded it’ (1992: 83–4). Medieval literary and historical texts frequently recombined and readjusted the geographical location and physical characteristics of the Plinian marvellous races, much in the tradition of the Mirabilia mundi or Libri monstrorum. India’s description appears only in the B-text (MS Laud Misc. 622) of Kyng Alisaunder, but Ethiopia’s description occurs in both the B and L texts (MSS Laud Misc. 622 and Lincoln’s Inn MS 150, respectively). In the ‘londe of Ynde’, there are five thousand cities and a slew of marvels, ranging from the absurd (the Erþe-drake) to the grotesque (the Orphani). In the island called ‘Gangerides’, there are large and bald (‘mychel and belde’; 4855) White people who are ‘faire and gent’ of body, and are ‘engyneful to fiȝth’ (skillful in war) (4858–60). Pandea is a land of maidens, with a queen and the women wage war (4906–18). In addition to corporeal differences, medieval travel writers associated racial differences with cultural practices specifically associated with food. For example, the people known as the ‘Faraugos’ hunt in the wilderness and forests the flesh which they ‘eten raw and hoot, / wiþouten kycchen’ (4919–24), while the Indian ‘Maritiny’ (as opposed to the Ethiopian Maritiny, described later) are derived from the Plinian ‘icthyophagi’ (fish eaters), but they too eat their food, in this case fish, raw, ‘wiþouten fyre, wiþouten panne’ (4930). A cannibalistic folk called the ‘Orphani’ eat their elders’ ‘guttes’, for ‘loue fyne, / and for penaunce and for discipline’ (4943–4). Friedman believes that the Indian custom of suttee (self-immolation of a woman over her husband’s funeral pyre) may have been responsible for such accounts of ‘parent-eating races’ (1981: 25). Even the ‘Houndyngs’, like the Cynocephali of Pliny, Augustine and Isidore, are represented in terms of their domestic arrangements: From þe brest to þe grounde Men hij ben, abouen houndes. Berkyng of houndes hij habbe. Here honden, wiþouten gabbe, Ben yshuldred as an fysshe, And clawed after hound, jwisse. Jn wood hij woneþ, God it woot, And libben by þe wilde goot. (4955–62) (From the breast to the ground, They are men, above hounds. Barking of hounds, they have. Their hands, without lie, Are shouldered like a fish, And clawed like a hound, truly, They live in the woods, God knows it, And live near the wild goat.) A connection between medieval Muslims and the Cynocephali was fairly common in the later Middle Ages, with the suggestion that Muslims are descended from a race of dogs (Friedman 1981: 67). A 1430 world map, for instance, lists various Plinian monstrosities with Arabic-derived nomenclature and

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offers a rubric for a people called Beni Chelib which reads, ‘Ebinichebel is a Saracen Ethiopian king with his dog-headed people.’ Here the Latin words transliterating the Arabic ‘banu kalb’ (‘sons of a dog’) are made into the name for the king of the dogheaded people. The conjunction of Saracen, Ethiopia, and Dog-Head on this map … stresses remoteness, monstrosity, and religious heresy. (Friedman 1981: 67) Other races of men in Kyng Alisaunder are ‘hore also a wolf’ (hairy as a wolf; 5022), while some women are ‘mychel and belde’ (large and bald) and live for only twenty years (4995) – they are a Plinian race (Friedman 1981: 13), but a typological opposite to the ‘macrobii’, or ‘makrobioi’, of Herodotus, whose name means ‘long life’, and who are typically located in Ethiopia (Halliday 1924: 53–4). Skin colour, however, is stressed in Alisaunder. On a hill called ‘Malleus’, the ‘folk on þe north half […] in al þe ȝer no sunne hij ne seeþ’ (people on the northern half […] in all the year they see no sun; 4897–8), likewise on the south side; but on the eastern part of the hill, ‘þe sonne and þe hote skye / al þe day hem shyneþ on, / þat hij ben blak so pycches fom’ (the sun and the hot sky / all the day shines on them / that they are black as pitch foam; 4902–4). Peter Burke points out that this common stereotype of Blackness being caused by the sun lasted well into the early modern period: ‘climate was thought to explain this variety of physical types and customs’ (2004: 27), especially skin colour. In fact, ‘this climatic explanation of the African’s pigmentation was commonplace in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ (Vaughan and Vaughan 1997: 23). Similarly, monstrosities also acquire qualities of skin colour, as even the innocuous Sciopod has black skin: Anoþer folk þere is ferliche, Also blak so any pycche. An eiȝe hij habbeþ and nomo, And a foot on to goo. Wiþ his foot, what hyt ryneþ, He wrieþ his body and w[h]an it shineþ, For his foot so mychel is Jt may his body wryen, jwis. (4963–70) (Another people there is, unexpectedly, Also black as any pitch, One eye they have and no more, And one foot with which to go, With his foot, he runs with it, He covers his body and when it (the Sun) shines, Because his foot is so great, It may cover his body.) Alexander also witnesses similar types of marvels in Ethiopia. The narrator tells us that ‘faire folk woneþ in Ethiope in þe est’ (6364) – ‘faire’ here presumably meaning ‘pleasing’ but also meaning ‘white’, but also perhaps an ironic play – and goes on to portray Black men in north-east Ethiopia, whose visage and ‘lych’ is ‘blake … / als it were grounden pych’ (body … black / as if it were ground pitch; 6406–7). They have eyes of ink and no

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nose (6408–9). The negative attribution of Blackness is evident in the narrator’s remark that ‘Vnlouerede is þat kynrede’ (Hideous is that race; 6413). Another ape-like people, whose lower lips hang down to their navel, and who stink as foul as carrion (6448–65), are ‘wel yuel yshape’ (truly evilly shaped; 6455): ‘Hij ben ycleped Garraman – / Of þe werlde þe vileste man’ (They are called Garaman / The foulest man of the world; 6464–5). The monstrous races portrayed in Kyng Alisaunder are usually silent, lacking the capacity for language. The Plinian race of people who have no mouth, nor teeth, nor lips but have a little hole in their chin, and eat through a reed, also have no tongue ‘to speken Latyn oiþer Englissh’ (to speak Latin or other English; 6427). But some, like the women who grow out of the ground, are said to be able to speak (they ‘ȝeden and romeden þere-about’ [sing and roamed thereabout; 6472], where ‘ȝeden,’ means to sing or speak poetically), although what they say is not mentioned in the Alisaunder: Verreymen, þere hij founde Wymmen growen out of þe grounde, Of summe þe heued potende out, Somme to þe breest, wiþouten dout. Somme weren to þe nauel ygrowe, And also somme to þe knowe. And summe weren ygrowe al out, And ȝeden and romeden þere-about. Faire wymmen it beeþ of prijs – Her here her cloþing is, Also ȝelewe as any golde, Als þe maistres vs haue ytolde. (6476–87) (Truly, there they found Women growing out of the ground, Of some the head pushed out, Some to the breast, without doubt, Some were grown to the navel, And some to the knee, And some were grown all out And sang and roamed thereabout. The fair women are of high value – Her hair is her clothing, As yellow as any gold, As the learned men have told us.) Although language is restricted from the monstrous races, their descriptors are heavily influenced by writing, as the poet refers to these women as ‘þise wymmen in lettre blake / ben ycleped Erþe-drake’ (these women in black letter / are called Earth-dragons; 6494–5). The phrase ‘lettre blake’ here refers to the source text itself, although it is unclear from which source the poet of the Alisaunder is drawing (Smithers 1961: 19). The textual naming of the women mirrors the Ethiopians who have eyes of ink, as the process of writing scripts these monstrous bodies.

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The following three sections of the romance are similar in scope to the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, as they focus upon wondrous animals (or the people who hunt them): Alexander sees many bestial monstrosities, including crocodiles and dolphins, and also an unclothed race of brown people (‘broune hij ben and noþing white’ [brown they are and not at all white; 6569]), who hunt those beasts (6568–85).

CONCLUSION The reliance upon the Plinian and Isidorean models in Kyng Alisaunder demonstrates how the prevalent encyclopaedic knowledge was featured in this example of early fourteenthcentury romance. The Black body is made spectacular, entertaining and sometimes fearful, and because it is situated in the context of Alexander’s Eastern conquests, it calls forth a colonial desire to see and experience corporeal difference at its most fantastic. The monstrous races in Alisaunder attempt to elicit pleasure in beholding the spectacle of the monstrous body (whether they are ridiculous or vile) rather than fear, similar to the races described in John Mandeville’s Travels. The natural historical written tradition moving from Roman antiquity through the fifteenth century shows that pseudoscientific ideas of race, including how ‘Whiteness’ and ‘Blackness’ were contrasted with each other in environmental ways, were already being produced in late medieval scriptoria in the fourteenth century. While Enlightenment ideas of ‘science’ and ‘biology’ were still a long way off in the intellectual tradition that would come about in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, medieval compendia writers were already using ancient ideas about climate, environment and ecology to construct various patterns of racialization that are immediately recognizable to modern readers today.

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CHAPTER THREE

Race and Religion Race and the Devotional Sensorium DOROTHY KIM

RACE AND THE DEVOTIONAL SENSORIUM This chapter focuses on the methodologies most useful in approaching the enmeshment of racial and religious difference in the pre-modern past. The devotional sensorium1 is where White hegemony often detected race. This chapter is also the history of race as religious ‘sensory history’, which Mark M. Smith defines as ‘the historical study of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch’ (2019a: ix). This chapter addresses the ways in which sensorial methodologies help to highlight how race and religious difference are intertwined and how religion becomes racialized in various ways, across differing conditions, time frames and geographies in the pre-modern past. In regards to the period 1350–1550, a discussion of the devotional sensorium is especially important since Western Christian hegemonic Roman Catholic identity was organized in relation to the senses – sight, sound, taste, smell, touch. It makes sense, then, that to discuss religious difference is also to discuss how the senses help hierarchize, frame, categorize and create avenues for racial detection. What follows is a discussion of the senses and the methodologies and critical theories in and around the senses. I am organizing this chapter to decentre the sense of sight since so much of the work on pre-modern race centralizes sight and often hyperfocalizes on epidermal race to the exclusion of other markers of racialization. Instead, we are going to go a different direction by beginning with scent, moving to eating and consumption, then to sound. Touch is connected to sight because so much of pre-modern discussions of race involve epidermal (in relation to skin) race and so they are intertwined.

THE MEDIEVAL SCENT OF RACE Mark Smith (2019a) explains some key points about the sensorial turn in social history especially in relation to olfaction. He argues that: The history of smell and olfaction has been central to this sensory turn. Historians of olfaction have in many ways written some of the most wide-ranging yet most theoretically sophisticated work on any of the senses … The history of smell and

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smelling is best understood in plural form, reflecting not only the fact that the past was populated by myriad smells but that the way contemporaries understood those smells varied a great deal depending on time, place, and whose nose was doing the smelling. (Smith 2019a: xi) He further explains that smell is not stable now or in the historical past: ‘olfactory scholarship departs from some popular treatments of olfaction that sometimes treat smell as transcendent, roving over the centuries with little change in meaning, when in reality the meaning of smells … is highly contingent on time, place, and constituency’ (Smith 2019a: xiv). One other point Smith makes is that olfactory scholars who work in the historical archive have eschewed some methodological idea of perfect reproduction of the historical smellscape as a priority for the field (xvii). Smell further intersects with medical humanities especially the histories of disease, hygiene and medicine as well as with disability histories. Thus, the olfactory methodology is specific to contingencies on the ground: the point of view of the one smelling, local conditions, geographies and time periods. It thus pairs nicely with a discussion of premodern critical race that also foundationally foregrounds these historical, geographic, contextual and temporal contingencies. Smell, at least in fantasies of the body, was a sense of detection but also important to religious/racial identity. One of the most important Western Christian religious traditions – the pilgrimage – was directly linked to olfactory religious rituals related to a holy Christian site. As Jonathan Reinarz explains: ‘European Christians who made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, however, were very different from subsequent generations of travelers: the former visited distant places in order to be physically immersed in the sites of the Bible, often hoping to add to the profundity of the experience through touch, sight, and smell’ (2014: 88). Reinarz points out that this was not a singular aim of one religion but also similar to what Muslims pilgrims wanted when they went on Hajj. Mark Smith’s work on race and olfactory history underscores how the main legal watersheds of critical race theory and critical race history in the United States are not just about how Blackness as a visual category gets defined in US legal history. Instead, he shows how the detection of race (and in this case the category of Black in the US legal codes) also relies on racial categorization via smell and olfaction. Smith discusses the important case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Smith explains, ‘the very basis of southern segregation, the infamous 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy vs. Ferguson, was built on the premise that the nose and not the eye could detect racial identity’ (2019b: 196). As Smith describes the case that was predicated on the visual passing of Homer Plessy as White, and whether he then could sit in the White section of the train in Louisiana, the arguments for Plessy’s continued categorization as Black were based on the defence’s argument that race could also be detected through smell. Smith writes: In court, Plessy’s attorney maintained that the statute itself was unenforceable because racial identity could not always be seen. The logic was impeccable: if you couldn’t see race, how on earth were people charged with enforcing segregation going to reliably confine black people to exclusively ‘black’ public spaces? Louisiana’s prosecuting attorney, John H. Ferguson, replied by drawing on centuries of racial, sensory stereotypes. It did not matter that the conductor couldn’t see Plessy’s race; instead, Ferguson insisted, he could smell Plessy’s racial identity. The argument,

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as later psychologists showed, was hardly empirical – there never was, nor has there ever been, an olfactory signature to race. But that didn’t matter. That whites had the authority to designate race as a culturally stable category by appealing to smell was, in the context of 1896, enough to make Homer Plessy black. The specific context of power relations dictated that southern whites could invoke the stereotype, one cultivated under slavery, to effect a stabilization of race. (Smith 2019b: 197) He also points out that there seemed to be no stability in relation to how one could detect the smell of Blackness, but that did not stop the court from siding with Ferguson that olfactory racialization was a stable, usable and tenable category of racial categorization and hierarchical sorting (see Smith 2019b: 196–8). In relation to the premodern past, there is the example of Jews in medieval Europe and the racialized/religious stereotype of the foetor judaicus, which was also a sensorial means of racialized surveillance and detection. The foetor judaicus has a history that moves beyond the Middle Ages and was deployed for Jewish genocide in the twentieth century with the Third Reich. Smith imagines this as an ethnic olfactory history, but I would revise this to say that in the case of Jews and Jewishness in the pre-modern past, it is, in fact, a consistently racialized category throughout because White Christian hegemony defined its religious identity primarily through a dialectic with racialized Jewishness in the Middle Ages (see Abulafia 2011; Heng 2018a). As Geraldine Heng explains, it is through the senses that both Christian identity was articulated and contrasted with Jewish racialized difference: The obsessions articulated in the exercise of church and state biopower point to a broad preoccupation with the sensory character of race in the medieval period. Medieval race is sensual: the ‘continuous caterwauling’ of Jews in prayer in their synagogues, Jewish bodies that waft a fetid stench (foetor judaicus), or the distorted hypervisibility of the Jewish face (facies judaica), so vividly caricatured in medieval manuscript doodles. The success of strategic essentialism required Jewishness to be vulnerable to sensory detection, so that Jewish bodies were always giving themselves away – as cacophony or noise, as smell, as menstrual effluvia or a bloody flux, as the tactile and visual cut of circumcision … Racializing the senses in this way – hearing, seeing, and smelling Jews – helps to bypass rational thought, in favor of feeling and sensing race through channels more direct, intuitive, and primitive. Sound that hits the ear, smell that assails the nose, bodily cuts that offend the eye: All are ways of sensing and authenticating race through the evocation of a bioscope in which ‘race-feeling’ instead of ‘race-thinking’ predominates. Think less; feel more. (Heng 2018a: 71–2; emphasis in the original; see also Heng 2018b: 80–1) As Heng notes, one of the main avenues of this racialized surveillance/detection was through smell and the racialized stereotype of the foetor judaicus. The foetor judaicus was the racialized myth that ‘Jewish bodies exuded a foul odor’ and was ‘a particularly poignant example of the way smell was used to register distaste for a racial group whose “evil” traits were assumed to relate to actual physical characteristics (in this case the nose)’ (Reinarz 2014: 94). As Joshua Trachtenberg’s (1961: 47–50) work and also Smith’s discussion explain, Jewishness was linked to an olfactory racialization because racialized Jewishness was intertwined with hell and the devil. This connection with the devil is also seen in

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the other sensorial realms – in the visual or epidermal with the depiction of racialized Jewishness as akin to devils (e.g. see British Library, MS Additional 49999 the De Brailes Hours and the Virgin Mary as mediatrix and White Christian supremacist punching the racialized and caricatured Jewish moneylender based on the anti-Semitic miracle of the Virgin tale about Theophilus)2 and the cacophonous sounds of hell connected to the noise and music of racialized Jews (see HaCohen 2012) (Figure 3.1). The longer history and genealogy of this connection between racialized Jews and undesirable odour can be traced in two different genealogies: one that links back to a medieval Arabic scholar, Abu Ma’shar, and a second emanating from a Roman commentary on Jewish religious practices related to Shabbat. First, pointing to the work of Eric Zafran (1979), Reinarz discusses how Abu Ma’shar’s discussion of the astrological sign of Saturn was connected with ‘fetid odor’ (2014: 94). Zafran points to a Christian genealogy that goes back to Saint Augustine’s statement that Saturn was ‘a god of the Jews’ (Zafran 1979: 16). Abu Ma’shar, a ‘ninth-century Arab astrologer’, writes that

FIGURE 3.1  Historiated initial with the Virgin Mary striking the Devil, in ‘The De Brailes Hours’. British Library Additional MS 49999, fol. 40v. © The British Library Board.

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Saturn had a ‘stinking wind’ (17). This ‘stinking wind’ appears to also appear in Roman sources in regards to Saturn (17–18). In the later Middle Ages, this connection between Saturn’s stinkiness and goatlike mien is described: ‘By the fifteenth century a variety of almanacs, prognostications and popular images explicitly state or show that the planet which controls the fate of the Jews is the most malign – Saturn’ (18). Geraldine Heng’s (2018a) work in England and the Jews points out that conversion from Judaism to Christianity did not necessarily mean that, if a Jew converted, they would immediately racially and religiously transform. Though in hagiography and other religious chronicle accounts this would be what would happen to their Jewish racialized bodies, in the case of real-life Jewish conversion, she explains that the taint of their Jewish blood and past Jewish racialized bodies would remain always under suspicion by Christians (Heng 2018a: 59–70). The case of smell and conversion is an interesting sensorial zone where further work in this area should be done. In fact, Reinarz discusses that if a medieval Jew ‘converted to Christianity, it was said, the Jewish stench transformed immediately into a fragrance sweeter than ambrosia’ (2014: 95). But one has to wonder if this was only in hagiographic fiction and religious propaganda rather than in real-life documentary accounts of what happened to Jewish converts in western Europe. Contextually, from C. M. Woolgar’s discussion in ‘Medieval Smellscapes’ (2019), foul or sweet smells did not necessarily have fixed affiliations but were often tagged to the body in relation to the medical humours and whether certain kinds of proximity to certain scents (sweet, bad/odorous, stinking) might help balance these medical humours (2019: 50–1). Woolgar explains that medieval Christians may have wished to aspire to certain sweet scents as a form of what I would call devotional competitive aspirational sanctity (55). However, in the organization of White Christian devotional identity, the stereotype (unfounded and unverifiable) of the foetor judaicus helped hegemonic White Western Christianity construct religious identity. Though Heng has pointed out that the English Jews were one of the earliest cases of complete racialized bureaucratic and government system that constructed Jewishness as a racialized category that was managed by the state, Woolgar notes that ‘The notion that the Jews had a distinctive smell does not appear in English sources before the expulsion of 1290, but it was current on the Continent’ (2019: 61; see also Heng 2018a: 1–29). Thus, the foetor judaicus would have been contextual by period, geographies and conditions. The further irony of White Christian religious identity is how so much of the aesthetics of smell were imports from racialized geographies – the Middle East, North Africa, Asia. The history of the enclosed walled garden is dependent on Islamic garden history though now couched, with its aesthetics in scents, as a recreation of the Garden of Eden (see McAvoy 2014: 5–10; Woolgar 2019: 60). In relation to the history of scent, the history of perfumes, soaps, ointments or other scented products was a history of the trade routes criss-crossing the Mediterranean through North Africa and the Middle East. In the late Middle Ages (1350–1550), the development of these scents and the proliferation of these products to a wider, usually upper-class, public was expanded substantially (Woolgar 2019: 68–69). Methodologically, an analysis of pre-modern critical race in regards to scent can open up interdisciplinary points of view that also destabilize the western European theoretical fixation with ocularcentrism. This is something I have discussed in regards to race and African feminism that wants to decentre western European theories and methodologies hyperfocalized on the visual (see Kim 2021). Scent is an excellent avenue to rethink how we can analyse racialized difference in regards to religion, especially when we consider the work on the Global South and non-Western regions that often moves away from binary ideas of olfaction (the fragrant vs foul issue) to

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something more multi-scentual. Some work in anthropology discussing the Global South has discussed how the world can be organized vis-à-vis scent calendars (time, geography, relationships, etc.) (Reinarz 2014: 2, 179, 186–7). Likewise, Mark Smith’s work in How Race is Made makes clear that one methodological avenue that pushes back on western European theoretical binaries and deeply enmeshed ocularcentrism is to work through sensorial histories beyond the eye. This re-examination through multiple senses can remap the terrain of how we think race is made and how in this case and this chapter the senses are marshalled to make racio-religious difference in the pre-modern archive.

‘EATING THE OTHER’ AND PRE-MODERN CRITICAL RACE This section will discuss race and religion in relation to the theoretical field of ‘critical eating studies’ and also the possibilities of bioarchaeology as a method useful to working on critical race. Kyla Wazana Tompkins (2012) explains and coins the term ‘critical eating studies’ in her book Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. She makes a distinction between critical eating studies and the histories of taste. As she writes in a footnote explaining why her book is not covering histories of taste: I echo both Ahmed and Lott in borrowing the language of cathexis from psychoanalysis to explore the conjoining of affect and aesthetics in the performance and dialogic constitution of race. The horizontal orientation of this project is probably why I largely ignore discourses of taste, which have been productively explored in the context of Enlightenment theories of aesthetics, as well as in social discussions of, in Bourdieu’s term, distinction. I suppose it could be said that I am more interested in flavor: Sweetness and later saltiness as well. (Tompkins 2012: 191n7; emphasis in the original) Thus, the histories of taste often become histories that rehearse White, default European Enlightenment aesthetics through a White tongue that speaks about ‘distinction’ rather than how food consumption is racialized. In this way, Tompkins’s discussion of cathexis – ‘the process of investing psychic energy in a part of the body or an instinctual object’ – in which affect and aesthetics intersect precisely explains why race-making, as a biopolitical and sociocultural phenomenon, works through the technologies of the senses to create race-feeling (see Oxford Reference 2021). I take the term critical eating studies from Tompkins’s work and the aims in her book Racial Indigestion. She links theories of embodiment and particularly ‘feminist, queer, and gender studies, as well as to critical race theory’, to a discussion of eating and flavour (Tompkins 2012: 3). Tompkins’s turn to centre critical eating studies also shifts the discussion away from what she sees as ‘an investment in surfaces’ in body studies to something I also think is much more productive: to analyse ‘orificially’ (3). She writes: My approach seeks to render discursive two kinds of matter toward which so much human appetitive energy is directed: food and flesh. As we will see, what is yielded by this new framework is a move beyond the concern with skin and boundary that has dominated body studies, and thus away from an investment in surfaces that I want

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to argue is the intellectually limited inheritance of the epidermal ontology of race. By reading orificially, critical eating studies theorizes a flexible and circular relation between the self and the social world in order to imagine a dialogic in which we – reader and text, self and other, animal and human – recognize our bodies as vulnerable to each other in ways that are terrible – that is, full of terror – and, at other times, politically productive. (Tompkins 2012: 3; emphasis in the original) To move beyond skin, which as she explains ‘is the intellectually limited inheritance of the epidermal ontology of race’, also speaks to the cathexis on sight as the grounds for a pre-civil rights historiography of race linked with eugenics. If we take her arguments and rethink the medieval racial sensorium, what would happen if we reorganize the discussion of race-making in relation to the bodily orifices – ear, mouth, eye, etc.? Tompkins also makes the very important point that while she is reading orificially, there is not one way to read this way: I do not – I would not dare – offer a single model through which to understand the mouth in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. At times the mouth reveals vulnerability; at other times it is a sign of aggression. Some mouths in Racial Indigestion are forced open; other mouths speak, eat, and laugh with the energy generated by suppressed political affect. Some mouths – the mouth of the reader or viewer in particular – are never visible in text or image but rather are assumed to exist, invited to engage with the page through various tropes of desire, disgust, laughter, and enjoyment. In Racial Indigestion the mouth is understood as a site to which and within which various political values unevenly adhere and through which food as mediated experience imperfectly bonds with the political to form the fictions that are too often understood within everyday life as racial truths. (Tompkins 2012: 4–5; emphasis in the original) As with all discussions of pre-modern critical race, this methodology will depend on local conditions, specific temporalities and the specifics of situations and actors. The point is to consider how these conditions work with nuance and thought. In the pre-modern past, crusader and other racialized religious Christian fantasies surface most regularly in the genre of romance. In romance, the trope of racialized bodies as being eaten really delineates how race-making and race-feeling come together in relation to pre-modern critical race studies and critical eating studies. Tompkins states: The image of the black body as an edible object is a strong and consistent trope in this book, and it is an image that carries the weight of many centuries of forced labor, of coercive and violent sexual desire, and of ongoing political struggle. As we will see, however, the fantasy of a body’s edibility does not mean that body will always go down smoothly. (Tompkins 2012: 8) This racialized trope of Whiteness consuming the racialized body is germane to discussions of how religious race-making and religious race-feeling happen in pre-modern critical race studies particularly in regards to the realm of White hegemonic Christian fantasies: romance and fiction. As White, Christian Western medieval identity is centralized on

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specific sorts of religious food consumption – the ritual of communion, transubstantiation, the regular consumption of the body and blood of Christ – it should not be surprising that pre-modern critical race-making also used the sensorial realm of eating to racialize religious groups. In the phantasms of medieval romance and fiction, this often came in the form of fictional examples of taboo instances of eating and food consumption, particularly cannibalism. The Auchinleck Manuscript (c. 1325) (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Adv. MS 19.2.1) contains the crusader romance ‘Richard Coer de Lion’, where a White, Christian medieval writer plays on the Islamic food practice of eschewing pork by creating a Christian giant king, namely Richard Coer de Lyon, who is a cannibal who ‘eats the other’ (see Larkin 2015). Clearly, this is also a reference to and riff on transubstantiation, but in this case, the Muslim racialized object of White Christian crusader fantasy. In the case of this English crusader fantasy, we see correlations to Tompkins’s discussion of the White mouth: ‘From within these images, it is not simply the White mouth that is of interest, in its voracious and cannibalistic desire to experience, enjoy, and destroy the other, what bell hooks called, in her foundational formulation of the phrase, “Eating the Other”’ (2012: 9; see also hooks 1999: 21–41). Connected to the crusader romances in the Auchinleck manuscript is the recipe for ‘Teste de Turke’ in British Library MS Royal 12.C.xii (the recipes are on fols. 11r–13r, this recipe is on 12v) (Figure 3.2). The Harley 2253 scribe is the scribe of the Anglo-Norman recipes in this multilingual (English, French, Anglo-Norman French, Latin) manuscript produced c. 1320–40 (Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts). This recipe is laid out in Constance B. Hieatt and Robin F. Jone’s critical edition of the Anglo-Norman recipe: 27. Teste de Turke. Fueille de paste, bon farois: plaunté dedenz, chonys e volatyle, dates plumees souceez en miel, formage nowe plaunté dedenz, clous, quibibes, sucre desus, puis une couche de fars festicade grant plenté; colour de fars, soré, jaune e vert. La teste serra neir adressé a la manere de chevels de femme en un neyr esquele, une face de houme desus. (Hieatt and Jones 1986: 868) Hieatt and Jones translate ‘Teste de Turke’ as ‘Turk’s head’ (870). This is a game, rabbit and poultry (‘chonys e volatyle’ / chonis e volatile), pie with sugar (‘sucre’), honey (‘miel’), dates (‘dates’) and new cheese (‘formage nowe’) in it. However, the directions are most peculiar in the second half when explaining what the pie must look like. The editors are perplexed by the manuscript’s recipe and try to explain what they see as opaque cooking directions: While the recipe gives us the general idea of the effect to be aimed at, it is, unfortunately, not entirely clear. In the absence of other directions for achieving the effect of black hair, we conjecture that the black bowl called for below provides a background representing the hair of the ‘Saracen,’ and the yellow-green-pink tints of the pistachio finish give the ‘Turk’s’ complexion; while en un neyr esquele might equally well mean ‘in the shape of a black bowl’. (Hieatt and Jones 1986: 873) In this recipe, what we see is the actualization of ‘eating the other’ in relation to the fantasies depicted in English crusader romances. In this case, the pie is supposed to

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FIGURE 3.2  ‘Teste de Turke’ in London. British Library MS Royal 12.C.xii, permissions and image from the British Library. © The British Library Board.

literally be shaped and decorated to look like the racialized and feminized head and hair of the purported Muslim enemy. The recipe asks that the visualized pie be decorated so that there is a black head and to set up hair in the manner of a woman’s hair (‘La teste serra neir adressé a la manere de chevels de femme’). The White English Christian can be imagined as eating (and enjoying) this racial/religious Muslim who is also feminized in this pie which is a form of mimetic cannibalism. Similarly, in the historical view of the fifteenth-century English romance/epic The Siege of Jerusalem, another round of cannibalism becomes a main focus of this text. Based on Josephus’s second-century account of the Roman advance onto Jerusalem, the romance/epic version adapted to Middle English alliterative prose spends several episodes discussing the extreme starvation of the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem with vignettes

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about how Jewish women would cannibalize their children during the siege (see Williams Boyarin 2013). In this instance, The Siege of Jerusalem pushes heavily on cathexis, in gendered emotion and pathos as a way to fetishize fictional Jewish gendered cannibalism. Other scholars have extensively discussed the issues of race, religion, and food taboos and consumption in these romances (see e.g. Heng 2003). My point here is to explain how the engines of often national fantasy and Christian hegemonic identity formation utilized taste and food as a means to construct racial/religious identity in fantasy and in religious propaganda. A different axis is to consider how other methodological ways think through eating and food that includes critical food studies that intersects with medical humanities and environmental humanities. And within this realm, this next section will discuss bioarchaeology as a methodology useful in discussing embodied racio-religious difference. I am indebted to both Monica Green and Alice Toso who introduced me to and also helped me understand the basics around the discussion of medieval race, genetics and bioarchaeology (see Green 2015; Toso 2019). The possibilities of discussing embodied race in relation to bioarchaeology as a critical method, rather than discussing archaeology and genetics as a way to inform a preconceived essentialized idea of racial categorization, is one I briefly touch upon in ‘Premodern Critical Medieval Race’ (Kim 2019). Though I will discuss this more extensively in the introduction to this volume, I would like to discuss here the utility of bioarchaeological methodology in addressing racioreligious difference and the issue of taste and foodways. If pre-modern critical race is embodied, an embodied performance particularly in relation to religion, then as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has explained: ‘Race is evinced in such highly visible actions as the choice, preparation and consumption of food; patterns of speech and use of language, law; customs and ritual; and practice of sexuality’ (2013: 112).

BIOARCHAEOLOGY AS A METHODOLOGY TO DISCUSS EMBODIED RACE In recent work discussing medieval Iberian bioarchaeology, especially in relation to Muslim burial sites in urban areas in what are now Portugal and Spain, I would like to discuss this work as a way to think through how bioarchaeology may aid in examining pre-modern critical race studies in relation to racio-religious difference and taste and food. If ideas of ancestral genetics that identify race are in the realm of a pre-civil rights understanding of race – namely, essential and about some sort of eugenicist vision of race – then bioarchaeology is how scientific analysis, can be used productively to discuss embodied race in relation to religion and flavour and consumption through different foodways. I am summarizing here bioarchaeologists working in medieval Iberia from the eighth to thirteenth centuries (see Inskip et al. 2019; Toso et al. 2019). Though the period is slightly earlier than the dates for this volume, I believe their work is applicable to thinking through 1350 to 1550, and particularly in how foodways and religious-racial identity intersect but also are dependent on local conditions, specific situations, groups and periods. In particular I want to examine the foodways of Iberian Islamic communities to consider the contrast between White, Christian racialized fantasies of ‘eating the other’

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versus what an examination of the historical record of that community in a specific urban geography may actually reveal about what marks medieval Iberian Muslims as a specific religious identity through their own medieval foodways. Sarah Inskip and colleagues’ work, ‘Diet and Food Strategies in a Southern al-Andalusian Urban Environment’ (2019), examines the urban city of Écija between c. 800 and 1400. Medieval Écija was multiracial/multireligious: ‘a multi-cultural/religious city: Muslims, Muwallads (converted Christians), Mozarabs (i.e. Christians living under Islamic rule) and Jews, with a clear Islamic influence in terms of economy, culture and society (Garcia Baena 2006). This diversity was maintained while Écija was the regional capital of the Cora Istiyya, which presented some economic independence (Valencia Rodriguez 1988)’ (Inskip et al. 2019: 3858). This time period is particularly important to discussions of Islamic Iberia ‘due to the significant and widespread socio-cultural changes that took place after Arab and Berber expansions reached the region in AD 711. Islam became the dominant faith, and the reintroduction and dissemination of knowledge, via the translation of texts once lost to the Latin west, proved to be critical to the later European Renaissance’ (Inskip et al. 2019: 3857). The project of the collaborators is to analyse an Islamic cemetery in Écija, Seville province, Spain, to consider the material data left in the skeletons. The group is using stable isotope analyses, which have proved invaluable in improving understanding of dietary practices and environments in the past (Katzenberg and Waters-Rist in press; Larsen 2015), have been used to assess dietary and environmental changes during this time period. For example, interesting diversity in Iberian isotope values recorded in archaeological skeletons potentially relates to geography religion and social status… (Inskip et al. 2019: 3858) They contextualize their stable isotopic analysis, which they are taking from analysis of the skeletal bones, with information from historical sources. Along with a consistency in diet that focused on certain meats (cattle and sheep; see Inskip et al. 2019: 3860) and grains – which align with what historical sources discuss of the Islamic religious diet – there is also for this site an increased consumption of sugar. The sugar consumption has both an interesting history in relation to Islamic religious/ racial identity but also sets up some questions in relation to race, sugar and the set-up to the transatlantic chattel slave trade and the place of Iberia in the history of this trade. Inskip et al. explain that Sugarcane may have arrived first to southern and eastern Iberia during the 9th century for family consumption as is mentioned in the 10th century agricultural Calendar of Cordoba (Sato 2015) and it may have become an export product only several centuries later (Perez Vidal 1973). In other Islamic lands, the relationship between sugar consumption and Ramadan is recorded in poetry by the 9th century, potentially making it a desirable plant (Sato 2015). While there are strong doubts surrounding the possibility to detect the consumption of sugarcane from isotopic ratios from bone collagen, because the protein content is low, a reconstruction combining collagen and bioapatite, as employed here, could reveal if this product was an important part of the diet… (2019: 3859–60)

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Their analysis of this gravesite has indicated a gendered Muslim (and thus gendered religious-racial) proclivity for sugar consumption. Their analysis of the bones (collagen from the ribs) and teeth (bioapatite) have shown that ‘the combination of collagen and apatite values might hint at greater consumption of sugarcane by females (girls). This suggests that although base diet did not differ between the sexes, there may have been subtle variances between males and females’ (Inskip et al. 2019: 3868). Along with the medieval Iberian bioarchaeological information from Écija that shows a higher sugar consumption for Muslim women undoubtedly connected to religious calendar holidays, the evidence seems to suggest that sugar marked Islamic men and women racially/ religiously precisely because it was part of their calendar of religious holidays. Sugar was particularly prominent in Islamic life as part of the meal breaking the fast during Ramaḍān. As Sato explains: ‘ifṭār … The daily after-sunset breaking of the Ramaḍān fast. Also, the breaking of the Ramaḍān fast on the first sighting of the new moon in Shawwāl. A large amount of sugar and sweets are consumed for the ifṭār’ (2014: 182). This connection to a calendar Islamic religious holiday would then mark sugar and the consumption of sugar as an embodied racial marker connected to religious holidays and embodied rituals. In addition, sugar played a part in other Islamic religious experiences, as it was ‘given as gifts by caliphs and sultans during Ramaḍān and for pilgrimages to Mecca, and […] sold as candy at annual festivals during the sacred months’ (2). Sugar was then the flavour of specific Islamic holidays and religious experiences. Sugar was the sign of embodied race, in the words of J. J. Cohen, ‘evinced in such highly visible actions as the choice, preparation and consumption of food’ (2013: 112). In this case the sense of flavour and consumption of food is the sensorial conduit to race-making. However, the commodity of sugar itself in the project of race-making shifts as it becomes an important marker of the devastation of the transatlantic chattel slave trade from the fourteenth century forward. Its cultivation and local production in Islamic Iberia, which was eventually taken up by Iberian Christians, is of prominent importance in discussing pre-modern critical race because sugar is a central node in environmental humanities, transatlantic studies, and global foodways to discuss transatlantic chattel slavery, the construction of race in relation to enslaved Black men and women, and sugar’s place in violent structural racism. Sato explains, ‘The Iberian Christians brought the sugar production techniques they had learned from the Muslims to the New World. They established numerous sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean islands and Brazil in the sixteenth century, employing a large number of black slaves from Africa’ (2014: 1). In fact, as one of the pieces in The 1619 Project explains: None of this – the extraordinary mass commodification of sugar, its economic might and outsize impact on the American diet and health – was in any way foreordained, or even predictable, when Christopher Columbus made his second voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1493, bringing sugar-cane stalks with him from the Spanish Canary Islands. In Europe at that time, refined sugar was a luxury product, the backbreaking toil and dangerous labor required its manufacture an insuperable barrier to production in anything approaching bulk. It seems reasonable to imagine that it might have remained so if it weren’t for the establishment of an enormous market in enslaved laborers who had no way to opt out of the treacherous work. (Muhammad 2019) Sugar and enslaved men and women become the axis lines of the triangular Atlantic trade that fuelled violent settler colonial empires: ‘“White gold” drove trade in goods and

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people, fueled the wealth of European nations and, for the British in particular, shored up the financing of their North American colonies’ (Muhammad 2019). The beginning of transatlantic chattel slavery and the enslavement of Black men and women is the story of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Iberia. As Hortense Spillers has explained in her foundational article, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’ (1987), Donnan’s first volume covers three centuries of European ‘discovery’ and ‘conquest,’ beginning 50 years before pious Cristobal, Christum Ferens, the bearer of Christ, laid claim to what he thought was the ‘Indies.’ From Gomes Eannes de Azurara’s ‘Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, 1441–1448’ [Donnan 1932: 18–41], we learn that the Portuguese probably gain the dubious distinction of having introduced black Africans to the European market of servitude. (Spillers 1987: 70)

FIGURE 3.3  Domino Sugar Factory, Williamsburg, 2014. Courtesy of Abe Frajndlich/The New York Times/Redux. © Abe Frajndlich.

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It is Kara Walker’s installation ‘A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby’ (2014) that connects race, the flavour and necropolitics of sugar, with the history of the commodity (Figure 3.3). The installation also looks both to the pre-modern past and also to its longer, violent, racialized and devastating history (Figure 3.4). The title ‘a Subtlety’ is a reference to a medieval practice of sugar sculptures during banquets, as Alixe Bovey explains: ‘the most alluring pieces at the table were sugar sculptures known as sotiltees (or subtleties). These sculptures came in all sorts of curious forms – castles, ships, famous philosophers or scenes from fables’ (2015). More recently, Gitanjali G. Shahani in Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature (2020) opens her second chapter on Sugar with a discussion of Kara Walker’s installation and also its title: Characteristically, Walker’s title was something of a mouthful. Provocatively long, sweeping in its historical breadth, and written in the manner of a frontispiece to an early modern printed tract, the exhibit was called ‘A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.’ (Shahani 2020: 37)

FIGURE 3.4  Kara Walker, ‘A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby’, 2014. © Ann Hilton Fisher.

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The connection between the sweetness of sugar, the appetite to consume it that shifted with the Iberian violent settler colonial colonization and genocide as well as its traffic in transatlantic chattel slavery and its use of Black men and women in its sugar plantations in the Americas has meant that in the hands of western European Christians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, sugar became ‘blood sugar’ (Figure 3.5). ‘Blood sugar’ is the term Kara Walker uses in an NPR interview, but it has a longer history related to the violent labour in producing sugar:

FIGURE 3.5  Kara Walker with Source Material, 2014. Courtesy of Abe Frajndlich/The New York Times/Redux. © Abe Frajndlich.

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Unpaid or exploited laboring humans left their blood, sweat, fingers, hands, and ultimately, lives, in the plantation machinery of sugar-cane slavery and sugar processing as though in a sacrifice devoid of sacredness and rituals. … Visual and installation artist Kara Walker herself, in an interview with Audie Cornish on National Public Radio, asserts: ‘Basically, it was blood sugar … like we talk about blood diamonds today, there were pamphlets saying this sugar has blood on its hands.’ (Loichot 2014) It is Valérie Loichot’s review of Kara Walker ‘A Subtlety’ (Figure 3.6) that precisely reveals how this installation works within the frames of racial indigestion: Kara Walker, confectioner in chief, offers us the indigestion of the greedy act of consuming sugar for centuries … But it is against the rules to taste the sugar – no confectionery samples are offered at the end of the show – and the sugar is stinky and inedible. The exhibit stirs a reflex of nausea rather than hunger, an indigestion created by our consumption of sugar made possible by our exploitation of fellow humans. This luxury turned into necessity changed the course of human history, driving colonization of tropical zones, chattel slavery, indentured labor, and glucose illnesses. (Loichot 2014) This work on race and sugar continues in the early modern period particularly with conferences such as ‘Beyond Sweetness: New Histories of Sugar in the Early Atlantic World’ (see Hopwood 2014) and Kim Hall’s in-progress work, The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Gender and Material Culture in Seventeenth Century England (forthcoming). Sugar is not the only food item that has different valences in the discussion of taste and racial/religious difference and identity, the other item, I have pointed out earlier,

FIGURE 3.6  Kara Walker, ‘A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby’, 2014. © Jason Wyche.

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most regularly discussed in Christian crusader romances and religious propaganda is the consumption of pork. However, the bioarchaeological material evidence shows something different from the White Christian fantasies. The bioarchaeological work on Écija also reveals that the main diet consisted of meat and grains. Though Écija lies on a river, there is no evidence from the data at this site to suggest fish as a dietary staple (Inskip et al. 2019: 3860, 3868). This is in line with the comparative site of medieval Lisbon (eleventh to twelfth centuries), which also shows a lack of fish consumption. The bioarchaeological data on this site, ‘the first bioarchaeological study of Islamic diet and lifeways in medieval Portugal’, examined a grave site in medieval Lisbon in São Jorge Castle (Toso et al. 2019: 3699). This lack of fish consumption is a particular dietary practice connected to Islamic identity: Perhaps the most notable feature of the human results is that despite the coastal location of Lisbon, marine resources do not appear to play a major role in the human diet … Freshwater fish, although a plausible and abundant resource in the Taugus River, was probably not widely consumed. In this regard, cultural and religious preferences should also be considered. The Quran does not prohibit the consumption of fish; however, some sections of Islam did consider it unlawful, mainly in the Eastern Shia tradition. Arab authors, following their Greek predecessors, had different opinions on the benefit of fish; however, it was commonly believed that fish were less nutritious than meat and generally not as good for human consumption. Fish recipes are also very scarce in medieval Andalusian cookbooks, usually accounting for 4–10% of the presented recipes. (Toso et al. 2019: 3708–9) However, Alice Toso and colleagues’ work on eleventh- to twelfth-century Lisbon further explains the Islamic Iberian diet: ‘Much of what is known about medieval diet comes from historical accounts that usually focus on Christian Europe. While a handful of cookbooks and health treatises survived from the late medieval period concerning Islamic Spain, no information is given on the territories of modern day Portugal…’ (2019: 3701). The diet would concentrate on the following: ‘Arab cuisine focused mostly on meat from domestic animals, fowl and game, accompanied by vegetables and a variety of flat breads in the East or semolina flour couscous in the Maghreb. Animal fat, especially from mutton, was widely used…’ (3701). However, the bioarchaeologists conclude that though there are some points of data that mark an Islamic diet (i.e. sugar) for this site, in general, ‘while there is similarity between Islamic sites in the north and central parts of Iberia, the variation between them is marked and overlaps with Christian sites’ (Inskip et al. 2019: 3871). In addition, the other main information linked to Islamic religious dietary practice, in contrast to Christian dietary practice, is the consumption of pork. Unlike the fantasy and fetishization of racialized consumption regarding pork seen in medieval crusader romances, the bioarchaeological and embodied data from Iberian sites show something different: Zooarchaeological studies of faunal assemblages from Islamic sites showed a high predominance of ovicaprids as the most represented species, followed by rabbit. Only two sites show different species as being the most common: pig in Torre Vedras (Gabriel 2003) and cow in Conimbriga (Detry et al. 2014). The presence of pig is quite surprising though somehow common in Islamic sites (Detry et al. 2014, p. 101). This

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is usually explained as pig breeding for Christian consumption or wild boar hunting, a practice that was permitted in case of need, and still exists in modern Maghreb tribes (Simoons, 1961). (Toso et al. 2019: 3702) In other words, though pork was generally avoided, it was actually consumed in Islamic cities in Iberia and, in fact, could have been consumed by Christians but also potentially as part of ‘wild boar hunting’ which was permitted in case of need. This taboo food restriction, seen as a major line crossed in medieval Christian crusader romances, is revealed in the on-the-ground activities and material evidence of the period as entirely dependent on populations, issues around food need and also much more imbricated than in literary fantasies. I point this out here because what the actual historical, lived, practiced conditions and the evidence we can discern from material and documentary analysis can often stand in contrast to literary, artistic, musical and other fictions in which a fantasy of consumption is prioritized which often goes with the propaganda of racialized denigration and violence over the complexities of what may be happening in religious/ racial groups depending on local geographies and conditions. Nonetheless, critical eating studies show multiple angles into thinking through racial/religious race making from the high Middle Ages to the early modern period.

SOUNDSCAPES AND THE SONIC COLOUR LINE3 When I am discussing racialized soundscapes, I am particularly thinking of the work of Jennifer Stoever in The Sonic Color Line (2016). Stoever is specifically talking about the history of America and sonic racialization in the twentieth century. Stoever introduces two key theoretical definitions: the sonic colour line and the listening ear. Both can be observed in the pre-modern past, though contingent on different factors, geographies, contexts, and racializations beyond the Black and White divide of the twentieth-century United States. Stoever writes: The sonic color line describes the process of racializing sound – how and why certain bodies are expected to produce, desire, and live amongst particular sounds – and its product, the hierarchical division sounded between ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness.’ The listening ear drives the sonic color line; it is a figure for how dominant listening practices accrue – and change – over time, as well as a descriptor for how the dominant culture exerts pressure on individual listening practices to conform to the sonic color line’s norms. Through the listening ear’s surveillance, discipline, and interpretation, certain associations between race and sound come to seem normal, natural, and ‘right.’ (2016: 7–8) In regards to religion and race, sound is a main area in which race-making is constructed as race-feeling. If the sounds of White Christian Western hegemony in the Middle Ages are based on polyphonic consonance and the sounds of the cathedral through the twelfthcentury invention of polyphony in Paris, then the racialized soundscapes, particularly of Jews and Muslims, stand apart (see HaCohen 2012). In regards to heterophony and ideas of ‘Jewish noise’ there is a distinct sonic racio-religious colour line explicitly discussed by Ruth HaCohen (2012) in her book The Music Libel Against the Jews.

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My example involves one location, Jerusalem, filtered through a myriad of racioreligious soundscapes in the work of the fifteenth-century Dominican monk and pilgrim from Ulm on his multiple descriptions and pilgrimages to Jerusalem. What we see then with Felix Fabri’s copious comments about Jerusalem’s soundscapes is a way in which his ‘listening ear’ sorts in regards to the context of multireligous and multi-Christian groups in conflict over the same sacred spaces. While his side, the Western Catholic contingent, can sing and create Christian noise that is never imagined as ‘clamor’, Felix Fabri utilizes his listening ear to categorize which noise is the racial/religious enemy of the White Western Christian hegemony even when he’s in a location where this faction does not have ascendency. You can see Fabri’s continuous use of this formulation of ‘clamor, clamoris’ in his description of the mosque and Islamic school that sits right outside the Holy Sepulchre and faces it. He describes it both geographically but also by soundscape in order to situate it as an affront to Western Christianity: DE HOSPITALI SANCTI JOHANNIS ET LOCIS EIDEM ANNEXIS ET COAEDIFICATIS. … Porro ad latus magni hospitalis erexerunt Sarraceni turrim altam, pretiosam, polito et albo marmore ornatam, et juxta turrim moscheam, contra faciem templi sancti sepulchri. Et in hac turre clamant et ululant die ac nocte secundum maledictae suae sectae institutiones. Ego omnino credo, hanc moscheam cum turri in despectum Crucifixi, et in praejudicium Christianorum esse aedificatam. Juxta moscheam sub turri est una schola puerorum, in qua pueri paganorum de lege Machometi imbuuntur, et toto die mirabili ejulatu clamant. Ego quadam alia vice, cum solus caussa orationis de monte Syon in atrium templi descenderem, et pueros clamantes audirem, accessi ad ostium scholae et introspexi, et sedebant ordinate in terra, et eadem verba omnes pariter altis vocibus personabant, inclinantes caput cum dorso, sicut Judaei faciunt etiam in suis orationibus. Totiens autem repetebant verba eadem, quod ipsa verba et notam retinui, quae sic sonabant:

(Fabri [1843] 2011: 322) THE HOSPITAL OF ST. JOHN AND THE PLACES ADJOINING IT, AND FORMING PART OF ITS BUILDINGS Now, by the side of the great hospital the Saracens have built a tall and costly tower, adorned with white polished marble, and close to the tower they have built a mosque, facing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In this tower they shout and howl day and night according to the ordinances of their accursed creed. I quite believe that this mosque and tower have been built out of disrespect for the Crucified One, and as an offence to the Christians. Beside the mosque at the foot of the tower is a boys’ school, in which the heathen children are instructed in the law of Mahomet, and there they shout all day long, making a surprising noise. On another occasion when I was coming

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down from Mount Sion alone in order to say my prayers in the courtyard of the church, hearing the boys crying out, I went up to the door of the school and looked in. They were sitting in rows upon the ground, and all of them were repeating the same words in unison in a shrill voice, bowing down their heads and their backs, even as the Jews are wont to do when saying their prayers. They repeated the same words so many times, that I remembered both the words and the musical notes, which sounded thus […]. (Stewart 1892: 396) Fabri explains that this mosque and Islamic school is particularly disturbing because ‘in hac turre clamant et ululant die ac nocte’ (in this tower they shout and howl day and night). Fabri explains explicitly that: ‘Ego omnino credo, hanc moscheam cum turri in despectum Crucifixi, et in praejudicium Christianorum esse aedificatam’ (I quite believe that this mosque and tower have been built out of disrespect for the Crucified One, and as an offence to the Christians). Thus, he imagines the mosque and its accompanying school is a deliberate attack on the geographical space of the Holy Sepulchre and its soundscape. He does not dwell on architectural or visual details, but rather on its location and its soundscape. He explains that the boys at the school ‘toto die mirabili ejulatu clamant’ (shout all day long, making a surprising noise). Upon further investigation, Fabri likens their embodied prayer and educational practice in sound and ritual as akin to what he has seen of Jewish embodied prayer and sound. He even goes as far as to write down the soundscape and the words and transliterate them into Latin musical notation and text. He has described this Islamic soundscape (akin to the Jewish soundscape) of Jerusalem as an assault on the Holy Sepulchre’s Western Christian location and sonic world. He literally imagines it as a religious assault. His use of ‘clamor, clamoris’ to describe this racially and religiously hostile soundscape is Felix Fabri using his listening ear to explain the racialized sonic colour line of the Holy Land.

CONCLUSION This chapter is a way to examine multiple methodological ways into examining premodern critical race through sensorial histories that decentre sight. I am especially interested in considering a range of theoretical and methodological options that may help researchers in rethinking the possibilities of premodern critical race/religious difference through smell, taste and sound. A move away from the ocularcentric focus of race is also a move away from its overwhelming Eurocentrism in Western academic discussions and knowledge production. This is a point that African feminists, especially Oyèrónké Oyĕwŭmí (2005), have made in relation to discussions of race. Further research and exploration in sensorial histories, race-making and the theoretical avenues away from a Eurocentric framing, I believe, will really help describe, explain and unpack how racemaking worked through the senses in the pre-modern past.

CHAPTER FOUR

Race and Science A Case Study of Bioarchaeological and Forensic Perspectives on Population Diversity REBECCA REDFERN AND JOSEPH T. HEFNER

INTRODUCTION By applying archaeological science, bioarchaeological and forensic anthropology techniques to the study of human remains, it has been possible to obtain new evidence about medieval Londoners from the mid-fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, showing that at least a third of people did not have White ancestry, some of whom were mixed heritage and others of whom had spent their early childhoods in England. These data show that multidisciplinary studies are key to exploring the intersectional complexities of medieval life, particularly for those whose lives were not written down or were more nuanced than a line in a list of household items or a will would suggest. In comparison to many urban centres in medieval England, London appears to be the most well-known and researched, because of the wealth of historical evidence. Its social and economic importance is reflected in the abundance of primary source evidence, much of which relates to the people who dwelt in or visited the city, providing information about origin, age, gender and socio-economic status. Archaeology has contributed to this knowledge, particularly through the excavation of many thousands of human remains. The majority of these skeletons are the people who were not written about – the marginalized, the migrant and the poor – whose skeletons are a repository of information, revealing evidence about peoples’ lives, living environment and the wider population as a whole. Above all, they are an independent and unique source of information, and are central to researching the embodiment of race (e.g. Gravlee 2009). It proves that people with We would like to thank the editors for inviting us to participate in this volume, they have been very encouraging and supportive of our work, and we appreciate their confidence in us. We would also like to acknowledge the Macromorphoscopic Databank for access to reference data. RR would like to thank the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology (BABAO) members for sharing information about their practice and work, and granting permission to cite unpublished research in this chapter. RR is also grateful for the everpatient Don Walker (MoLA) for his help with the SPT site information, and David Bowsher and Tracy Wellman for granting permission to use MoLA drawings, and for providing the site maps. The authors would also like to thank the staff (past and present) of the CHB for their recording of these populations, and John Chase for taking the photographs. It would not have been possible to submit this research during the pandemic lockdown without Sharon DeWitte, Jelena Bekvalac, Meriel Jeater and Jackie Keily who provided context and site report information.

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African ancestry were victims of the Black Death, that both males and females with nonwhite ancestry were living in London during the late medieval period, and that they were not distinguished by funerary treatment, even during the plague pandemic (see also Redfern and Hefner 2019). These results check our perceptions about the make-up of late medieval populations in northern Europe in a number of ways. Firstly, they require us to reassess our knowledge of mortality risk and disease frequencies in this period; secondly, they prompt us to look again at free and forced mobility; and, finally, they challenge us to go back to the archives and look anew, not only at the human remains but at the archaeological and primary source evidence too. The evidence for late medieval lives obtained by bioarchaeological, paleogenomic (ancient DNA) and other scientific analyses is increasingly incorporated into historical scholarship (Robb et al. 2019). The unique datasets they provide have developed interpretation and helped explore many research questions, the most well known being the fourteenth-century Second Plague pandemic (Bos et al. 2012; Keller et al. 2019) and the health impacts of the Little Ice Age (Williams and Larsen 2017; Nagaoka et al. 2019; Primeau, Homøe and Lynnerup 2019; Scott and Hoppa 2019). These techniques and those in forensic anthropology are not limited to understanding funerary practices or health and disease, as the evidence they provide for the history of race is a crucial line of independent data in this period. The study of mobility and migration, particularly through enslavement has long been of interest in late medieval studies (Hernæs and Iversen 2002), but it is only recently that archaeological human remains have been revisited to investigate aspects of ancestry and to connect those results with stable isotope and ancient DNA evidence for migration and population affiliation (amongst others, Martiniano et al. 2016). This chapter introduces how ancestry is studied in archaeological human remains using techniques developed in forensic anthropology, and demonstrates this with a case study from late medieval London; it provides an overview of other scientific techniques that may be used to discover whether a person has migrated, aspects of their life (e.g. diet) and population affiliation.

FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGY: ESTABLISHING GEOGRAPHIC ORIGIN Modern biological anthropologists do not debate the existence of discrete packages of humans, groupings usually referred to as races. Most anthropologists understand the very idea of race fails to accurately define the wonderfully broad human condition. In fact, the entire field of anthropology, including the more applied characters practicing forensic anthropology, accept that race is not biological; rather, they see race as a social construct without biological meaning (American Association of Physical Anthropologists 2019). The paradoxical nature of forensic anthropological estimates of ancestry (read: geographic origin) belie the emphasis all anthropologists place in their efforts aimed at understanding the true nature of human variation in the context of history, gene flow and non-random migrations rather than racial classifications based on distinct evolutionary lineages or sharp genetic differentiation (Templeton 2002). In 1992, forensic anthropologist Norman J. Sauer asked a seemingly rhetorical question: if races do not exist, why are forensic anthropologists so good at identifying them? (Sauer 1992). His answer was relatively straightforward: forensic anthropologists can estimate social race from the skeleton because those categories are correlated to geographic

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origin and cranial morphology. Nearly two decades later, Ousley and colleagues (2009) provided quantitative support of Sauer’s assumptions, demonstrating a predictable relationship between peer-perceived designations and human cranial dimensions assessed through measurements of the human skull. In other words, the methods incorporated by forensic anthropologists to estimate a descendant’s ancestry from their skeletal remains are successful because they capture some of the same morphologies used by the living to distinguish between groups. This concept is, of course, not without critics who argue the practice forensic anthropologists undertake perpetuates and even strengthens the erroneous race concept (Goodman and Armelagos 1996; Goodman 1997; Armelagos and Goodman 1998; Williams, Belcher and Armelagos 2005). The consequences of social race are felt first and hardest by marginalized and underrepresented groups (Gravlee 2009; Reineke and Martínez 2014). The marginalized, the under-represented, the immigrant and the minority: these groups are often overlooked in death even though their numbers in medicolegal death investigations far outweigh their contribution to demographics (Quinet 2007; Amnesty International 2010; Brian 2014; Reineke and Martínez 2014; De León 2015; Black, Dearden and Montes 2017; Spradley et al. 2019). The unique population history in the United States comprises Indigenous peoples, immigrants and migrants who faced forced movement and enslavement (Dinnerstein 2009; De León 2015). US history demonstrates how arbitrary designations have been used to identify and marginalize ‘the other’ (Cornell and Hartmann 2004; Omi and Winant 2014). However, that very population history necessitates forensic anthropological estimates of ancestry, where the goal is not an arbitrary label such as language or political affiliation, but rather an objective assessment of place, the geographic origin of an individual determined using the only biological data available: skeletal morphology (Ousley, Jantz and Freid 2009). There are two conventional forensic anthropological approaches to estimate ancestry from human skeletal remains: measurement and morphology (DiGangi and Hefner 2013). These two data types capture variations in skeletal morphology reflecting differences in environmental conditions and other extrinsic factors affecting the human condition. Consider the human nose, for example. The fleshy nose reflects underlying skeletal structures which in turn reflect adaptations to different environmental conditions. Hot, dry regions of the world require a broader nasal opening with more surface area to humidify hot, dry air; cooler, wetter climates warrant a smaller, but also longer, opening to slow down and warm the air prior to full respiration. Such adaptive strategies are quantitative and qualitative; they can be measured and described. When these measurements and morphologies are collected from populations around the world, they serve as reference data for future predictions within statistical models (DiGangi and Hefner 2013).

BIOARCHAEOLOGY: EXPLORING PAST POPULATIONS The field of bioarchaeology is embedded in social theory, as it combines both the biological and social sciences (Knudson and Stojanowski 2008), meaning that data captured by a human body about that person’s life is interpreted in its sociocultural context, drawing on concepts such as the life course approach and embodiment theory (Martin, Harrod and Pérez 2014). The incredible time-depth of study afforded by the analysis of individuals from the archaeological record, means that bioarchaeologists are very aware that the human body has changed from prehistory onwards in response to the environment and sociocultural behaviours (Robb and Harris 2013). By recognizing that bodies, due to their

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE IN THE RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN AGE

plastic nature can be shaped over a lifetime and from generation to generation, means that the body can be studied ‘as a site of lived experience’ (Joyce 2005: 140) because its tissues and appearance capture evidence for these events, such as skeletal changes because of impairment (Tilley 2015) or head-shaping as to reflect group identity (Ben̆ uš, Masnicová and Lietava 1999). This is also true of evidence for how a person is treated after death, with funerary practices providing insights into social status, gender, mobility and occupation (Knüsel 2010; Knüsel and Robb 2016). The acceptance that past bodies represent a combination of the biological and social, means that the remains of each individual provides a unique insight into their own personal experience, as well as at the population level, into a past community (Gowland and Thompson 2013). Skeletal and dental evidence for disease, trauma and responses to childhood health events, growth and stature, body modification and funerary treatment, have all been used in bioarchaeology to explore past lives, particularly through individual osteobiographies (Stodder and Palkovich 2012; Hosek and Robb 2019). Increasingly, ancestry (aDNA and forensic techniques) is also included in these studies to improve and finesse interpretations, because of the known impact of structural violence upon certain status, ethnic and ancestry groups (de la Cova 2012; Klaus 2012; Mant and Holland 2019). Focusing on the late medieval world, bioarchaeological research has identified Jewish victims of ethnic cleansing in England and Spain (Colet et al. 2016; Booth et al. 2019), and the remains of transported Black Africans in Portugal, whose commingled bodies had been disposed of in a rubbish dump (Coelho et al. 2017; Ferreira, Coelho and Wasterlain 2019). Analysis of these individuals has provided evidence for cultural dental modification, and the paleopathological changes observed in the subadult individuals, records the impact of capture and transportation (Wasterlain, Neves and Ferreira 2016; Wasterlain, Costa and Ferreira 2018).

STABLE ISOTOPES: DIET, ORIGIN AND MOBILITY Over the course of a person’s life, their dental and skeletal tissues have the ability to capture information about their diet, childhood origin and evidence for mobility (Richards and Montgomery 2012). This is because chemicals in drinking water, and consumed terrestrial and marine resources become incorporated into these tissues, and act as an independent source of evidence for investigating a person’s life history (Lee-Thorp and Katzenberg 2015). When multiple individuals of different ages and sexes are studied, particularly from well-phased cemetery populations, it is possible to establish how diet changes in response to the life course, whether dietary differences existed between males and females, identify whether multiple foodways are present and, often, whether people are local (or not) to a particular geographic region. For example, recent work on populations from Spain has provided evidence for the consumption of sugar cane (Inskip et al. 2019), identified differences in consumption patterns between Islamic and Christian populations (Alexander et al. 2015) and found regionally distinctive diets (Lubritto et al. 2017). Mobility research has focused on the relationship between communicable diseases (e.g. syphilis and leprosy) and population movement (Roberts et al. 2013; Roffey et al. 2017), the origins of individuals at religious and pilgrimage centres in Europe, Crusader burials in the Near East (Mitchell and Millard 2009; Meijer et al. 2019) and Black Death graves in England (Kendall et al. 2013); with future studies about migrant adolescent workers in England promised (University of Reading 2011–14).

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Analysis of lead (Pb) isotope values have been used to investigate mobility, but they can also provide information about an individual’s exposure to the metal and/or pollution (Montgomery 2002; Budd et al. 2004a), and its use has been of great value to the study of enslavement and transportation in the Roman world (Redfern 2018) and in the later transatlantic slave trade (Laffoon et al. 2019). One study of rural and urban populations from medieval Norway was able to distinguish between the two populations, as the urban population had higher lead values (Åberg, Fosse and Stray 1998).

ANCIENT DNA ANALYSIS: HUMANS AND DISEASES In the late medieval period, the focus of interest has been upon disease genomics, particularly the cause of the Second Plague pandemic (Bos et al. 2011, 2012, 2016; Schuenemann et al. 2011; Spyrou et al. 2016) and the strains of tuberculosis and leprosy present across Europe (Donoghue et al. 2005; Müller, Roberts and Brown 2014), with the spread of the latter two diseases also shedding light on mobility patterns (Donoghue et al. 2015; Donoghue 2019). The analysis of dental calculus (i.e. tooth plaque) has also contributed to our knowledge of past populations, as it can be used to explore the use of medicinal plants (Gismondi et al. 2018), establish the range of diseases present in a population (Jersie-Christensen et al. 2018) and has proven that women created illuminated manuscripts (Radini et al. 2019). Proteomics is a very new area of study which focuses on ancient proteins, and has been applied to the study of archaeological human remains. For example, it has been used to better understand the Yersina pestis bacteria (Schrimpe-Rutledge et al. 2012), to identify the consumption of milk (Warinner et al. 2014) and to establish patterns of diseases which are rarely encountered through other scientific techniques, such as hepatitis B (Krause-Kyora et al. 2018). Although the focus of genomic studies has been on large-scale migrations in prehistory, it is increasingly being used to identify migrants in the medieval period, such as European Crusaders in Lebanon (Haber et al. 2019), and the make-up of populations before and after the Second Plague pandemic in Europe (Klunk et al. 2019). Although no study has specifically sought to determine the population origins of individuals, particularly those with non-White or diverse heritage identities in late medieval England, work on later populations offers promise, with the genomic analysis of enslaved individuals buried in the Americas demonstrating that it is possible to establish which African populations individuals may have originated from (Schroeder et al. 2009; Barquera et al. 2020), recently, this information was obtained from a clay pipe (Schablitsky et al. 2019). Studies of modern populations can be equally informative, as a study from Cuba was able to show mixed-race populations from Indigenous American, African and White European populations in previous generations (Fortes-Lima et al. 2018). In contrast to stable isotope analysis, the use of genomic data in the study of past populations must be undertaken with great care and consideration, as from our perspective there is a difference in the setting and interpretation of genomic studies between ancient and modern populations. In our experience, researchers in ancient genomics typically come from an anthropology background and understand that clustering in human populations has no ‘objective biological reality’ (Maglo, Mersha and Martin 2016). They recognize that a person’s genetic heritage is just one aspect of their identity, and may well have been the least important one. In contrast, research on

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contemporary populations has become (often unintentionally) embedded in traditional notions of race and population difference (Suzuki and Von Vacano 2018), as the work of Bliss (2012, 2018) and Benn Torres (2020) explores. Research has also encountered an often marked dissonance between a person’s self-reported ancestry affiliation and their genomic information (Mersha and Abebe 2015), again emphasizing the extent to which bodies are a social construct and how physical variation can be interpreted and embedded into identity (e.g. Shah 2019). It is into this setting that aDNA work is published, with results that do not conform to preconceived notions of population history/origin being attacked by the far-right.

BRITISH BIOARCHAEOLOGY AND RECORDING ANCESTRY Skeletons dated to the late medieval period form the majority of holdings in museums and other institutions in Britain, as archaeological excavations, particularly since the mid1990s have uncovered numerous cemeteries (Roberts and Cox 2003). However, the study of population diversity for this period did not form part of our thinking until relatively recently – this was in stark contrast to scholarship of Roman and pre-Norman Britain, where even before archaeological science could play a role, migrants and diversity were expected findings (amongst others, Eckardt 2010; Groves et al. 2013). Although longstanding primary source research showed that migrants (particularly from Europe) were present in late medieval and early modern Britain (e.g. Thrupp 1957), only a very small number of people from outside of northern Europe were thought to have been present (e.g. Ray 2007; Lutkin 2016; see also England’s Immigrants 1330–1550),1 and therefore it was supposed that the likelihood of archaeologists finding their remains was negligible. Consequently, the assumption that mixed heritage individuals or those with non-White ancestry were unlikely to be identified in archaeologically derived populations became uncritically and unquestioningly embedded into our thinking. Even when stable isotope analyses of mobility began in the early 2000s (e.g. Budd et al. 2004b) and more attention was paid to migration and mobility in historical scholarship rather than archaeology (e.g. Habib 2008), we did not think to take the next step and investigate ancestry, thereby perpetuating the view that late medieval England did not have a diverse population. The rare instances where non-White people were identified were thought to be just that (Williamson 2014).2 The recording of archaeological human remains has been standardized for over twenty years through the work of Historic England (formerly English Heritage), the Chartered Institute of Field Archaeologists and the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology. Although many of the recorded data may be used to explore biodistance and population relatedness through dental and skeletal non-metric traits and metrics (Stojanowski and Schillaci 2006), it is only from 2017 that ancestry has had its own dedicated chapter (Mitchell and Brickley 2017). Therefore, the amount of bioarchaeological data for population diversity should significantly increase from now on, as colleagues have affirmed that despite the economic pressures of contract archaeology, having professional documentation has meant that their budgets and time frames may now accommodate the additional recording necessary to capture ancestry data. Furthermore, as postgraduate courses have expanded in the United Kingdom, the ability for collections to be revisited for masters theses research has also increased, and led to incredible new findings, such as the crew of the Mary Rose (sunk in 1545), which

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included men with Black and of diverse heritages whose childhoods were spent outside of Britain (Scorrer and Faillace 2019). Although the practice of bioarchaeology varies enormously between countries, even within Europe (Márquez-Grant and Fibiger 2011; Buikstra and Roberts 2012), work exploring population diversity has and is being undertaken both by colleagues in Britain and Europe on medieval human remains (Zakrewski 2011; After the Plague 2016–20; Coelho et al. 2017). Given the inestimable social value that archaeological studies can bring to under-represented communities by providing evidence and challenging stereotypes (Bressey 2009; Little and Shackel 2016; Battle-Baptiste 2017), it is hoped that more studies will be forthcoming.

CASE STUDY: LATE MEDIEVAL LONDON Primary source information for late medieval London shows that the population was drawn not only from the counties which surround the City (e.g. Surrey), but also from different parts of what is now the United Kingdom, as well as northern and southern Europe. Individuals from more distant locales were also present, including people from India and Iceland (Williams 2007; Kendall et al. 2013; Lutkin 2016; Barron, Carlin and Rosenthal 2017). As London was the most important urban settlement in England, acting as the centre of government and business (Porter 1998), it is not surprising that the population was drawn from across the late medieval world, with preliminary bioarchaeological research showing that it included individuals with non-White ancestry, at least one of whom was a second-generation migrant (Redfern and Hefner 2019). Two cemetery populations from late medieval London were included in our analysis. The first (SPT82 and SPT85: SPT) were buried in the precinct of St Mary Spital, an Augustinian hospital and monastery founded in 1197 by a group of wealthy and prominent citizens, and located outside the eastern City walls (Figure 4.1). The foundation charter of St Mary Spital stipulated that it should care for the infirm and pilgrims,3 but the excavation of mass burial pits and records in other primary sources show that the cemetery areas were also used to bury its religious community and hospital inmates, and its suburban location meant that it had the space to accommodate catastrophic mortality events (e.g. famine) (Connell et al. 2012). St Mary Spital is well documented in primary sources and has been subject to archaeological investigations since antiquarian times, which have detailed the extent of its property and burial grounds (Thomas, Sloane and Phillpotts 1997). The human remains from SPT were recovered in the 1980s from what is now the Central Foundation Girls’ School during an archaeological evaluation and later in a rescue excavation. Unfortunately, although the initial results have been briefly summarized in the archaeological reports of later excavations at St Mary Spital (Thomas, Sloane and Phillpotts 1997; Harward et al. 2019), the SPT burials have not been subject to radiocarbon dating and the excavations remain unpublished. A total of 402 burials were encountered, including two multiple graves, and were dated stratigraphically and on body position (see Gilchrist and Sloane 2005). Radiocarbon dating of human remains excavated from Spitalfield Market (SRP98) in the late 1990s to early 2000s using Bayesian modelling established that burials took place at St Mary Spital between the late twelfth and mid-sixteenth centuries (Sidell, Thomas and Bayliss 2007; Connell et al. 2012), therefore the thirty-three individuals included in this case study date from this five-hundred-year period.

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FIGURE 4.1  Map showing the location of the hospital and precinct of St Mary Spital, London. The black dot shows the location of the Central Foundation Girls’ School. © Museum of London Archaeology.

The second site is East Smithfield (MIN86) (Figure 4.2), and the fifty-six human remains included in this study were excavated from two phases of the site (Table 4.2). The first phase is the Second Plague pandemic cemetery (1348–50), a planned emergency burial ground created in response to the plague (Yersina pestis) reaching England in the midfourteenth century. Burials were organized in two distinct areas, the western cemetery

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FIGURE 4.2  Map showing the location of the East Smithfield emergency burial ground. © Museum of London Archaeology. TABLE 4.1  Classification matrix from an artificial neural network using macromorphoscopic data (2,000 iterations, range = 0.1, decay 20 years old) individuals from both cemeteries were selected if the cranial bones necessary for undertaking macromorphoscopic analysis (MMS) were present (Hefner and Linde 2018). This gave a total of eighty-nine adult individuals for whom ancestry could be studied. Individuals with congenital skull anomalies (e.g. facial asymmetry) were also excluded. The individuals in the sample were also examined for evidence of cranial and dental modification, but neither were observed (see the above-mentioned individuals from Lagos, Portugal). At present, identifying ancestry in subadults (< 20 years old) is an active area of forensic research. Tests of methods show that the results are not as robust as those achieved for adults. Therefore, we have excluded subadults from our research.

CASE STUDY: MACROMORPHOSCOPIC ANALYSIS Applying MMS to understand the role ancestry (social race) played in medieval London is not as straightforward as a forensic anthropological assessment of ancestry involving modern human remains. We do not have, for example, an individual’s self-reported ancestry; nor do we have access to a peer’s perceived social race. We have only the hard, mortal tissues left behind so very long ago. Those mortal tissues, fortunately, have indelibly etched upon their surfaces morphological features useful for predicting an individual’s ancestry. We need only tease apart the data and measure how similar (and dissimilar) each is to all the others. One way to approach measuring similarity between individuals from morphological variability is to literally let the dead speak, in other words, measure morphological similarity/dissimilarity with a total disregard for a priori labels or classifications of social race. Ancestry estimation translates ‘biological traits to a culturally constructed labelling system’ (Sauer 1992: 109) and is not an attempt to reify biological race, but to establish ancestry as a social category with inclusion criteria that are linked to biogeographical ancestry.

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For many biological anthropologists studying human variation, the primary concern is the relationship between a biological variable (e.g. skin colour, stature, cranial length, facial morphology) and geographical origin (e.g. Hungary, Europe or Zalavar). However, there are times when a given set of observations can be divided into subgroups which differ in non-random variations in meaningful ways, but without any initial assumption about who or what will differ and how those differences will be expressed. Various methods to measure these differences fall under a suite of techniques known as cluster analysis: analytical methods used to partition data into comparatively homogenous mutually exclusive or hierarchical subsets based on similarities among the objects (in this case, inter-individual similarity). We used data from MIN86 (N=56) and SPT82 and SPT85 (N=33) (Table 4.1), to search for individuals with enough morphological distinction to warrant closer inspection.

TABLE 4.2  Individual classifications of the East Smithfield (MIN86) and the Cental Foundation Girls’ School (SPT82, SPT85: SPT).

Plot No.

Context Site

1

5741

2 3

Location within Site and Date*

Plague Burial**

Sex

Predicted Classification

MIN86 Eastern cemetery

Plague

Female African

5281

MIN86 Mass burial trench 3

Plague

Male

African

9540

MIN86 West Row 2

Plague

Male

African

4

11244

MIN86 Mass burial trench 1

Plague

Female African

5

5902

MIN86 Eastern cemetery

Plague

Female African

6

12790

MIN86 Mass burial trench 1

Plague

Female White

7

11108

MIN86 Mass burial trench 2

Plague

Female Asian

8

7381

MIN86 West row 3

Plague

Female Asian

9

11625

MIN86 Mass burial trench 2

Plague

Male

Asian

10

7094

MIN86 West row 6

Plague

Male

White

11

11944

MIN86 Mass burial trench 1

Plague

Male

White

12

6467

MIN86 West row 3

Plague

Female White

13

20003

MIN86 Emergency burial ground

Plague

Female White

14

5283

MIN86 Mass burial trench 3

Plague

Female White

15

12815

MIN86 Mass burial trench 1

Plague

Male

White

16

11627

MIN86 Mass burial trench 2

Plague

Male

White

17

11109

MIN86 Mass burial trench 2

Plague

Female White

18

11914

MIN86 West row 1

Plague

Male

White

19

11115

MIN86 Mass burial trench 2

Plague

Male

White

20

881

SPT

Female White

21

1009

SPT

Male

White

22

1004

SPT

Female Asian

23

1325

SPT

Female Asian

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE IN THE RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN AGE

24

1148

SPT

Male

African

25

1185

SPT

Female White

26

1124

SPT

Male

Asian

27

1136

SPT

Male

Asian

28

1314

SPT

Male

African

29

1164

SPT

Male

White

30

9901

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1350–1400)

Potential Male plague

Asian

31

810

SPT

Female White

32

1006

SPT

Female African

33

782

SPT

Male

White

34

1199

SPT

Male

African

35

914

SPT

Female African

36

1237

SPT

Male

37

1166

SPT

Female African

38

979

SPT

Female African

White

39

1019

SPT

Male

40

694

SPT

Female White

Asian

41

11030

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1350–1400)

Potential Male plague

42

12664

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1350–1400)

Potential Female White plague

43

1104

SPT

Female White

44

1313

SPT

Female White

45

1239

SPT

Female Asian

Asian

46

1311

SPT

Male

Asian

47

927

SPT

Male

White

48

1935

SPT

Male

Asian

49

696

SPT

Male

White

50

994

SPT

Male

White

51

8015

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1350–1400)

Potential Female African plague

52

6272

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1350–1400)

Potential Female Asian plague

53

9519

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1350–1400)

Potential Female African plague

54

1126

SPT

Male

White

55

12339

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1400–1538)

Female White

56

13935

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1400–1538)

Male

White

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57

981

SPT

Male

White

58

9425

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1353–1538)

Male

African

59

10170

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1353–1538)

Male

White

60

905

SPT

61

6371

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1350–1400)

62

1118

SPT

Female Asian Potential Male plague

African

Female Asian

63

5285

MIN86 Mass burial trench 3

Male

White

64

9417

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1353–1538)

Plague

Male

Asian

65

6565

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1350–1400)

Potential Female White plague

66

9395

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1353–1538)

Male

67

12297

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1400–1538)

Female White

68

8108

MIN86 St Mary Graces (1350–1400)

Potential Male plague Male

White African

69

678

SPT

70

8427

MIN86 West Row 2

Plague

Female White

Asian

71

6532

MIN86 Eastern cemetery

Plague

Female White

72

12643

MIN86 Mass burial trench 2

Plague

Female White

73

8277

MIN86 Mass burial trench 2

Plague

Male

White

74

7163

MIN86 West row 6

Plague

Female White

75

7065

MIN86 West row 9

Plague

Male

76

11430

MIN86 Mass burial trench 2

Plague

Female White

77

5960

MIN86 Eastern cemetery

Plague

Male

78

12700

MIN86 West row 4

Plague

Female White

White White

79

6428

MIN86 West row 6

Plague

Female White

80

9807

MIN86 West row 4

Plague

Female White

81

5272

MIN86 Mass burial trench 3

Plague

Male

White

82

11118

MIN86 Mass burial trench 2

Plague

Male

White

83

12566

MIN86 Mass burial trench 1

Plague

Male

White White

84

8343

MIN86 West row 6

Plague

Male

85

12814

MIN86 Mass burial trench 1

Plague

Female White

86

12813

MIN86 Mass burial trench 1

Plague

Male

White

87

11193

MIN86 West row 3

Plague

Male

White

88

11857

MIN86 Mass burial trench 1

Plague

Male

White

89

12567

MIN86 Mass burial trench 1

Plague

Male

White

* The burial types/area for the Second plague pandemic emergency ground (1348–50) are given where possible; date range for the St Mary Graces burials are provided (see Grainger et al. 2008; Grainger and Phillpott 2011). ** Based on archaeological and/or aDNA evidence

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To explore this variability, natural clustering of the data requires defining the number of natural clusters to express and some measure of similarity. If, for example, if we look for a two-, three- or eight-group solution (using a Euclidean distance measure – which is beyond the scope of this chapter), the data will demonstrate relatively distinct two-, three- and eight-cluster solutions (Figure 4.3). However, the overlapping clusters could potentially

FIGURE 4.3  Plot of the two-, three- and eight-cluster solutions within the combined (MIN86 and SPT82 and SPT85: SPT) samples determined using mutually exclusive clusters calculated from the raw data. Note the level of overlap in the eight-cluster solution, particularly compared to the two-cluster. © Joseph T. Hefner.

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indicate those clusters are more like each other than either is to a third or fourth. The twogroup solution (Figure 4.4: two group) shows overlap between the two clusters, which may not represent the actual distribution of ‘populations’ within our sample but rather some other aspect of skeletal biology (e.g. sex, size). An eight-group solution (Figure 4.4: eight group) demonstrates a great degree of overlap between most of the individuals and seems to add very little information to the question: are there individuals or groups of individuals within our sample distinct enough warrant closer inspection? Now that we have explored the data for mutually exclusive groups we dig into them a little deeper and search for hierarchical clusters, the essence of which is identifying similarities among objects, but with the understanding that larger clusters also may be present in the data structure. These clusters are generally presented in tree diagrams that express the hierarchical relationship between the individuals identified at the terminal nodes of each tree branch (bottom of the tree diagram). In three dimensions (Figure 4.4), several individuals are clearly distinct from most of the sample. Individuals 3 (MIN86 sk 9540), 7 (MIN86 sk 11108) and 79 (MIN86 sk 6428) in Cluster 3 are on the outside edge of total variation seen within the entire sample. Morphologically, these three individuals are clearly distinct from the others, expressing morphologies found in hot, dry climates (for example wider nasal apertures; a post-bregmatic depression; low, rounded noses) seen in regions such as the Mediterranean and northern Africa. In fact, all the traits

FIGURE 4.4  Plot of a three-cluster solution for hierarchical clusters within the combined (MIN86 and SPT85 and SPT82: SPT) samples calculated from the raw data. Note: Each number in the field represents a single individual corresponding to the plot number (Plot No.) in Table 4.2. © Joseph T. Hefner.

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FIGURE 4.5  Individual density plots, by variable, for the three-cluster solution. Note: NAW = the nasal aperture width; PBD = the postbregmatic depression; MT = the malar tubercle. © Joseph T. Hefner.

expressed in these three individuals are more common expressions in African samples than in northern or southern White European groups. These distinctions are most clearly illustrated by a density plot of the morphology scores for each cluster (Figure 4.5). In summary, the MMS analysis shows that the majority population of medieval London were people with White ancestry (males n=30, females n=24, total n=54, 60.7 per cent) (Figures 4.6 and 4.7; Table 4.1), who given the stable isotope and primary source evidence,

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FIGURE 4.6  Example of an individual with White European ancestry. ©Museum of London.

FIGURE 4.7  Example of an individual with Black African ancestry. ©Museum of London.

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are likely to reflect locals and migrants from what is now the United Kingdom, as well as from across Europe. The method has allowed us to identify males (n=8) and females (n=9) who have African ancestry (n=17, 19.1 per cent), who following from previous stable isotope work on the MIN86 population (Kendall et al. 2013; Redfern and Hefner 2019) are likely to include both first and (at least) second migrants. Our experience of applying this method to pre-modern populations leads us to reject the ‘Asian’ classification (males n=10, females n=8),5 because regardless of ancestry group, the faces of medieval people were wider than seen in contemporary populations, and so we believe that this is a false-positive result (see discussion in Redfern and Hefner 2019). Instead, we suggest that this classification reflects several variables such as that these people are from locales currently under-represented in the MMS reference data, and include those with diverse heritages.

CONCLUSION The study of late medieval skeletons affords us insights into both the biological and social dimensions of human bodies, because the people they represent experienced and were shaped by both forces. The evidence captured within their skeletal tissues enables us to construct their own osteobiography but also understand patterns at the population level. Forensic anthropology offers new perspectives on race in past populations, which, when combined with other scientific analyses, forms a robust dataset to explore how ancestry, childhood origin and population affiliation intersected and interacted in the late medieval world. Our review of this work underscores the need for multidisciplinary studies, with each method and source bringing their own unique evidence. Often, as the study of contemporary population reveals, the results of these studies will be complex and are likely to contain contradictions, especially between genomic and morphological assessments of population groupings, but we should not fall into the trap of ranking these or giving more weight to certain datasets. The inclusion of ancestry assessment in professional standards in Britain will not only improve our understanding of population diversity in late medieval and early modern England, but also the increased datasets will permit further refinement of our methods and results. The publication of these data are becoming standardised in site reports, meaning the evidence for England being home to migrants and their descendants is becoming embedded in knowledge and understanding of professionals and the general public.6

CHAPTER FIVE

Race and Politics Unkynde Monstrous Races and ‘Curled Darlings of Our Nation’ MATTHEW VERNON

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. —James Baldwin, ‘Letter from a Region in my Mind’, November 10, 1962 In a special issue of postmedieval on race in the Middle Ages, Medievalist Asa Mittman asked the provocative question: ‘Are the “monstrous races” races?’ (Mittman 2015a). In so doing he artfully opened up a host of questions about the problematic nature of terminology freighted with unwanted ideological baggage. The primary one he advanced was the inherent difficulty of disarticulating modern conceptions of race from the cloud of meanings that are attached to the bothersome term arising in texts from the medieval period as well as through archival and editorial practices. This is a familiar debate to medievalists who continue to struggle with the quite apparent relationships among their field’s origins, nineteenth-century projects of colonization and racial categorization, current modes of inquiry considered to be sufficiently distant from those troubling beginnings and, of course, the objects of our scholarly gaze. In an effort to cut the tangle of misleading implications, scholars on both sides of the temporal divide have largely cordoned off possible medieval figurations of race from later, more direct usages. Geraldine Heng characterizes how this approach considerably limits the power of medievalist interventions into race studies: [A]t present, the discussion of premodern race continues to be handicapped by the invocation of axioms that reproduce a familiar story in which mature forms of race and racisms, arriving in modern political time, are heralded by a shadowplay of inauthentic rehearsals characterizing the prepolitical, premodern past. (Heng 2018b: 23) The sacrifice made to maintain this division surely is in favour of respecting the historical specificity of the unique and malleable intersections of gender, space, religion and class that collude to produce effects that resemble, but are distinct from, modern versions of race. The primary objection one might raise to this line of reasoning is that the lack of quiddity presumed of race in medieval society certainly should inform modern

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conceptions of race, which are no less contingent upon ‘modes of seeing and cognitive and perceptual mechanisms that lead us to “see” race’ (Hooker 2009: 18). However, Mittman also raises more pressing concerns about who benefits from certain discussions of race and what assumptions are incorporated in the foundation of the debate that begins to question race as an apparatus: [W]e should reject the term [‘race’ in the sense of ‘monstrous race’] because its retention reifies the implicit reality of the ‘white’ or ‘European’ or ‘Christian’ ‘race’ at the core of medieval discourse. Whenever we write ‘monstrous race,’ we accept ‘Christendom’s’ rhetoric of its own existence and we imply the presence of a ‘normal’ or ‘normative race’ at the center, revealed by these ‘monstrous races’ at the periphery. (Mittman 2015a: 48) He quite rightly hesitates at the threshold of using race in this way given how readily this lends itself to the creation of a racial hierarchy, even outside of the realm of fantastical texts, that tends to place difference on a scale that uses White Christianity as its reference point for what is natural. Mittman’s correction to the historiography of race is necessary; it provokes a critical reconsideration of the politics surrounding the solidity of racial categories. To take his thinking a step further, this argument underscores the fundamental malleability of race in the medieval imagination. The epistemic regimes scholars frequently impose onto medieval and early modern texts do not comport with the far more flexible and dynamic conceptions of race that a medieval or early modern writer would construct due to the necessities of encounter or having to live with people read as outside a ‘normative racial’ perspective. Consider Mittman’s argument alongside William of Rubruck’s description of entering the Great Khan Mongke’s court during his journey through the Khan’s lands in 1253–5. After an arduous journey and a series of seeming miscommunications William was allowed this audience. Significantly, throughout his travels William adhered to the Franciscan order’s rule of dress, which meant walking to court barefoot despite intense cold. William records the amazement of those in attendance: ‘People gathered round us, gazing at us as if we were freaks [monstra], especially in view of our bare feet, since they imagined that in no time we should lose them’ (William of Rubruck 1990: 173). Shirin Khanmohamadi highlights this moment in her In Light of Another’s Word (2014) to show complications in a visual regime that ostensibly is meant to serve the projects of Western domination and conversion. What the reader must grapple with instead is ‘a greater fluidity and dialogue in the relation between viewer and viewed’ that destabilizes the assumed relationships between what is normative and what deviates from those norms’ (Khanmohamadi 2014: 86). Heng puts the perceptual dialectics that further inform William’s subjection to an ethnographical gaze into a deeper historical perspective; she lays out the vacillation between the Mongols being read as an ‘impossibly alien people, sharing far less with the West than Saracens and Jews’ to exhortations that European forces emulate the Mongols within the same reports (Heng 2018b: 293, 297). The seemingly contradictory impulses between reading the Mongols as monstrous and worthy of Western admiration would by the fourteenth century turn into outright admiration in Mandeville’s Travels. If the moves that I have made thus far – prefacing a discussion of early ethnographic work with reflections on so-called monstrous races – seem remote from this chapter’s focus on race and politics, that is precisely the point. This chapter follows the line of

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reasoning charted in recent scholarship on race in the Middle Ages presenting race as ‘an interpretive process’ (Whitaker 2019: 6). Race’s mirage-like nature, as Cord J. Whitaker puts it, sits uneasily with a common understanding of politics, which is ordinarily defined through an understanding of the material effects of state power on specific bodies. However, the intersection of race and politics in the medieval and early modern periods necessarily must be read through imaginative work and through the texts that do not come from the realm of power. Rather, to understand race before race becomes reified, scholars have had to engage with what precedes the apparatus that codifies and polices particular bodies. Imagination and conjecture shape the eventual structures that impose themselves upon specific bodies. In heeding Heng’s insight about the persistence of premodern race, we must also consider racialization as a process that is always in motion, thus can be brought into startling adjacency with contemporary racializing assemblages, or as Alexander G. Weheliye provocatively describes this deep stratum of social mechanisms: ‘[the] set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite humans, and nonhumans’ (2014: 4). This chapter begins with a quote from James Baldwin’s ‘Letter from a Region in my Mind’ (1962) that keys my argument about the imbrication of mental and legal processes in constructing race. As Baldwin puts it, the political realities of race are not realities at all but a dangerous ‘delusion’ expressing categories that need to be continually reexamined to stall the harm they always threaten to incite. I will try to take up Baldwin’s conceptual provocation in a fashion by critically destabilizing the seeming solidity of race that emerges from political life, as I define it below. The following is less of a linear, historical argument than a mediation on the reoccurrence of attempts to build neat lines of race to obfuscate the contradictions, erasures and overlapping identities that emerge from the process of making race. Before defining what I mean by race and politics, I would like to note why this chapter will not simply rely on state documents that have within them a recognizable sense of what race is. To do so, I will refer back to the example with which this chapter began. The preceding evolution in how western Europeans perceived Khan’s court attests to race in the sense of ‘a fluid, unstable, and “decentered” complex of social meanings’ (Winant 1994: 59). However, perceptions of Khan’s court began to shift due to the imagined threat that the Mongolian army posed, more than due to extensive contact of the sort that William was able to achieve through his strenuous efforts. This is to say that William’s narrative has a usefulness that is circumscribed by how exceptional it is. Indeed, even where interactions like the ones William describes happened, direct evidence of racialization can be frustratingly out of reach. Accounts of foreign merchants Londoners produced in compliance with a 1439 Act of Parliament, for example, hint at both extensive geographic contact through trade networks, and an explicit preference for crews drawn from ‘as many different nations as possible’ (Brown 1890: 120; Bradley 2012: xxv). Moreover, they are a direct response to growing nationalistic sentiment that would manifest itself in more extreme efforts to expel people considered to be hazardous for the civic body. Nonetheless, descriptions of foreign merchants are often vague, with preference given to the quantity and quality of goods traded; of sailors, even less is recorded. A Hakluyt Society editor gives a sharp articulation of early travel narratives’ descriptive limitations marked by an uncharacteristic exclamation point: Nor is there in any of the narratives any serious attempt, based on reliable sources or personal observations, to describe contemporary conditions within the interior of

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West Africa, except where Richard Eden twice digresses to give a short description of Africa, and in these two instances he draws his information, not from trustworthy contemporaries Moors, negroes, or Portuguese, but mainly from rumor and the works of classical writers! (Blake 1942: 253) The editor is particularly off-put by descriptions of the mythical African ruler Prester John that find their way into what would seem to be otherwise faithful accounts of exploration. Prester John will be discussed below. The editor’s perspective dismisses the utility these intrusions into travel accounts have as they demonstrate the overlap between fantasy and material realities which constitutes racialization from the medieval period onward. The small set of recorded encounters between peoples from different continents who are racialized belies the much larger and more unruly collection of evidence that can be derived from a variety of other sources. In terms of thinking about the interaction between race and politics, this chapter takes its inspiration from Saint Thomas Aquinas’s meditation on how the city can both thrive and retain its own sovereign identity: For a city which needs much trade to sustain it must also of necessity suffer continual contact with foreigners. But according to the teaching of Aristotle, association with foreigners commonly corrupts the morals of the citizens because men from foreign parts, nurtured on other laws and usages, inevitably behave differently in many ways from the customs of the citizens and when their example influences the citizens to act in similar ways, civic life is disturbed. (Dyson 2002: 50) There are myriad complexities to this passage that show the difficulties and possibilities of trying to lay hold of the racial mirage. The argument that continued exposure to ‘men from foreign parts’ will cause some moral corruption of a city not only is protonationalist but also anticipates the strategic essentialism that defines racism. Here I follow the comprehensive definition of race Geraldine Heng provides in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages: Race is one of the primary names we have – a name we retain for the strategic, epistemological, and political commitments it recognizes – that is attached to a repeating tendency, of the gravest import, to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and power differentially to human groups. (Heng 2018b: 3) Race cannot exist without political life; as Aquinas would have it, the development of social life depends upon the creation of political institutions. Aquinas’s anxiety demonstrates the politics of identity that work to construct both the foreign and the reference culture as absolute and essential; that is to say that two types of identity formation are happening simultaneously. He is asserting that it is possible to preserve one’s own sense of cultural coherence from the drift that occurs when foreign bodies are allowed to live in the state. However, Aquinas’s statement is troubled by the fact that the perceptual drift he fears has already happened (Figure 5.1).

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FIGURE 5.1  Alterpiece of ‘Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas’ on the wall of the Santa Caterina d’Alessandria Church. © Vladimir Korostyshevskiy/Alamy Stock Photo.

Aquinas is steeped in what is pejoratively described in Adelard of Bath’s Quaestiones Naturales as ‘Saracenorum sententiae’ (quoted in Metlitzki 1977: 51). Aquinas works with Aristotle even though from the perspective of the Church the author being ‘so much handled by Arab scholars was enough to infect him [Aristotle] with the taint of Islam’ (Dyson 2002: xxiii). I quote this phrase from Adelard’s Quaestiones Naturales to emphasize that at issue is not solely religion but also race. Adelard frames his text as a dialogue between himself and his nephew. After his nephew uses the term ‘Saracen’ as a means to demean any knowledge that can be gleaned through Averroes, Adelard gently revises his nephew’s language. He suggests instead that he will give his views on the studies

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of the Arabs (‘Arabicorum studiorum’), which calls attention to the ‘racial, political, and social project to represent Muslims as inferior to Christians’ and his desire to resituate his Muslim sources within geographic, historical, and intellectually appropriate sites (Burnett 1998: 91; Rajabzadeh 2019: 3). Here again, we see the racial mirage in a form that Maria Rosa Menocal argued should make visible the cultural dialectic that the writer hides from view, prompting readers to ‘reevaluate our assumptions and knowledge of the oftenhidden Other – the Arab, the Semite, the Averroes – who stands silently behind Aristotle in the thirteenth century’ (1987: 14). Although Aquinas seems certain about the need to bar the permanent change that encounters with foreigners might bring, such a change is implicit within his writing and inextricable from it. The dialectic of contact, both in the literal sense of trade the passage describes and in the imaginative sense of intellectual borrowing and distinction-making, creates what I will be describing as politics. One therefore needs to explore the possibilities contained within this dialectic and unpack the meanings contained within reading uncertainties and ambivalences of the process of racialization that emerge from the creation of identity through the process of making distinctions. The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, the popular nativist poem first composed in the years before the 1439 Act of Parliament, with two subsequent recensions, examples the political dynamics I have framed around Aquinas’s commentary on foreigners. The poem makes an elaborate hierarchy of countries and goods they provide on the basis of what they provide to the British public. The poet’s critiques take particular aim at Italian merchants whose goods he believes to be encouraging wasteful behaviour and excessive consumption by selling their luxury goods: For moche of thys chaffare that is wastable Mighte be forborne for dere and dyssevable And that I wene, as for infirmitees In oure Englonde is suche comoditees Wythowten helpe of any othere londe, Whych by wytte and practike bethe ifounde, That alle humors myght be voyded sure; Whych that we gledre wyth oure Englysh cure, That wee shulde have no nede to skamonye, Turbit, euforbe, correcte, diagredie, Rubarde, sené, and yet they bene to nedefulle; But I knowe thynges also spedefulle, That growene here, as these thynges seyde, Lett of this matere no mane be dysmayde, But that a man may voyde infirmytee Wythoute degrees fet fro beyonde the see. (quoted in Gerald of Wales [1863] 1968: 173) As was the case with the passage from Aquinas, this poem is self-evidently about nation and preserving political boundaries through carefully monitoring trade. However, it is similarly deceptive in its targets. The poet is scrupulous about identifying items for their effects as they relate to their country of origin; here he stages a telling departure from that routine to highlight goods associated with India, Greece and northern Africa: Turbit, Scamonie, Diagredie. Paul Freedman argues about the evocative nature of foods

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in medieval writing that they were ‘not abstract metaphors but vivid concepts that permeated geographical lore’ (Freedman 2008: 89). This is quite evidently the case here, where the staging of the poet’s nativist argument against the intrusion of comestibles brought by Italians is meant to indicate a more pernicious infiltration of a far distant world. More pointedly, the author is thinking about the permeability and mutability of the body in his emphasis on items that would be used to balance the humours; he articulates fears of somatic change brought about by thoughtless intimacy with the East. The author is concerned with the spices being items of ‘complacence’ which he links to English infirmity, as he is with English cupidity. This passage evokes familiar tropes of the luxurious and deadly East, memorably summarized by Gerald of Wales’s warning: the East ‘has precious metals of certain types, sparkling gems and aromatic spices […] what are these in comparison with the loss of life and health?’ (Gerald of Wales 1982: 54). Of course, these sorts of admonitions would hardly curb English appetites for luxury foods and spices. It is a cliché, but one worth repeating in the face of these proto-nationalistic disavowals of the world’s wealth, that racialization is one of the primary engines for empire’s workings. Some hundred years after The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye’s composition these nationalistic attitudes were sharpened by encounters with otherness. However, these clear lines of difference being asserted quickly became complex when they had to circumscribe resistant bodies or justify force on behalf of the state. One can see the progression from simplistic understanding of racial difference to one that becomes ad hoc and troubled in accounts of Martin Frobisher’s explorations in the sixteenth century. Early in the text the author, George Best, describes an interracial marriage as a means to debunk climatological theories of Blackness. The account describes an Ethiopian ‘black as cole brought into England’ who marries an English woman. The child they produce was ‘in all respects as blacke as the father’. Best reads this as convincing evidence that ‘blackness proceedeth rather of some natural infection … that neyther the nature of the clime neyther the good complexion of the mother concurring coulde anything alter’ (Best [1578] 1867: 54). The reason for the place of prominence for this story is that is meant to allay fears of the ‘smothering heates with infectious and contagious ayres’ that led to the infamous deaths of Thomas Wyndam’s crew during their voyage to Benin, discussed below. More broadly, this example is meant to assert that the English could safely colonize climactic zones wholly different from their own without fear of falling victim to the ‘infections’ afflicting the inhabitants of other climactic zones. This example is, to say the least, ironic, as Best seeks to demonstrate the impassible difference between races with the example of the possibility for social life that proceeds on wholly different polarities than the one perhaps intended, with an Ethiopian living and marrying in England. This example is paradigmatic of the tangled meanings that emerge during these attempts to more firmly solidify both geographic and racial lines. Best writes that his work is meant to allow the reader to ‘see both the shape and fashion of the whole universall face of the earth, compared all togyther’ adjoining old geographical knowledge with new (Best [1578] 1867: 37). He could well be writing about constant reimagining of conceptual categories that is a necessary corollary to this epistemological mission. Race, physiognomy, and affect all become imbricated in his account. In the example of the racial differences of Africans, Best moves from his suspicion of a climatological theory of race to the familiar religious explanation that credits Noah’s son, Ham’s, transgression for inherited Blackness. Benjamin Braude has read the moves to make Black identity through this myth as a means to construct White identity:

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The Curse of Ham not only created African identity; it was also essential to the fixing of white identity. Just as Africans made it possible for Europeans to master and tame the wild reaches of the lands beyond the Western ocean, so a theory of African origins allowed Europeans to tame the fear that they themselves might become as wild as the lands they sought to conquer. (Braude 2005: 88) While this quite clearly describes the intent of these epistemic moves, the way they are enacted in the text is far less straightforward. In contrast, Frobisher also has numerous encounters with the Inuit people in the lands he reaches on his journey, each requiring him to revise his conceptual apparatus to comprehend the people he encounters. Upon his first seeing several Inuk people at a distance, he mistakes them for ‘porposes or scales or some kind of strange fish’ (Best [1578] 1867: 73). It is only with some difficulty that they are accepted as human, and even that move is contingent and liable to conceptual slippage. Frobisher, according to the account, can barely comprehend the Inuk grief. When they see one of their number that he tricks and kidnaps onto his boat, he notes that they sounded ‘like the howling of wolves or other beasts in the woods’ (86). Michael Locke, fellow explorer and financial backer to Frobisher, assays a congenital theory of the people he encounters during this voyage based on his impressions of physiognomic and lexical taxonomy: ‘these strange people to be of countenance and conversation proceding of a nature geven to fyrsenes and rapyne’ (82). The range of these responses bespeak the dynamic and ad hoc nature of racialization. However, they univocally attest to the demands to contain these bodies within epistemic meanings that can be thoroughly distinguished from the political body of England. When Frobisher kidnaps the Inuk man, he makes it quite explicit that he does so for the sake of displaying his difference: Nowe with this newe pray (which was a sufficient witness of the captaines farre and tedious travell towards the unknowne parts of the worlde, as did well appeare by this strange Infidel, whose like was never seen, red, nor harde of before, and whose language was neyther knowne or understood by anye) the saide Captain Frobisher retourned homeward, and arrived in England in August folowing, an 1576. (Best [1578] 1867: 74) This final passage is dense with the pretexts and paradoxes of racial imagination for political ends. Although the purport of the passage is to emphasize the strangeness of the Inuk man, the text relies on a familiar paradigm, with a twist. ‘Infidel’, a term that would have been more commonly applied to Muslims, is modified by ‘strange’ as though the author seeks to rhetorically render the harm done to the Inuk man as part of a larger cultural narrative pitting Christians against Muslims. At the same time the phrase preserves the value of his novelty as a proxy for possible land exploitation. The kidnapped man’s difference testifies to the absolute difference of the land as a place for unsuspected riches, or at the very least makes the ‘farre and tedious travell’ worth the trip in the eyes of his financial backers. More importantly, this passage testifies to how difficult the racial mirage is to maintain. Subtly the narrative lets the image of the savage native and imperiled civilized man slip when it refers to the Inuk man as Frobisher’s ‘prey’. This, of course, is precisely what the man is to Frobisher, who lures the man into imprisonment and ultimately to his death with ‘prettie pollicie’: through demonstrations of kindness and promises of gifts. At work in this early moment of

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racialization is the parallel process of making invisible the construction of Whiteness, particularly the narrative of innocent White power.

WANDERING IMAGININGS Although much of this chapter has been preoccupied with thinking about race as somehow a category of the difference read upon the body, this move is not meant to reify the category of race by aligning it with perceived phenotypic difference. Race is an imagined category brought to bear to apply force in political situations in the heuristic ways. Thus racialization can occur in unexpected places and move in unlikely directions. This is the case in the example of Richard Eden’s account of Thomas Wyndham’s 1553 voyage, alluded to above. The text gives a straightforward description of a journey to Benin piloted by a Portuguese man named Anthonie Anes Pinteado, who had found employment with the British after falling out of favour with the Portuguese court. Pinteado leads a merchant crew through a number of ordeals to the court of a Benin king, including pressing through to their destination over Pinteado’s warnings about the season being inhospitable at the time of their arrival. The Benin king is minimally described as ‘being a blacke Moore (although not so blacke as the rest)’, able to speak Portuguese and sitting in a ‘great huge hall’ (Blake 1942: 317). These details are seemingly superfluous to the account, the description of the king’s body and the customs of the court are never at issue in the narrative. The king communicates his desire for trade and to accommodate the crew through Pinteado, who acts as a translator. Instead, what occupies the centre of the account are the hardships the crew undergoes in reaching Benin and continue to experience as they wait to complete to complete the terms of their trade. The account claims that the sailors begin to die off, the author claims, in part due to their excessive diet – they eat ‘fruits of the countrey’ and drink palm wine – and because of the hot climate. The crew’s panic mounts, particularly after Windham’s death. They blame Pinteado and threaten his life: ‘But certaine of the mariners and other officers did spit in his face, some calling him Jewe, saying that he had brought them thither to kill them, and some drawing their swords at him, making a shew to slay him’ (319). This passage nuances the previous claims this chapter has made about race as a mask worn out of political expedience. The sailors use race tropically against Pinteado. They level the word ‘Jew’ as an epithet to signify his status aboard the ship as the ‘internal minority’, to borrow Heng’s phrase (Heng 2018b: 55). ‘Jew’ is used in an elusive fashion, evoking a network of possible assumptions about Pinteado’s possible differences from the British. His knowledge of the African coast, his common language with the Benin King – that is to say his ability to cross borders, which makes him an asset to the British – are implicated through the use of ‘Jew’ rather than the more obvious causes of their hardship – their avarice and gluttony. This example demonstrates just how unstable the referents in racialized imagination can be. At no point is Judaism, or the body of someone who is Jewish, under scrutiny. Yet the term is freighted with racial stereotypes that ‘justify’ the threat of physical violence and imply the ‘proper’ composition of British society. Here I should note that the author seems to be aware of this irony and makes use of it to structure his narrative. In a final move to make Pinteado into a trope for political purposes, the author ends the account with a moral about envy, contempt and the King of Portugal (Blake 1942: 320). This last example draws this argument close to its core contention; that racialization occurs on the grounds of imagination even in the case of political life. As noted above,

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imaginative work is often read with some suspicion in political texts; one might be yet more leery of reading fantasy as an likely intersection for race and politics. However, it is not merely an author allowing ‘his imagination to run riot’ for Richard Eden to turn his attention from a straightforward description of John Locke’s voyage along the west coast of Africa, to an extended quotation of Mandeville’s Travels (Mandeville 1983: 256). Rather, it demonstrates much of what it purports to: a European Christian desire to imagine the idea of a Black Christian ruler presiding over a utopian empire. Patricia Ingham persuasively argues that the land of Prester John constitutes the ‘fantasies of the perfect Christian polity’ that allows European Christians to rediscover themselves in a ‘strange and marvelous’ light (Ingham 2006: 488). Although it was not the object of her argument, Ingham’s reading has compelling implications for considering the question of race. Mandeville describes Prester John’s fashioning himself, albeit incompletely, after a form of Christianity his readers would recognize: The Emperor watched the service and the way priests were made, and how solemnly and devoutly they were ordained. He then asked the knight what sort of people these were who were being ordained, and what they were called; the knight said they were priests. Then the Emperor said that no longer would he be called King or Emperor, but priest instead, and that he would take the name of the first priest of the church. (Mandeville 1983: 182) To answer the most pertinent question the appearance of Prester John raises – why would a European Christian in the medieval and early modern periods want to envision such a utopia inflected by race? – I would apply Ingham’s logic to argue that race functions as a screen for self-recognition. Prester John is used as ‘evidence’ of European political structures’ rightness that are apparent; even someone seemingly distinct in terms of the intersections that constitute race would recognize the superiority of Western religious customs. The success of the Prester John myth is its remove from real society. Here again, race is entirely imagined without reference to the bodies that might militate against the impositions of racial categories. This racial mirror held up as a Christian apotheosis at the far end of the world is contrasted in Mandeville with the danger of losing hold of that identity. The striking example of this comes in when Mandeville relates a story about a young man who circumnavigates the globe, passing through many lands ‘beyond India’, before arriving on an island where he heard his own language being spoken (Mandeville 1983: 129). The man marvelled that such a thing could happen, but could not get any transport further and so returned the way he came. Mandeville conjectures that the man had travelled so far he had nearly returned home. This is as close as Mandeville comes to offering a cautionary tale about the estrangement haunting the border crossing that is the text’s primary pleasure; Mandevillian errantry through the world might lead to one losing track of what is natural to oneself. Although what is at stake is not somatic change, it does question the primacy of overlapping racial and political hierarchies that are boldly affirmed in the text’s prologue when Mandeville declares that ‘every good Christian man who is able, and has the means, should set himself to conquer our inheritance, this land, and chase out therefrom those who are misbelievers’ (Mandeville 1983: 44). This ethos provides the motive for the text’s ostensible paradigm of a polarized world, wherein ‘each part of the earth and sea has its opposite, which always balances it’ (129). Importantly for

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Mandeville, this puts at odds the imagined community of European Christians centred on Jerusalem and a periphery made up largely of non-Christians. Mandeville was by no means forwarding a binary that unquestioningly centred upon the primacy of Whiteness. Mandeville in fact organizes his text around three different centres of political importance and racial difference that function as doubles for each other: Jerusalem, the Khanate and the lands of Prester John. Of these, the Khanate gains unexpected prominence in Mandeville’s narrative, despite the stated importance of Jerusalem to every Christian and the clear significance of Prester John’s pious rule over a vast empire in India. What transfixes Mandeville is both the organizational efficacy of the Khan’s rule which generates robust trade and peace with most surrounding lands and the inclusivity that the Khan’s society is based on, such that they ‘allow all nationalities and men of all kinds of religions and faiths to live among them without hinderance’ (Mandeville 1983: 159). The transactional ease across borders is of a piece with the land’s religious tolerance; the Khan believes that his people see with ‘two eyes and Christian men with one’ allowing them to make more intelligent decisions than their Christian counterparts (143). This aspect of the Khanate fundamentally destabilizes the logic of Mandeville’s worldmaking, and would perhaps have presented a crux for the large number of medieval and early modern audiences of his work. A European Christian would hold that their beliefs constitute an absolute difference from the pluralism the Khan advocates, and ultimately a difference that would place them above people so far from a world centered on Jerusalem. At the same time, Mandeville constructs the Khanate as a utopia because it levels the hierarchies that were so important to the perspective of his European Christian audiences. Although Mandeville excels in his imaginative depictions of bodies, he shows surprising restraint in limiting his discussion of the Khanate’s people to how they dress, which removes the chance to read physical difference as determinative of their place in the world. Mandeville thus offers his audiences a utopia they cannot accept into their predominant mental paradigms as they relate to racial dominance or political power. Yet he tantalizes in its vision of a society that thrives because it exists outside of the restrictions the Christian West places on its community.

UNKIND IMAGININGS Shakespeare’s Othello draws on Mandeville’s meditation about race, politics and imagination, heightening the confusion between them and demonstrating the disastrous ends Baldwin warns are the necessary end point of this form of political imagining. The play begins with Iago and Roderigo shouting racially inflected insults up to the window of Brabantio, a Venetian senator, whose daughter has eloped with Othello. The insults are aimed to slander Othello and expose his elopement with Desdemona. He and his relationship are described in terms that recall the menagerie Mandeville assembles in his book: ‘old black ram’, ‘Barbary horse’, ‘the beast with two backs’, a union that will produce ‘coursers for cousins and gennets for germans’. The ostensible provocation for this are the workings of politics in the mundane sense this chapter has laboured to avoid: the distribution of power and wealth through promotion or marriage. However, the play quickly moves beyond that to a far more complex idea of the political that must confront the messiness of physical contact with bodies that are considered essentially different.

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Iago asks Roderigo to cry out his insults as though there was a civic catastrophe at hand, as when ‘fire / Is spied in populous cities’ (Shakespeare 1997b: 1.1.76–7). Despite this merely being a pretence, Brabantio immediately is seized by his preconception of this situation, he claims to have dreamt of it and ‘belief of it oppresses’ him. He treats his domestic crisis as a civic one; he warns his fellow senators to this effect: ‘If such acts have passage free / Bond-slaves and pagans shall our statesman be’ (1.2.97–8). His fear is akin to one that we have been tracing through this argument from Aquinas, the political choices that have built the current Venetian state, here the choice to not only employ Othello, but more importantly, to bring him into his household where he could practice his supposed ‘witchcraft’ on his daughter. Rather than resist the racialization that is being used to bar him from Venetian society, Othello’s famous speech before the Venetian senate embraces the tropes of being a ‘bondslave’ and living among pagans: Her father loved me; oft invited me; Still question’d me the story of my life, From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes, That I have passed. … Of being taken by the insolent foe And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence And portance in my travels’ history. (Shakespeare 1997b: 1.3.129–32, 137–9) The move is counterintuitive, but the import is clear, if racialization is a habit of the imagination, why can Othello not wield it as well as Brabantio? This speech constitutes a supreme act of self-fashioning wherein Othello embraces some of the tropes that racialize him, although he mobilizes them in terms that allow him to transcend the social boundaries he describes; in response to Brabantio’s wild claim that some magic has tricked his daughter into marriage, Othello unfurls his tale of moving upwards from slavery which woos the Senate as completely as it did Desdemona. He carefully frames his appeal to the Senate by noting that Desdemona’s was not the only greedy ear; he reminds his audience that her father ‘oft invited’ Othello, to listen to his story. This parallel rhetorical move reminds the senate that the racial boundaries Brabantio evokes with his claims of witchcraft had already been lowered by his inhabitation of Venice’s domestic sphere. This is a small, but important nuance in text that places such emphasis on Othello’s public role in Venetian society, because it adds this as one of the overlapping claims to Venetian ‘citizenship’, to borrow Julia Reinhart Lupton’s framing. I hasten to note that while Lupton’s argument follows a trend in Shakespeare criticism emphasizing religion as the difference that would have most concerned Shakespeare’s early modern audiences, that perspective downplays how much race and religious beliefs inform one another. Indeed, Brabantio follows the lines of both to contrast Othello with Desdemona: If she in chains of magic were not bound, Whether a maid so tender, fair and happy, So opposite to marriage that she shunned The wealthy curled darlings of our nation, Would ever have, to incur a general mock,

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Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom Of such a thing as thou, to fear, not to delight. (Shakespeare 1997b: 1.2.65–71) When Brabantio discovers that his daughter indeed does love Othello, these words take on a wholly new cast. Desdemona is guilty of a type of ‘unkindness’, specifically for betraying her father (Shakespeare 1997b: 1.3.293–4), and more generally for rejecting the ‘curled darlings’ of their nation. Following Lara Bovilsky’s argument about Desdemona’s Blackness, I would suggest that this designation is part of her racialization, that her sexual freedom is read as means to racialize her. Her move from the genealogical imperatives of the Venetian state, to marry within Venice, ‘blacken’ her and move her towards racial categories that echo those of Othello. The word ‘nation’, here referring both to people of common ancestry and territory, occupies the nexus of racial and political terrain that Desdemona is accused of upsetting. Absent Mandeville’s relativism that can countenance the beauty of Othello’s difference, his entrance into Venetian society is contingent and constantly under threat of revocation. Likewise, despite Desdemona’s genealogy and her phenotypic difference from Othello can spare her from the racialization she undergoes. I linger over the scenes of Brabantio accusing Othello because they are so rich with contradiction; he expresses his certainty about how he perceives Othello in absolute terms (mirroring to some extent the feelings of Shakespeare’s audiences) and yet his resort to the language of magic and his desire to hear Othello’s life story betrays how deeply enmeshed the glamour of what Othello’s Blackness signifies has become within Brabantio’s psyche. This difficulty in reconciling the revulsion at Othello’s body and his indulgence in occupying the fantasy his body evokes perfectly echoes the sentiment letter writer John Chamberlain expresses when reporting on the impending departure of a Barbarian envoy that had come to London to discuss commercial and military alliances between England and Barbary: The Barbarians take theyre leave sometime this week, to goe homeward, for our merchants nor mariners will not carry them into Turkie, because thy thincke it a matter odious and scandalous to the world to be friendlie or familiar with Infidells but yet yt is no small honor to us that nations so far removed and every way different shold meet here to admire the glory and magnificence of our Queene of Saba. (quoted in Harris 2000: 31) As was the case with Brabantio, Chamberlain charts a confounding path from noting his countrymen’s aversion to escorting the Moors on the basis of religion to likening his own ruler to the most prominent dark-skinned queen in the Bible on the basis of nation. This is a jarring statement about competing racial paradigms that exist in tandem and operate under the guise of various denials about underlying political realities. On the one hand, the merchants and mariners ostensibly are engaged in trade relations with Barbary, on the other, orientalizing Queen Elizabeth recalls Henry VII’s own delight in assuming the opulent aesthetics of far-flung courts into his own (Jirousek and Catterall 2019: 97). Even at this late point race resembles less of a loose network of observations about the body than a pattern of self-deceptions with the political function of naturalizing the edges of communities that are permeable both in fantasy and fact. This is the troubling paradigm that catalyzes Othello’s tragedy. If we are to take Othello’s conversion seriously both in terms of his religion but also his allegiances to

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Venice – as opposed to merely having converted out of convenience, or ‘turned Turk’ (Lupton 2005: 114) – he must police a line that he and Desdemona have already crossed in their elopement. As has been acknowledged in classic studies of Othello, Iago merely precipitates what is already in the minds of the characters around him (Bloom and Jaffa 1964: 39), thus when Othello muses about how Desdemona’s marriage to Othello is ‘nature erring from itself’ he articulates the hierarchy of ‘clime, complexion, and degree’ wholly unsuited for someone who has occupied as many social and geographical sites as he claims to have. On the other hand, his sentiment about what is natural is an ideal representation of what an Elizabethan spectator would hold paramount in judging a foreigner’s proximity to themselves. Othello commits suicide to efface the racial remnant within himself he believes otherwise cannot be incorporated into Venetian society. Racialization has been seen in previous texts as a way to construct Whiteness as an pretext to consolidate identity and to naturalize expressions of power over others, here we see the converse effect of race to produce a conceptual misidentification, first of Desdemona, who he kills seemingly to punish ‘nature erring’ and then himself for existing in both inside and outside of Venice’s political sphere. He casts himself as having ‘turned Turk’ and uses his death as a final opportunity to conduct the self-fashioning he was able to accomplish so adroitly at the play’s opening. It would perhaps be naïve to insist that, given the disbelief other Venetians express at Othello’s jealousy and violence, the racial remnant or the difference of his nature is just another fiction emerging from his imagination, rather than a reflection of animus arising from Venetians’ distrust of his status.

CONCLUSION To conclude this mediation on race and politics, I would like to consider the infamous 1601 draft proclamation from Queen Elizabeth I’s government which appoints the merchant Casper van Seden to remove a number of ‘blackamoors’ from Britain and repatriate English prisoners from Spain and Portugal: Whereas the Queen’s majesty, tendering the good and welfare of her own natural subjects, greatly distressed in these hard times of dearth, is highly discontented to understand the great number of Negroes and blackamoors which (as she is informed) are carried into this realm since the troubles between her highness and the King of Spain; who are fostered and powered here, to the great annoyance of her own liege people that which co[vet?] the relief which these people consume, as also for that the most of them are infidels having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel[.] (Hughes and Larkin 1969: 221–2) This draft proclamation would have been responding to conditions in England two years before Othello was written. It shocks in its strange congruence with familiar modern uses of the racial scapegoat upon which to load the nation’s problems. Scholars have disagreed about whether or not any of this documents led to any actionable policy. Miranda Kaufmann, for example, has rejected the notion that this was anything more than phatic, a mere bit of political manoeuvering to delay a debtor (Kaufmann 2008: 369). Such an argument is perhaps correct, but precisely misses the point of race and politics that this chapter has tried to address. The ‘blackamoor’ has already been imagined

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as a coherent racialized body vulnerable to the whims of the state’s power; the damage has already been done. As each of the examples above demonstrate, the imaginative apparatus surrounding race paves the way for an array of abuses while abolishing other forms of difference. In this case, the foreignness of Van Seden is overshadowed by the absolute difference of black bodies. How fitting that such a document would be in the form of a draft, revealing of attitudes, but in an in-between state in terms of its political power, both real and imaginary.

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CHAPTER SIX

Race and Ethnicity Circum-Atlantic Colonialisms KATHY LAVEZZO

The question of what ‘race’ and ‘nation’ mean is notoriously fraught, as is the related issue of how those concepts intersect with one another. Important work (e.g. Loomba 1989; Heng 2018b; Whitaker 2019) examines how European discourses produced between 1350 and 1550 make possible or offer alternatives to post-Enlightenment racisms. Many scholars (Beaune 1991; Lavezzo 2004; Staley 2012) also have tracked within that period a prehistory of national thinking. Taken together, scholarship on race and nation is varied, with critics employing different and even contradictory understandings of key terms. Due to that heterogeneity, I begin this chapter by outlining my methodology and defining my terms. After summarizing my approach, I consider how racism and nationalism intersect in two case studies: English–Irish relations during the latter half of the fourteenth century and Spanish relations with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas during the midsixteenth century.

DEFINING RACE My methodology engages multiple theories of race and nation (e.g. Crenshaw 1991; Omi and Winant 1994; Bhabha 2004; Du Bois 2007). I especially draw on Stuart Hall, whose analysis of ‘the fateful triangle’ of race, ethnicity and nation is noteworthy for its sophistication, nuance and clarity (2017). Race, for Hall as for other critics, pertains to pseudo-information about supposedly innate, natural and unchanging traits that distinguish one group of people from another. Drawing upon critics such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Hall analyses how race traffics in mythic ‘truths’ by analysing it as a discourse. By discourse, Hall refers to how the world (indeed the cosmos) is organized and made meaningful through representations, and how those representations, in turn, function like a language. Hall stresses the utility of analysing race as a discourse, writing that hateful as racism may be as a historical fact, it is nevertheless also a system of meaning, a way of organizing and meaningfully classifying the world. Thus any attempt to contest racism or to diminish its human and social effects depends on understanding how

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exactly this system of meaning works, and why the classificatory order it represents has so powerful a hold on the human imagination. (Hall 2017: 32) Racial discourse organizes through and on behalf of difference. Like other essentialist discourses, racism constructs supposedly insuperable lines that separate and hierarchize binary oppositions, for instance culture versus nature. Racial discourse claims to tell the truth about essential and unchanging aspects of human populations, traits that are so innate and natural as to prevent persons located on one side of a binary from moving over to the other (so that, for example, populations are thought to possess a barbarism so essential and inherent that they never can cross over into civility). With its claims about real and unchanging essence, race functions as a ‘major or master’ trope that fixes signs within a discursive ‘world of Manichean opposites – them and us, primitive and civilized, light and dark’ (Hall 2017: 32, 70). While racial discourse purports to provide knowledge about essential and unchanging traits, it is precisely the opposite: a fiction. No discourse, indeed, is ever accurate. The orderly and stable account of the world presented by a discourse through its neat dichotomies and patterns misrepresents the world, which is, in realty, defined by a messy and ‘fluctuating contingency’ (Mercer 2017: 15). To comprehend how discourse fails to capture the shifting, heterogeneous and contradictory nature of the real world, we need only consider how the gender binary of man and woman misrepresents the actual diversity and instability of gender. The words – or in linguistic terms, ‘signs’ – ‘male’ and ‘female’ hardly offer correct accounts of the genders they claim to represent (in linguistic terms, their ‘signifieds’). Again, the supposedly essential, unchanging and natural traits that racial discourse generates are constructs, mere linguistic tropes. What might seem in racial discourse to be a factual account of biology or nature is in reality part of a signifying grid, a discursive creation, an invocation of binary categories of the biological or natural. As Hall puts it, ‘what precisely tends to fix race in its obviousness and visibility – in physical characteristics of “color, hair and bone” – are themselves nothing but the signifiers of an invisible code that writes difference upon the black body’ (2017: 63). Or as Gates stresses, ‘[r]ace … pretends to be an objective term of classification, when in fact it is a dangerous trope’ (1986: 5). The mythic nature of racial discourse is far from the whole story, however. For crucially, while its binary oppositions are fictive, racial discourse nevertheless pertains to a certain, all-too-real, differentiation: the allocation of power. The real dividing line in racial discourse concerns not any supposedly natural and unchanging group characteristics but, rather, how that discourse enables the allocation of ‘wealth, resources and knowledge differentially across societies and between groups’ (Hall 2017: 43). To put it another way, in racial discourse an artificial account of nature naturalizes (and thus authorizes) historical organizations of power between those who belong and their others, between groups invested with agency, autonomy and authority and those denied such powers. Thus, racial discourse entails a certain sleight of hand when it comes to ideas of difference: fictions regarding essential human differences are invoked to make actual differences ‘between belonging and otherness’ possible (Hall 1996: 445). Those historical power differentials, working in tandem with a panoply of racist discourses, have had very real material, psychological and biological effects on social groups. At the same time that it can become institutionalized and thus deeply structure a society in a host of dangerous and damaging – indeed lethal – ways, race is never straightforward,

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monolithic or inevitable.1 Race is by no means a universal phenomenon tied to a transhistorical human impulse to fear and master what is different.2 Rather, racism is part of a ‘social formation’ composed of various and multiple linkages of all kinds, that are joined together or, to invoke Hall’s (Althusserian) terminology, ‘articulated’, at specific moments in time and in specific places (Hall 1980: 325). By stressing the multiplicity of racism, I mean to emphasize how it overlaps, works alongside and/or emerges in relation to other categories of identity. Race is never autonomous but rather signifies in relation to such categories as gender, sexuality and class. Thus, analysis of racial discourse demands our consideration of how it and other forms of disenfranchisement (which are themselves often essentialist) such as sexism or elitism, ‘overlap, intersect, and fuse with each other’ (Omi and Winant 1994: 68). I also emphasize the multiplicity of racism to underscore how racial discourse articulates (that is, joins) a host of arenas, such as law, education, entertainment and culture.3 To put it another way, social formations vary widely over time and across different locations; racism penetrates unevenly, even within a particular social formation. The conjunctural nature of racial discourse means that analysing it requires tracing the particular combination of linkages at various levels that makes action possible during a particular moment and at a specific location. A full analysis of race means asking ‘what are the specific conditions which make this form of distinction socially pertinent, historically active?’ and what ‘concrete historical “work”’ does racism perform? (Hall 1980: 338).

RACE, NATION AND ETHNICITY How does racial discourse intersect with hegemonic Western nationalism?4 With respect to Western peoples such as the English or the Spanish, I provisionally define the nation as an imagined community that is united by an array of shared traits that may include but are not limited to a history, language, territory, political organization, legal system, culture and religion. Notions of national identity may arise both from within and without a community. Typically, internal conceptions of a nation concern its sovereignty (or its special and supreme qualities). Conversely, ideas generated by outsiders often assert the debased nature of a national collective. Some scholars who work on nations and nationalisms claim that such concepts – regardless of whether they celebrate or denigrate groups – have little or nothing to do with race. That is the case for arguably the most influential theorist of nationhood, Benedict Anderson. Anderson (1983) contends that national discourse arose in the eighteenth century, due to the dominance of print capitalism and vernaculars. He compellingly argues that, thanks to their mass circulation in print, vernacular texts (for instance an English newspaper) allowed people living far apart to imagine themselves as united by membership in a ‘mass monoglot’ national community of readers (Anderson 1983: 45). Members of a nation, for Anderson, organize themselves not so much in terms of the binaries of racial discourse but by imagining themselves simultaneously reading the same newspaper. Anderson subscribes, in other words, to what Werner Sollors (1986) would call a consent, as opposed to a descent, model of national identity formation. In theory, anyone, from any background, may enjoy national belonging by learning the vernacular of a nation and going through naturalization processes.5 Race, on the other hand, for Anderson, pertains to ideas of biology that are rooted in class elitism and ‘above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to “blue” or “white” blood and “breeding” among aristocracies’ (1983: 149). In this view, while national traits are accessible to anyone

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possessed of the time and inclination to learn them, racial characteristics are accessible only to people who are linked by reproductive patterns. The ongoing popularity of Anderson’s work reflects how nationalism is still celebrated in certain circles. Such is not the case, however, with racism. In the wake of mass atrocities such as the Holocaust and the exposure of ‘scientific’ racism as a sham, racism is widely disavowed as a superstitious and extremely dangerous phenomenon. Thanks to the widespread denigration of racism, any celebration of nationalism demands an understanding of the nation as an entity opposed to racial thinking. In lieu of race, scholars on nations and nationalism frequently prefer to use the terms ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethnicity’ to refer to national traits. Ethnicity implies here a turn away from essence and biology and an embrace of the cultural and social. ‘Ethnicity’, as medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen puts it, ‘is identity as expressed in culture’, it ‘is adoptable, malleable, and ethically neutral’ (2013: 114). But, as Hall (2017: 100) points out, all too often ‘ethnicity and race … play hide-andseek with one another’. Invocations of ethnicity by nationalists – even those who claim to reject racism – nevertheless can carry with them a whiff or hint of race. In addition, scholarship on nationalism – including work that disavows racism – also at times veers into racism when it purports to discuss ethnicity. In the words of Hall, ethnicity appears to be grounded exclusively in the cultural, in the realm of shared languages, specific customs, traditions, and beliefs, yet it constantly slides—especially through commonsense conceptions of kinship – toward a transcultural and even transcendental fix in common blood, inheritance, and ancestry, all of which gives ethnicity an originary foundation in nature that puts it beyond the reach of history. (2017: 108–9) Thus, even as it is true that ‘ethnic’ national traits like languages and foodways may be learned, such traits are vulnerable to a racist perception that renders them fully available to only certain people, from a shared kin group. Whenever a national narrative creates such ‘natural’ boundaries, drawing hard lines between those who belong and those who are excluded, it functions as a racial discourse. While ethnicity historically has slipped into racial discourse, Hall has endeavoured to recuperate the term in a manner that clearly opposes race (Hall 1996). He proposes a new definition of ethnicity that self-consciously acknowledges the role of cultural and other external factors in making or constructing group identities. Hall’s understanding of ethnicity stresses the contingent, malleable and contested nature of identity and allies with a ‘politics of ethnicity predicated on difference and diversity’ (1996: 447). Instead of authorizing oppression, Hall’s new ethnicity fosters social liberation and human diversity by stressing the unstable and constructed nature of identity. I follow Hall in using ethnicity to refer to the constructed and shifting nature of all identities and understanding race as a fiction about essential, unchanging and inborn traits that is marshalled on behalf of oppressive political hierarchies. My definitions of race and ethnicity do not so much occlude the real effects of racism as aim at clarity and a nuanced discursive analysis. I seek to both acknowledge the pervasiveness of structural racism in our world and examine through careful discursive analysis the slipperiness of race, ethnicity and nation as overlapping categories of identity. In what follows, I examine two case studies: the relationship between English colonizers and the Irish in the mid-fourteenth century, and the Spanish treatment of Indigenous

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Americans in the early sixteenth century. Emerging from different historical moments and divergent circum-Atlantic locations, my examples clarify how race is by no means a universal, stable and omnipresent human phenomenon. Rather, racial formations assume distinctive forms at various times and in different locations. In the case of medieval England and Ireland, an emerging national discourse becomes racial when it rejects the idea that the English can become like the Irish or vice versa: while the Statutes of Kilkenny worry over English colonists degenerating into Irish ways of living, Froissart’s chronicle relates a failed effort to teach Irish kings how to be English subjects. Both the chronicle and the legislation speak to the widespread opposition of English civility to Irish barbarism in late medieval England, a time when the Irish did not enjoy the normative Whiteness that they do today.6 My second example shows how the civilized–barbarous binary reappeared in Renaissance Spain in debates over the exploitation of Indigenous Americans. In this case study, taken near the start of the great imperial projects of early modernity, the scaling up of domination during the Renaissance carries with it an intensified and more explicit racial discourse: the massive appropriations of the Spanish Empire in the Americas prompted nothing less than an official, state-sponsored debate over the humanity of Indigenous Americans. Here, as in the example of England, the historicity of Whiteness emerges, but in a starkly different conjuncture. I refer not to Spanish discourses about savage ‘Indians’, but to how an idea of Spanish savagery – known as the Black Legend – also emerged at this time. A product of a host of phenomena – including efforts to defend the Indigenous peoples and efforts by envious, would-be European colonizers to take down their Spanish rival – the Black Legend shows how a now normative Spanish people were not always White.

ENGLAND AND IRELAND From 1171 until 1536, when Protestant English authorities engaged in a full-scale colonization of Ireland, a ‘patchwork’ of territories in and around Dublin, mainly in eastern and southern Ireland, was inhabited by colonizers (Watt 1987: 311). The catalyst for the occupation was Diarmait Mac Murchada, an Irish king at war with other Irish kings, who travelled in 1161 to Aquitaine to seek help from Henry II (1133–89). In 1170, with Henry’s permission, a motley group of Norman and Welsh mercenaries invaded Ireland. A year later, Henry himself led an invasion, during which he gained the loyalty of Irish authorities and created a charter that granted Dublin to the men of Bristol, thus enabling the economic exploitation of the city. For almost a century after the events of 1170–1, Ireland’s occupation resulted from a mixture of invitations by natives seeking assistance and ‘private aristocratic enterprises’ stemming from the ambitions of individual knights, barons, lords and other nobles (Bartlett 1982; Davies 2006: 25–65). That dynamic began to change in the later Middle Ages, when a discourse of English national identity gained some prominence. Thanks to factors including the loss of French territories, the rise of an English state (thanks partly to the crown’s abuse of Anglo-Jews), the Hundred Years’ War against France (1337–1453) and the use of English in literary, political and other milieux, English kings started to assert their power as ‘heads of an English nation’ invested in translating the society, laws, etc. of England onto outlying western lands (Davies 1994; Clanchy 1998: 2; Stacey 2000). Any dominance achieved had oppressive results. English authorities excluded the Irish ‘from holding certain offices, from becoming burgesses of English towns in … Ireland, from the right to trade freely, or to inherit land held by English tenure, or to devise land

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by English law’, and more (Davies 2006: 118).7 By and large, the will to acquire power and goods – a desire enacted at times through brutal violence – was the historic grounds for conquest (Bartlett 1993: 21–3; Davies 2006: 27), while an ideological rationale was typically provided by the discursive opposition of Irish barbarity to English civility. Initially, starting with Gerald of Wales’s writings, racist discourse emerged in chronicles and other literary records. But with the rise of English national sentiment, that discourse began to appear in official documentary culture, such as parliamentary statutes and royal ordinances, from the second half of the thirteenth century onwards (Davies 2006: 115–7). However, such legilslation was as much – if not more – concerned with the behaviour of the English in Ireland as it was with native Irish people. That is, the practice of colonists mixing with the Irish in all sorts of ways often prompted the issuance of statues. It was the historical erosion of national discourse – the breakdown of the dichotomy English vs Irish – that led English authorities to insist, in racial terms, on maintaining national divisions. The most notorious of such state-sponsored documents are the statutes of a 1366 parliament held in Kilkenny. The Statutes of Kilkenny were passed by Lionel of Antwerp, earl of Ulster and son of Edward III. They echo and combine earlier rhetorics, and were reissued repeatedly over the next century and a half, due to the ongoing mingling of English colonists and Irish natives. The highly iterative nature of the statutes and related legislation testifies to the gap between national discourse and lived experience (Crooks 2005: 120–1). Some of the most charged language in that document emerges in its preamble, which stresses the decline of Englishness in Ireland: Whereas at the conquest of the land of Ireland, and for a long time after, the English of the said land used the English language, mode of riding and apparel, and were governed and ruled, both they and their villeins, called Betaghes, according to the English law, in which time God and holy Church, and their franchises according to their condition were maintained and themselves lived in due subjection; but now many English of the said land, forsaking the English language, manners, mode of riding, laws and usages, live and govern themselves according to the manners, fashion, and language of the Irish enemies; and also have made divers marriages and alliances between themselves and the Irish enemies aforesaid; whereby the said land, and the liege people thereof, the English language, the allegiance due to our lord the king, and the English laws there, are put in subjection and abandoned, and the Irish enemies exalted and raised up, contrary to reason. (Berry 1907: 431)8 With its overview of traits – la lang gis monture leys et vsages (language, manners, mode of riding, laws and usages) – that it understands as vital to Englishness, the preamble offers a kind of primer to fourteenth-century English national identity (Berry 1907: 430). The statutes that follow work biopolitically to discipline the bodies of colonists by legislating what languages they must speak, how they must style their hair, wear their clothes, etc., and outlining the punishment that results from any failure to follow ‘English’ modes of living. The preamble develops a discourse of English versus Irish by contrasting English language, manners, etc. with the maners, guise et lang des Irrois enemies (manners, fashion and language of the Irish enemies; 430). The idea that it is encontre reson (contrary to reason) for the English of Ireland to jettison English ways and embrace their Irish counterparts speaks to the racial dimensions of the preamble (430). Reason in the Middle

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Ages, especially after the rediscovery of Greek philosophy, referred to mental acuity, including an ability to grasp what is appropriate according natural and eternal laws (e.g. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1–1, q. 94). The claim in the preamble that an Englishman choosing Irish over English ways is irrational thus implies, in a racial vein, that according to the laws of nature and indeed providence, English men are governez et reulez (governed and ruled) by English modes of life, and that any divergence from that relationship violates what is natural or essential to the English (Berry 1907: 430). A similarly racial sentiment had emerged in legislation from a 1297 parliament, which described colonists as quasi degeneres (as if degenerate) (Curtis and McDowell 1943: 37; Richardson and Sayles 1947: 17). The phrase literally means that the colonists have come out of their gens or genus, a word used by medieval writers to categorize groups of people according to their distinctive racial traits. For example, Isidore of Seville, in his popular Etymologies defines gens as a biological inheritance when he writes that ‘The word gens is also so called on account of the generations (generatio) of families, that is from “begetting” (gignere, ppl. genitus), as the term “nation” (natio) comes from ‘being born (nasci ppl. natus)’ (2006: 192). The role of what R. R. Davies describes as ‘the myth of biological descent’ in gens (as well as natio [nation]) suggests how traits are ‘natural’ to particular social groups, and thus that nature – biological reproduction – has created ‘proper’ boundaries between people.9 Parliament’s claim that the English in Ireland have become degeneres (degenerate) connotes an unnatural defection from their ‘proper national place’ (Watt 1987: 310; Davies 1994: 7). To return to the Statutes of Kilkenny, the most overtly racial element of the preamble may be its reference to Irroies enemies (Irish enemies), a phrase that is repeated in the statutes no less than six times (Berry 1907: 430, 438, 442). Such repetitions bind Irishness so closely to anti-English sentiment as to render them inseparable; the statutes suggest that to be Irish is to be an enemy of the English. Such a discourse is racial not because it lays stress on particular physical attributes, for instance skin colour, but because it naturalizes an aggressive opposition, so that the Irish are imagined as naturally – inevitably – opposed to English welfare. The idea that the Irish are the natural-born enemies of the English suggests that the English of Ireland who choose Irish ways and marry Irish women engage in extremely irrational behaviour: not only do they violate the natural relationship of the English to their national manners but also they illogically embrace what is, naturally, opposed to themselves. One means of undermining such claims is to put pressure on their ideas of Englishness. Both the Statutes of Kilkenny and the 1297 parliamentary legislation connote the idea of an English gens with distinctive traits whose superior and discrete identity merits protection from a treacherous Irish population. But the fact is that the ‘English’ to whom the Statutes of Kilkenny and other texts refer were themselves a heterogeneous group. From the beginning of settlement in the late twelfth century, colonists to Ireland came not just from England but also from France, Wales and Flanders (Bliss and Long 1987: 708– 15). The statute reflects that heterogeneity: it is written in French (or rather an AngloNorman version of French) yet advocates using la lang Engloies (the English language) which, presumably, is English (Berry 1907: 430). Beyond their origins, colonists were also divided between the law-abiding and criminally inclined. When Lionel became the Irish lieutenant in 1361, he brought with him a ‘massive influx of English personnel’, some of whom had ‘been indicted or outlawed for serious crimes’ on the mainland; also, several of Lionel’s chief ministers in the colony were manifestly corrupt (Crooks 2005: 121, 126–47). Additional divisions existed between new and more long-standing

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members of the Irish colony. In the fourth of the thirty-five statutes contained in the legislation, the practice of les Engleis nees en Engleterre (the English born in England) denouncing lez Engleis nees en Ireland (the English born in Ireland) as Irishdogg (Irish dogs) and the latter denigrating the former as Englishobbe (English hobbes or fools) is forbidden (Berry 1907: 436). Such historical and internal evidence of difference and division reveal how the very ‘English’ ways and manners that the Statutes sought to police were themselves fictional and mythic.10 Moreover, the problem the statutes address – the settlers’ usage of Irish practices – undermines the very notion of natural or proper orderings. The statutes interpret the adoption by the English of Irish style, fashion and laws as a kind of degeneracy or an erosion of English ways that are proper to the settlers. But such adoptions lend themselves to alternate readings and orderings of the world. Namely they suggest how ‘English’ language, laws, etc., are not innate but just one of many lifestyle options – including the lifestyles of ‘Ireland’ – available to anyone who desires to adopt them. Finally, the reference in the preamble to divers mariages et aliaunces (divers marriages and alliances) between the settlers and the Irish belies racial stereotypes regarding the English and Irish as enemies. Far from natural-born enemies, settlers and natives were so attracted to one another as to marry and make other forms of alliance. Indeed, even Lionel, the king’s son and lieutenant of Ireland, ‘drew on the manpower of Irish dynasties’ for assistance in governing the colony (Crooks 2005: 124). A fascinating and telling instance of such an English–Irish alliance emerges in the story of Henry Chrystede, as recounted by the French chronicler Jean Froissart (c. 1337–c. 1404) around twenty-five years after the Statutes of Kilkenny were issued. Like the Statutes, Chrystede’s account of his biography and the Irish exemplifies ideas about Irish and Englishness that circulated in medieval England, even as it evinces their mythic nature.11 In the fourth book of his Chroniques, a history of the Hundred Years’ War, Froissart describes his encounter in England with Henry Chrystede, a middle-aged Anglo-Irish knight. Raised in Ireland in the powerful colonial household of the Earl of Ormond, Chrystede was abducted as a young man by one Brin Costerec and taken to the town of Herpelin in County Wicklow, south of Dublin. During the period of his captivity in the 1350s and 1360s, Chrystede married Costerec’s daughter, with whom he had two children. After seven years, the English captured Costerec and obtained the release of Chrystede, who was repatriated from Ireland to Bristol with his wife and one of their daughters. When encountered by Froissart, Chrystede had just been ordered by King Richard II (1367–1400) to perform services related to the king’s military expedition in Ireland. Namely, due to Chrystede’s facility for the Irish language (which, he tells Froissart, he can speak as well as he can speak English and French), the king had enjoined him to teach English ways to four Irish kings who had submitted to Richard and whom the king seeks to dub as English knights (Froissart 1978: 411).12 In his encounter with Froissart, Chrystede describes the Irish and their landscape, both of which, Chrystede stresses, are possessed of a remarkable capacity to resist conquest. Ireland is unusually hard to overcome, the Anglo-Irish man asserts, for it is a strange, wild place consisting of tall forests, great stretches of water, bogs and uninhabitable regions. It is hard to find a way of making war on the Irish effectively for, unless they choose, there is no one there to fight and there are no towns to be found. The Irish hide in the woods and forests, where they dwell in holes dug under trees or in bushes and thickets, like wild animals. (Froissart 1978: 410)

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On the face of it, Chrystede’s account of what it means to be Irish may not seem racial insofar as it does not foreground any idea of human physiology or biological inheritance. Chrystede tells Froissart nothing in this passage about the appearance of Irish bodies and offers no overt statements about how the Irish are inherently or innately wild. Yet Chrystede nevertheless slips into a closed, essentialist and thus racial discourse of Irishness through his invocation of ‘the unchangeable realm of nature’ (Mercer 2017: 3). That slippage into race occurs when Chrystede foregrounds the Irish landscape as singularly wild (Irish forests, bogs and waterways are uninhabitable and therefore hard to conquer) and then parallels the nature of Irish territory with that of the Irish people. In the same way that Ireland est fourmé estrangement et sauvagement (is a strange, wild place), Chrystede implies, the Irish live comme bestes sauvages (like wild animals) (Froissart 1867: 169). The natural – and thus supposedly unchangeable and eternal – wildness of the Irish land mirrors the animality of the Irish themselves. Such an equivalence implies that the rudeness of the Irish is of a piece with and should be understood in terms of the savagery of their unchangeable natural landscape. Chrystede’s discourse thus slips into naturalizing what is in fact a cultural construct; the fiction of the ‘wild’ Irish appears to be essential and fixed as the nature of the land itself. Chrystede’s effort to construct Irish barbarism in and through Irish land becomes especially clear when he recounts how the Irish live in holes in the ground. By inhabiting holes, the Irish literally exist inside – they enter into, are geographically one with – their wild territory.13 That myth of the wild Irish has a long history, extending back to mid-twelfth-century papal legislation and Gerald of Wales’s writings (Figure 6.1), where it was contrasted with English civility.14 While Chrystede represents only the Irish side of the wild Irish-civilized English binary, he turns to its English component as he recounts to Froissart his effort to ready the four Irish kings for knighthood or, as Chrystede puts it, teach them how to conform à l’usage d’Angleterre (to English habits) (Froissart 1867: 174; 1978: 413). Like the preamble to the Statutes of Kilkenny, Chrystede’s discourse invokes a rhetoric of reason: he describes to Froissart both how he was instructed à conduire et à gouverner et à ramener à raison (to persuade, direct and guide in the ways of reason) the four kings and how he told the Irish that their manners are not raisonnable (reasonable) (Froissart 1867: 174–5; 1978: 413–14). Placed alongside his account of a savage Irish people living in holes ‘like wild animals’ as well as other comments such as his assertion that the Irish are très-rudes et de moult gros engine (very rude and thick-witted) and ils le menguent par grant délit (they eat with great relish) the hearts of their enemies, Chrystede’s references to reason generate a discursive opposition between a thinking and cultured English and a bestial and base Irish people (Froissart 1867: 174; 1978: 413, 410). Chrystede fixes and naturalizes such oppositions when he stresses the Irish kings’ inability to adopt English manners. Chrystede tells Froissart that, while he ‘instructed’ the kings ‘to the best of my ability’, they did prove to be very uncouth and gross-minded people. I had the greatest difficulty in softening them and tempering their language and characters. And even so, if any habit is broken, it is not very much. On many occasions they slip back into their rudeness. (Froissart 1978: 413) However much Chrystede strives to render the Irish ‘English’ and, indeed, even while, Chrystede claims, the Irish kings themselves submit assés doulcement (quite meekly) to their training, they prove unable to transition from a ‘rude’ Irish identity to a more

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FIGURE 6.1  Illustration from Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica (c. 1196–1223), of one man killing another with his axe. Royal MS 13 B VIII. f 28 r. British Library. © Culture Club/ Hulton Archives/Getty Images.

‘sophisticated’ English identity (Froissart 1978: 414). In that fixing of the line between Irish and English, Chrystede’s discourse becomes racial. The rudesse (rudeness) of the Irish, he suggests, are not a manner of ethnic styling and culture but are somehow ingrained in them and are thus incapable of being fully transcended. By the same token, English national identity proves to be closed and essentialized, not open to any motivated learner, even an aristocrat. As Claire Sponsler has demonstrated, we need look no further than Chrystede himself to debunk the offensive racial image of the Irish that he presents to Froissart. The tale of his own captivity belies Chrystede’s stereotyping of the Irish. For example, the captor who sheltered Chrystede lived not in a hole but, as Sponsler (2004: 317) notes, in a manoir (manor). There, ‘against all of the stereotypes of the savage Irish’, Chrystede ‘is treated kindly’ and lives ‘in considerable comfort if the term “manoir” with its connotations of landed wealth is any indication’ (318). While Chrystede articulates

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his revulsion at the Irish kings’ savage – even cannibalistic – ways, and claims that the Irish are de diverse acointance (hard to get to know or make friends with), his transition into an Irish-speaking member of the Costerec household suggests otherwise (Froissart 1867: 170; 1978: 411). Chrystede effectively thrives in the Costerec household, which seems to hold more opportunity for advancement than that of the Anglo-Irish Ormond, as Chrystede becomes a member of the family and Costerec’s heir apparent (Sponsler 2004: 318). The example of Chrystede thus effectively undermines the claim made in the Statutes of Kilkenny regarding how it is ‘against reason’ to choose Irish over English ways. As Sponsler puts it, Chrystede demonstrates how ‘for a nonlanded man seeking to improve his lot in life, there might be ample opportunities among the Gaelic Irish for social and economic advance – opportunities greater than those offered within English or Anglo-Irish society’ (318). None of the documents examined in this discussion of medieval English and Irish discourses are explicitly racist in a way that twenty-first-century readers would immediately recognize. Neither the Statutes of Kilkenny nor Froissart make overt claims about inherited bodily features such as skin colour. Instead such documents all exemplify how medieval depictions of national identity slip into race by employing discourses – word choices, repetitions and patterns – that naturalize or biologize habits, behaviours and attitudes. Whether by repeatedly calling the Irish enemies, by aligning the Irish with a wild landscape or by describing the incapacity of the Irish to master English mannerisms and behaviours, each document erects cognitive barriers that close off Englishness and Irishness from change, variation and difference. Each document suggests how the Irish (or the English) are always bound to behave in a certain manner, in the same way that anything ‘naturally’ exhibits certain properties. As racial discourses, both the Statutes of Kilkenny and Froissart do not tell the truth about the superiority of English ways or the inherent hate that the Irish bear towards the English, but rather create systems that support inequalities of power. The point of the Statutes, for example, was not to describe accurately the world but to use language to bolster the authority of English lords, especially king Edward III’s son, Lionel, and his army.15 And Henry Chrystede’s offensive description of the Irish isn’t so much an accurate, eye-witness account but rather a discursive effort to overcome how his personal history of abduction and marriage rendered Chrystede’s Englishness suspect.16 By tracing out the patterns evoked by such documents (their dualisms, oppositions, chains of equivalence) and analysing their articulation during a late medieval English and Irish conjuncture, we can expose their racist and nationalist claims as discursive efforts performed on behalf of real power asymmetries.

SPAIN AND THE AMERICAS Among all pre- and early modern sites, Spain is unique in the dramatic nature of its turn to national and imperial identities. In one colossally eventful year, 1492, the last Muslim stronghold of Granada fell; Muslims and Jews were forced by an Edict of Expulsion to convert or emigrate from Spain; and Columbus set off on his voyage on behalf of his patron, Queen Isabella I of Castile. While such events may suggest the simultaneous establishment of a homogeneously Christian Spain and its imperial expansion, the reality was much messier. Jews and Muslims continued to live in Spain as conversos or converts to Catholicism, often while secretly maintaining their faiths. And Isabella financed Columbus’s explorations through funds seized from conquered Muslims of

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Granada and interest-free loans from Jewish conversos. The case of Spain raises a host of dynamics involving race and nation, including, but not limited to, the treatment of Jews, Muslims, Indigenous Americans and Africans. Thanks to its extension of the papal inquisition, the early lead it took in the transatlantic slave trade and other factors, Spain offers multiple and often overlapping articulations of race. In the remainder of this chapter I consider just one component of Spain’s early modern racisms, namely the treatment and perception of Indigenous peoples of the western hemispheric lands seized by conquistadores. By the mid-sixteenth century, the point at which this volume ends, the Spanish had expanded their holdings in the Americas far beyond Columbus’s initial 1493 settlement of Isabela (on the second largest island in the Caribbean, named ‘Hispaniola’ by the Spanish), and had gained control over the Aztec Empire in Mexico and large areas of the Inca Empire as far south as Santiago, Chile (Figure 6.2). Such imperial expansion hardly occurred peaceably and with Indigenous peoples’ consent. Rather, it occurred via force. Indeed, Spanish conquest involved large-scale massacres of first peoples by the invaders. In 1534 at Cajamarca in the Andes, for example, Francis Pizarro’s forces massacred five thousand to six thousand members of the Inca society led by their monarch, Atawalpa (Herring 2015: 2–4). Once conquered, first peoples were forced to convert and enter the encomienda system (1503–1720) through which their labour and land were allocated to colonizers, effectively enslaving the ‘Indians’. As Pagden puts it, because the Spanish (like virtually all subsequent imperialists) ‘had no clear and obvious authority’ over sites in the Americas, not long after Columbus’s first journey, Spain became the object of critiques from both without and within (2015: 45). Debates over Spain’s treatment of Indigenous people became known as ‘the affairs of the Indies’ (cosas de Indias).17 In Spain, those exchanges were first led by theologians centred around missionary and Dominican Friar Antonio Montesinos and Francisco di Vitoria (1483–1546), chair of theology at the University of Salamanca. The Spanish debates culminated in 1550, when King Charles V suspended expansion into the Americas and assembled at the Castilian royal court in the city of Valladolid a group of thinkers whose leaders were theologian, humanist and Charles’s official chronicler Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (c. 1490–1573) and Dominican Friar and Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé

FIGURE 6.2  Hernán Cortés and La Malinche leading the Spanish army in Mexico. Codex Azcatitlan f. 22v. Bibliothèque nationale. © Gallica Digital Library. Public domain.

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de Las Casas (1484–1566). While inconclusive in their outcome, the 1550–1 debates at Valladolid mark a crucial moment in European racial discourse. For the first time in pre- and early modern European history, authorities explicitly discussed the identity and rights of another group of people.18 In what follows, I first examine the racist elements of Sepúlveda’s arguments and then compare them to the highly complex and fraught claims made by Las Casas. Sepúlveda’s claims at Valladolid drew partly on his 1547 Latin debate, Democrates secundus sive de justis causis belli apud Indos (A Second Democritus: on the Just Causes of the War with the Indians aka Democrates alter) (1547), written in response to Las Casas’s influential 1542 attack on Spanish colonialism, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies). In his endeavour to support Spanish warfare against the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Sepúlveda generated an especially offensive combination of nationalism and racism. Sepúlveda based his discourse on classical and medieval ideas about natural laws governing the order of the created world.19 Invoking what are, basically, pagan and Christian grids of intelligibility, he states that the universe is organized by natural law through hierarchized binaries, in which, for example, ‘matter yields to form, body to soul, sense to reason, animals to human beings, women to men, children to adults and, finally, the imperfect to the more perfect, the worse to the better, the cheaper to the more precious and excellent, to the advantage of both’ (Las Casas 1992: 12). Sepúlveda goes on to assign the Indigenous peoples of the Americas to the lower and the Spanish to the upper halves such dualisms. Echoing Henry Chrystede’s claims about the Irish kings’ inability to learn English manners, Sepúlveda is racist in his policing of the line between binary categories, claiming that Indigenous peoples are ‘unreasoning’ and ‘totally incapable of learning’ anything beyond ‘mechanical’ occupations, and thus can never move into the higher state of existence enjoyed by their Spanish superiors (11). Because ‘Indians’ cannot master ‘anything but the mechanical arts’, he contends, they ‘are held by natural law to submit to the control of those who are wiser and superior in virtue and learning, as are the Spaniards’ (11). Whenever those ‘natural’ subordinates resist Spanish governance (and thus violate the ‘natural’ order of things), the Spanish enjoy the right to forcibly gain control over the Indigenous peoples, through warfare: ‘if the Indians, once warned, refuse to obey this legitimate sovereignty, they can be forced to do so for their own welfare by recourse to the terrors of war’ (12). The role of nationalism in Sepúlveda’s comments is complex. For example, his racist construction of those who by ‘natural law’ should control Indians in certain respects seems not nationalistic but rather class based: at times he singles out certain groups from all European nations for their ‘natural’ gifts. In a move that supports Anderson’s claims regarding race and class, Sepúlveda states that it is ‘especially the [Spanish] nobility’ who are superior to the Indigenous peoples and excludes from his claims about Spain ‘soldiers, who, for the most part, are unprincipled’ and dangerous (Las Casas 1992: 11). Hierarchizing certain groups (such as aristocrats over commoners, and the learned over the ignorant) throughout Europe, he states that such elite groups ‘especially shine forth natural ability, uprightness, training, and the best morals of any nation’ (11; my emphasis). But while at such moments his racial hierarchies are a function of class distinction, at other times Sepúlveda’s discourse shifts into far more Spain-oriented, nationalistic stances, such as his claims in Democrates secundus that ‘[m]ore than any other country, this country hates and detests depraved individuals’, and that, with respect to Spanish soldiers, ‘the Spanish legions have always provided examples that exceed all human credibility’ when it comes to ‘courage and the martial spirit’.20 In other words, even within the writings of a

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single individual, racial discourse emerges unevenly (and incoherently), aligning at times with class elitism and at others with national sensibilities. Even more than the arguments made by Sepúlveda, Las Casas’s approach to the ‘The Affairs of the Indies’ is intricate and telling on multiple and contradictory levels. From one perspective, for example, Las Casas, as an opponent of Sepúlveda, at times engages in valuable critiques of racist thinking. For example, in certain places in his writings Las Casas attacks the homogeneous and monolithic account of Indigenous peoples presented by racist discourse, stating that the Spanish wrongly condemn the ‘Indians’ ‘en masse’ as savages, when, ‘as a matter of fact, the greater number of them are free from these faults’ (1992: 26). Las Casas (Figure 6.3), moreover, exposes the real political divisions

FIGURE 6.3  Portrait of Bartolome de las Casas. © Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.

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that motivate racist discourses about Indigenous peoples. While Sepúlveda asserts that the Spanish’s superior ‘virtue and learning’ make them the natural masters of the ‘Indians,’ Las Casas exposes the distinctly unvirtuous and base motive behind the Spanish conquests: the imperialists’ ‘one purpose’, Las Casas asserts, is ‘gaining wealth, power, honors, and dignities’ (11, 26). Most famously, Las Casas contends that Indigenous peoples are fully human and thus not, as Sepúlveda and others suggested, a subhuman, irrational group – what Aristotle termed ‘natural slaves’ – who could never learn to behave in the manner of the Spanish elite. Combating Sepúlveda’s arguments by stressing the goodness and wisdom of the Christian god who created all the peoples of the world, Las Casas asserts that ‘the Creator of every being has not so despised these peoples of the New World that he willed them to lack reason and made them like brute animals, so that they should be called barbarians, savages, wild men and brutes’ (28). Yet, however laudable, Las Casas’s arguments about the human rights of Indigenous peoples are qualified by his religious investments as a Catholic bishop. Indeed, we can draw a parallel regarding the imperial project endorsed by Sepúlveda and its religious counterpart as promoted by Las Casas: while the former endorses the military expansion of Spain into the Americas, the latter supports the peaceful spread of Christianity into the ‘New’ world. An evangelizing Christian, Las Casas cannot tolerate the idea of Indigenous Americans living lives outside the Christian fold.21 That evangelism prompts the bishop to jettison one racial construction only to supplant it with another. For example, in a passage that adumbrates the romantic racialism espoused by the northern US abolitionist whom George Fredrickson has analysed, Las Casas states that Of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most simple, without wickedness and duplicity, the most obedient, the most faithful to their natural lords and the Christians whom they serve …. They are also the poorest of peoples on the face of the earth; they possess little and do not want to possess temporal goods. And because of this they are not proud, not ambitious, not greedy. (Fredrickson 1987: 97–129; Casas 1974: 38)22 While Las Casas rejects Sepúlveda’s defence of war against the Indigenous peoples, his religious sensibility leads to his own distinctively racist generalizations. While, according to the bishop, God made the ‘Indians’ as a people and thus they are all fully human, all Indigenous peoples also were created by God with certain shared traits: they are sin … dobleces (honest), fidelísimas (supremely loyal), obedientísimas (exceptionally obedient) and más humildes (the most humble of peoples) (Casas 1552: aiii). It is the case that some of the traits that Las Casas assigns to the Indigenous peoples correlate with Christian virtues, thus rendering them pious. At the same time, however, those and other traits – such as simplicity, loyalty and obedience – also problematically construct the Indigenous as a people devoid of agency, sophistication and independence. In other words, Las Casas’s racial stereotypes indicate that the Indigenous peoples are providentially (that is, naturally) inclined to submit to Christian doctrine and thus are ideal objects of religious conversion. Indigenous people ‘are of such gentleness and decency’, Las Casas claims, ‘that they are, more than the other nations of the entire world, supremely fitted and prepared to abandon the worship of idols’ (1992: 28). Like Sepúlveda, Las Casas does not offer any accurate account of Indigenous peoples, but instead uses racial discourse to support power divisions. But while Sepúlveda seeks to support Spanish secular authority, Las Casas bolsters the authority of religious leaders. The humility, simplicity and obedience

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Las Casas ascribes to all Indigenous people connotes a power dynamic in which the converted are governed by Christian leaders such as himself, a Christian bishop. The racist elements of Las Casas’s writings extend beyond his account of ‘Indians’ to the Spanish. Namely, Las Casas contrasts a harmless and innocent Indigenous population with a cruel and victimizing Spanish people (1992: 18, 20). The Spanish, he writes, are a ‘most cruel race’ who exhibit ‘ferocity’ and ‘inhuman brutality’ in their treatment of Indigenous peoples. It is certainly the case that many savage atrocities were committed by conquistadores. And, up to a point, Las Casas’s account offers a powerful dialectical critique of Sepúlveda. Turning the tables on Sepúlveda’s discourse of civilized Spanish versus savage ‘Indian,’ Las Casas claims that ‘in the absolutely inhuman things they have done to those nations’ of Indigenous peoples, the Spanish ‘have surpassed all other barbarians’ (29). Sepúlveda’s casuistic arguments for military force tragically ‘incite men who are savage, ambitious, proud, greedy, uncontrolled and everlastingly lazy to pillage their brothers and destroy their souls’ (26). But Las Casas’s writings ultimately do not reject the racial discourse but substitute his own binaries for those of Sepúlveda. Spanish is to ‘Indian,’ in Las Casas’s scheme, as victimizer is to victim; ambitious is to modest, savage is to gentle, greedy is to ascetic, dishonest is to guileless and lazy is to hardworking. Las Casas’s discourse slips into race when he, for example, attributes an ‘everlasting’ indolence to the Spanish, suggesting how they can never move beyond their lazy mode of being, and thus fixing them on one side of a hard working–lazy dichotomy. Above all, as we have seen, Las Casas’s ‘flip’ of the binary employed by Sepúlveda is partial. While Las Casas imparts to the Spanish the savagery that Sepúlveda locates in the Indigenous peoples, he refuses to link the other part of Sepúlveda’s dichotomy – a civilized and learned Spanish ruling elite – to the Indigenous population, but instead renders them meek and innocent objects of his own missionary project (Figure 6.4). Las Casas’s inversion of Spanish colonial discourse provided crucial fodder for arguably the most notorious combination of racist and national thinking directed at a European people: the so-called Black Legend.23 The Black Legend refers to a mythic account of the Spanish that arose in the early sixteenth century and persists (like so many racisms) in some quarters today (Greer et al. 2008b; Levin 2019). An early version of it appears in the following passage by Italian historian Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), who writes in his Relazzione di Spagna (Report on Spain) (1514) that the Spanish are of a saturnine and sullen aspect, dark skinned, small in stature, and haughty by nature. In their own estimation there is no other nation to be compared with them. In speech they extol their own affairs and find clever ways to dissemble as much as they can. They are more inclined to arms than any other Christian nation … There is great poverty in Spain … They are extremely avaricious … They are not given to letters … . Dissimulation is natural to this nation, and it is an art that is very thoroughly developed among people of all classes. (Guicciardini 1971: 32, 34–5) Guicciardini’s text, more than any other covered in this chapter, may best approximate subsequent racisms centred on physiognomy. Not only does the Italian writer suggest essence by, for example, stating that the Spanish are di natura superbi (haughty by nature) but he also lays stress on skin colour and body shape (Guicciardini 1953). While Las Casas’s writings lack such references to the body, his characterization of the Spanish as the most savage of peoples, lent support (from a Spaniard, no less) for claims like those

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FIGURE 6.4  Illustration of the Spanish butchery of the ‘Indians’ by Joos van Winghe. From Bartolomé de Las Casas, Narratio regionum Indicarum per Hispanos quosdam deuastatarum verissima (Frankfurt: Theodor de Bry and Johannes Saur, 1598), 10. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections. © Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

made by Guicciardini.24 Las Casas’s Short Description indeed ‘would quickly become a cornerstone of the Black Legend, to be translated and republished over the centuries with each new conflict involving Spain and its European rivals or American colonies’ (Greer et al. 2008a: 5). Las Casas, the great attacker of Spanish racism, thus inadvertently fostered a long-standing and influential racist construction of Spain. Of course, the Spanish – like the Irish, the English and the peoples of the Americas – were and are a diverse, heterogeneous and shifting group. While many Spanish did indeed engage in brutal acts against Indigenous peoples (as well as against other populations, e.g. Africans, Jews and Muslims), discourses about the Spanish as monolithically and essentially warlike, savage, backwards, etc. are myths. Instead of telling the whole truth about the Spanish, the Black Legend emerged from real discrepancies of power. The legend, that is, originated and was perpetuated mostly by fellow Europeans – such as Italians like Guicciardini, and people from England, France and the Netherlands – who themselves had colonial ambitions, with all the savage and criminal behaviour those ambitions entailed. The Europeans who fostered the Black Legend did so, at least in part, as a function of their envious, competitive relation to Spain as a great imperial power (Gibson 1971; Fuchs 2008).

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The Black Legend exemplifies a key aspect of racial discourse: its instability. Racial discourses are vulnerable to appropriation by any group seeking to enforce or shake up a power relation: even as Spanish authorities like Sepúlveda denigrated Indigenous Americans as inherently savage, Italians and other Europeans denigrated the Spanish as inherently savage. Race can scale up or scale down to virtually any communal size: it can enter smaller-scaled claims about communities, such as Sepúlveda’s arguments about the ‘natural’ virtues of a single class cohort – the nobility – within Spain. Racism can also inform larger-scaled, indeed hemispheric assertions, such as Sepúlveda’s and Las Casas’s respective claims about ‘Indians.’ While critics such as Benedict Anderson – scholars invested in celebrating the nation – assert that race and nation are opposed, we have seen otherwise. Indeed, nationalism is so open to racism that even in early precursors to the modern nation – ideas of Englishness, Irishness, hispanitas, etc. – racism creeps in. The fact that race emerges in alternate-scaled groups, whether larger (Indigenous Americans) or smaller (Spanish aristocrats), only testifies to its mobility, not its opposition to the nation as a form. Such shifts up (to a continent) or down (to a class group) indicate the fluidity of race as a term that can inform a slew of communal discourses, all of which emerge in and through the generation of dualisms and hierarchies, iterated on behalf of power.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Race and Gender Pre-modern Critical Intersectionality DOROTHY KIM AND MICHELLE M. SAUER

INTRODUCTION Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Leslie McCall, in their 2013 article ‘Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis’, define the tripartite structure of Intersectionality Studies as ‘first consisting of applications of an intersectional framework or investigation of intersectional dynamics, the second consisting of discursive debates about the scope and content of intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological paradigm, and the third consisting of political interventions employing an intersectional lens’ (Cho, Crenshaw and McCall 2013: 785). The first intersectional ‘engagement’ really considers how the a multi-axis, intersectional frame can help rethink specific, contextual ‘research and teaching projects’ (785). The second intersectional ‘engagement’ addresses ‘theory and methodology’, and asks ‘whether there is an essential subject of intersectionality and, if so, whether the subject is statically situated in terms of identity, geography, or temporality or is dynamically constituted within institutions and structures that are neither temporally nor spatially circumscribed’ (785–6). This area is especially central to discussions in pre-modern fields because of the dynamic flux in constituting identities in different geographies and the transhistorical discussion that any work on pre-modern critical intersectionality must undertake. Finally, the third area addresses how intersectionality requires not just theory and methodology but also praxis particularly in relation to politics, activism and resistance. Our chapter resituates this work and then examines it in relation to the pre-modern archive. We demonstrate how pre-modern critical intersectionality should address all three areas discussed in Cho, Crenshaw and McCall’s piece through three different European case studies: St Mary of Egypt in the Byzantine Empire; the legal documentation of Jewish women in court cases in medieval England; and Teresa of Cartagena in the Iberian Peninsula. Of course, intersectionality is also always under construction, especially since the various identity categories we are discussing are always in flux in the pre-modern past. Thus, pre-modern critical intersectionality will also be dependent on local conditions, geographies, time periods and group dynamics.

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PRE-MODERN CRITICAL INTERSECTIONALITY Intersectionality was coined by the Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 (Crenshaw 1989). When Crenshaw coined the term, she applied it specifically to US law and sought to explain the intersection of race and gender through ‘a Black feminist criticism because it sets forth a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis’ (Crenshaw 1989: 139). Since much of critical race theory is often developed in the field of law (specifically to address legal structures and systems), the theoretical development in relation to ‘antidiscrimination law’ is not a surprise. Likewise, she points to the fields of ‘feminist theory and antiracist politics’ to clarify the other areas that must contend with intersectionality and move beyond a single-axis framework. What Crenshaw proposes instead is to examine structural methodology with a ‘multiaxis framework’. Importantly, her study reveals how single-axis frameworks cannot account for Black women’s experience of the law: With Black women as the starting point, it becomes more apparent how dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis. I want to suggest further that this single-axis framework erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification and remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting inquiry to the experiences of otherwise-privileged members of the group. In other words, in race discrimination cases, discrimination tends to be viewed in terms of sex- or class-privileged Blacks; in sex discrimination cases, the focus is on race- and class-privileged women. (Crenshaw 1989: 140) In other words, Crenshaw notes the historical, systematic erasure of Black women in the legal archive as a function of methodology; specifically, she argues, Black women are rendered invisible in the archive when our discussions of gender fail to consider race and when our discussions of race fail to consider gender. The theory of intersectionality goes back further in Black queer feminist discourse with the work of the Combahee River Collective (CRC). The CRC called on prevailing feminist and racial justice movements to account for the unique experiences of Black and queer women. The CRC laid out their political goals and theoretical praxis in 1977 in The Combahee River Collective Statement in which they first discussed ‘identity politics’ (Combahee River Collective 1977a). The CRC articulated its arguments within a compelling genealogy of theorists and activists: Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier and Kimberlé Crenshaw, to name a few (Taylor 2017). The Collective underscored the centrality of what Crenshaw describes as compounded harm in any intersectional analysis or politics – the idea that ‘multiple oppressions reinforce each other to create new categories of suffering’ (Taylor 2017: 4). Taylor writes in further detail about how the CRC theorized oppression: The CRC described oppressions as ‘interlocking’ or happening ‘simultaneously,’ thus creating new measures of oppression and inequality. In other words, Black women could not quantify their oppression only in terms of sexism or racism, or of homophobia experienced by Black lesbians. They were not ever a single category, but

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it was the merging or enmeshment of those identities that compounded how Black women experienced oppression. (Taylor 2017: 4; emphasis in the original) These discussions of Crenshaw’s and the Combahee River Collective’s work highlight the main tenets of intersectionality: multi-axis frameworks and interlocking oppressions leading to what Crenshaw calls ‘compoundedness’ (Crenshaw 1989: 166). There seems to be a regular mistake made by medievalists who work in feminism to imagine that the experience of interlocking oppressions is akin to stacking LEGO® bricks – that oppressions can be detached and reassembled to form identities. The reality is that these identity markers, especially race, are mutually constructed and mutually reinforcing. The LEGO approach leads to false equivalence fallacies; instead, to speak about feminism is to then speak about Black feminism, to speak about disability is to then speak about Black feminist disability, to speak about LGBTQIA+ is to speak about Black transgender lives and structural oppressions. Take, for example, a recent special topic issue of postmedieval on Feminist Intersectionality. The editors, Samantha Katz Seal and Nicole Nolan Sidhu, rightly point out that ‘[i]ntersectionality may be an essential paradigm for medieval studies, but it is one to which the field – majority White and still dominated by White men – has reacted with disproportionate hostility’, and also acknowledge that ‘[m]edievalist feminism has a spotty record of aligning its passions for gender equality with antiracist, anti-elitist critique’ (Seal and Sidhu 2019: 272, 273). However, despite this promising setup, a number of the essays do not adequately address intersectionality. Instead of examining connections between gender and race and examining identities, several pieces substitute ‘intersectional’ in the general sense of the term (overlapping identities) in place of its specific meaning (that identity markers, including race, do not exist independently). At least some of this problematic situation could have been remedied through an interrogation of Whiteness itself. It is not enough to discuss marginalization when foregrounding intersectionality; instead, race must always be at the centre of such conversations. Whiteness as a category necessarily can and should be interrogated if it is the only racial identity present. Connections between categories is simply not enough. Generally, an approach that centres pre-modern critical intersectionality in discussing gender is quite rare in medieval studies.1 Finally, in following Margo Hendrick’s discussion of pre-modern critical race theory (PCRS) vs pre-modern race theory at the Race Before Race conference (Hendricks 2019), we would like to distinguish between the work of pre-modern critical intersectionality and pre-modern intersectionality. Pre-modern sexuality and queer studies has also neglected this critical genealogy. The most recent work on transgender medieval feminist criticism has pointed out the issue and tried to realign the critical genealogy to centre Black and Latinx transgender women and their critical and creative work as the beginning and centre of critical medieval transgender theory (Kim and Bychowski 2019). This is not just an issue in pre-modern gender, sexuality and queer studies; intersectional praxis and critical genealogy have been discussed in relation to queer of colour critique in the field of queer studies. Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez discuss the unfolding genealogies and futures of queer of colour critique, and their work makes clear that critical intersectionality is about working in ‘identity politics’ and cannot be shunted to some nebulous category of ‘marginalization’ (Hames-García and Martínez 2011). They argue that ‘queer politics can often mask not only an investment in whiteness, but also a Eurocentric insistence

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on whiteness as an unquestioned norm’ (Hames-García and Martínez 2011: 10–11). As noted by Hiram Pérez: [A] great deal of queer theorizing has sought to displace identity politics with an alternative anti-identitarian model, often – and perhaps disingenuously – christened ‘the politics of difference.’ This model accommodates familiar habits of the university’s ideal bourgeois subject, among them, his imperial gaze, his universalism, and his claim to a race-neutral objectivity. It is not surprising then to find buried underneath the boot of this establishmentarian anti-identity all sorts of dissident bodies. (Pérez 2005: 172) Likewise, to work on pre-modern critical intersectionality in line with the intertwined genealogies that comprise race, gender and sexuality studies is to firmly work on identity politics and is thus always about politics. Hames-García’s article lays out a state of the field in queer studies, examines and critiques its White racial genealogy, and then also explains the standard White ‘pattern of erasure, marginalization, and tokenization’ (Hames-García 2011: 21). He also underscores ‘a central claim to theoretical innovation within queer theory: the claim that the category of queer enables critique and transgression of boundaries, identities, and subject positions’ (21; emphasis in the original). He scrutinizes this claim as a ‘form of ontological denial that enables queer theory to mask its own dependence on an unacknowledged White racial identity’ (21). Hames-García describes these White queer genealogies in two camps: ‘separatist and integrationist’ (Hames-García 2011: 21; emphasis in the original). Queer theory’s ‘separatist account’ eschews intersectionality by decoupling ‘sexuality … as distinct from gender, race, and class’ (22). Hames-García’s evaluation of this separatist thread explains its illogic: ‘These narratives depend for their coherence, however, on the erasure or rejection of several decades of persistent calls within feminism, antiracist movements, and lesbian and gay of colour theory and activism to understand how different aspects of identity interconnect and mutually constitute each other so as to make separation futile at best and mystifying at worst’ (22). In other words, this ‘separatist’ line of discussion rejects the history and discussions of critical intersectionality. Meanwhile, Hames-García explains the integrationist approach in this way: Integrationist accounts of queer theory … attempt to respond to the challenges posed by the multiplicity of identity that separatist accounts avoid. While separatists attempt to distinguish or ‘disarticulate’ sexuality from race and gender, integrationists advocate for queer theory as a way to address the multiple relations among race, gender, class, and sexuality better than how feminism or other progressive movements and theories have. Integrationists do so most often, however, by eschewing or bracketing identity questions and using the deliberately vague category queer to blur lines among different social locations. The most strident versions, drawing from postmodern critiques of the subject, see identity itself as oppressive and always or nearly always dangerous. They dismiss the concept of identity, writing instead of ‘discourses,’ ‘practices,’ ‘desires,’ and the ‘subjects’ that they create. (Hames-García 2011: 24) He sees the latter pattern as a way to then to shunt BIPOC ‘from the center of debate in order to reintroduce them later at the margins of gay and lesbian theory’ (Hames-García

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2011: 25). He writes instead an alternative timeline (or really a timeline that includes the roughly sixty years of work in critical race theory, especially in Black and Latinx Feminist and Queer Studies) that predates and animates this White queer canon timeline. This fully accounted queer theory genealogy includes: James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962); Barbara Smith’s ‘Toward a Black Feminist Criticism’ (1977); Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic (1978); Pat Parker’s Movement in Black (1978); Foucault’s translated History of Sexuality (1978); Combahee River Collective’s ‘A Black Feminist Statement’ (1979); James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head (1979); Adrienne Rich’s ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1980); Cherríe Moraga and Amber Hollibaugh’s ‘What We’re Rollin’ Around in Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism’ (1981); Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back (discussing US Third World feminism) (1981); Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith’s All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982); Barbara Smith’s Home Girls (1983); Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (1983); Marilyn Frye’s The Politics of Reality (1983); Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson’s collection Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (1983); Sharon Thompson’s collection Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (1984); Gayle Rubin’s ‘Thinking Sex’ (1984); Joseph Beam’s collection Life: A Black Gay Anthology (1986); Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987); Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking (1989); Eve Sedgewick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990); Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990); Diana Fuss’s Inside/Out (1991); and Teresa de Lauretis’s special issue on ‘Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities’ (1991) (Hames-García 2011: 26–8). In regards to the end of his alternative genealogy, Hames-García makes the point that though de Lauretis ‘coins the term queer theory’ she concomitantly ‘laments the fact that queers of color have not produced much theory’ (Hames-García 2011: 28; emphasis in the original; de Lauretis 1991: viii–ix). He further explains that the hierarchy of text always privileges White queer theory and imagines queer of colour critique as additive. In addition, this genealogy of queer theory, particularly separatist queer theory, ‘simultaneously marginalizes the legacy of intersectional analysis and centers critical work that takes the Whiteness of its object of study for granted. In other words, theorists with an implicit commitment to maintaining the centrality of Whiteness can claim to be doing the basic work of sexuality to which “race scholars” will add’ (Hames-García 2011: 28). We highlight Hames-García meticulous work through these critical genealogies because they matter. If we do not attend to the moves of Whiteness and how even identity politics fields (though some of these critical theory areas often want to reject identity politics as a position) replicate a move to Whiteness. By whitewashing the genealogy, we will repeat the structures of Whiteness again and again. Since 1991 there has been more work that has reimagined these conversations while also centring critical intersectionality, including recent works, for instance Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley and Scott Lauria Morgensen’s collection Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (2011); Hiram Pérez’s A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire (2015); Joanne Barker’s collection Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (2017); Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018); T. J. Tallie’s Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa (2019); and more recently, José Esteban Muñoz’ The Sense of Brown (2020). The critical conversations have been propelled over the last twenty years by the now robust area of queer of colour critique, expanding into the areas of Indigenous and decolonial queer theory as well as Global queer theory in relation to Asia, Africa, the Caribbean,

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Central and South America. These are but a sample of the more recent publications in queer of colour critique that works with long genealogies of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Global queer of colour theory. Sexuality and queer studies is not the only place in which this issue has been seen; earlier genealogies in feminist studies and particularly Black feminism have pointed to this problem and the importance of critical genealogies that decenter Whiteness. Gabrielle Foreman explains the academic move of Whiteness in the following way in relation to Black studies: Non-Black academics and graduate students – like non-gay or non-Indigenous scholars, for example – have rightfully found the critical paradigms, frameworks, and texts that have emerged in the last forty years to be persuasive, exciting, and foundational. These scholars often delve into what’s ‘cutting edge’ and academically ‘sexy,’ what appears to them to be uncharted waters, virgin land ripe for discovery and conquest. They are often too privileged and encouraged, too rewarded and reluctant, to realize that to be responsibly trained, contributors need to grapple with a discipline’s genealogy, background[,] and long history of serious scholarship, and to understand what Toni Morrison calls its structures, moorings, and anchors (McKay [1998]: 365). (Foreman 2013: 310) Foreman highlights the settler colonial logics of Whiteness’ belief in its inalienable right to ‘colonize’ areas of study. You can take her points and think about this in relation to pre-modern critical race studies: centering the Whiteness of the genealogy is to literally dislodge the longer genealogy of this work that has been done by BIPOC scholars who have been attendant to the longer genealogies of critical race theory. Finally, these genealogies are important in relation to the pre-modern archive because so much of White critical theory, especially in relation to gender and sexuality studies, is predicated on a White European gaze or what Hames-García points to in Walter Mignolo’s decolonial work in early modern studies as ‘the colonial difference’ (HamesGarcía 2011: 29; Mignolo 2012). The temporal pre-modern and a rigorous reckoning in working on pre-modern critical intersectionality are important interlocuters in this conversation. What happens if there are other pre-modern genealogies? What if scholars attend to genealogies that dislodge the White Eurocentric, binary, White supremacist colonial ones that have become the violent colonial narrative that has fed the violence of global colonialism and White supremacy? Hames-García and BIWOC feminist scholars like Maria Lugones see the possibility of grounding a discussion of queer theory and intersectionality with a wider scope, more capacious genealogies, and the ability for potential liberation in the work of decolonial, anti-colonial, Third World, transnational and women of colour feminisms (Lugones 2008, 2010, 2016). Why do we not imagine that all gender and sexuality studies work be done through the lens of intersectionality? Or are we imagining that Whiteness is not a racial category that must be reckoned with? In this volume, in the chapter on Race and Science, we have bioarchaeologists explaining that the population numbers in 1348 London may have included a substantial Black population (Redfern and Hefner, in this volume). And this is in relation to one location and area (pre-modern England) that imagines a White population for a White field. What happens if we ask the question to medieval gender and sexuality studies as they think about subjects such as domesticity, labour, class, religion, court culture, medicine, book culture, that race must be addressed as well in all these

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archives and discussions? (Brown 2020).2 Is it even possible to work through any kind of pre-modern gender studies without thinking about race, sexuality, class, disability and how they all interlock – especially in relation to pre-modern critical intersectionality, which is also filled with added complexities because the different identities that we are discussing are all in contextual flux beholden to local conditions, geographies and frictions? Theoretically, the work of pre-modern gender and sexuality studies must always be using the method of pre-modern critical intersectionality, unless pre-modern scholars do not want to be involved in current gender and sexuality studies’ research. Otherwise, as Crenshaw states, ‘it sets forth a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis’ (1989: 139). It becomes the ‘single-axis framework’ that already ignores the issues of intersectional identities and compounded harms.

INTERSECTIONAL POLITICS, CRITICAL INTERSECTIONAL PRAXIS Within discussions of intersectionality, Taylor’s reassessment of the Combahee River Collective and Mikki Kendall’s book Hood Feminism (2020) provide useful avenues to think through the pre-modern archive. Taylor’s discussion of the importance of the Combahee River Collective also highlights another point in relation to the use of the term ‘identity politics’ and how pre-modern critical intersectionality must understand that the issues of intersecting oppressions are not theoretical but material. She writes: The CRC identified their recognition of this political tension as ‘identity politics.’ The CRC statement is believed to be the first text where the term ‘identity politics’ is used. Since 1977, that term has been used, abused, and reconfigured into something foreign to its creators. The CRC made two key observations in their use of ‘identity politics. The first was that oppression on the basis of identity – whether it was racial, gender, class, or sexual orientation identity – was a source of political radicalization. Black women were not radicalizing over abstract issues of doctrine; they were radicalizing because of the ways that their multiple identities opened them up to overlapping oppression and exploitation (Taylor 2017: 8) We highlight this point first to underscore that to discuss pre-modern critical intersectionality is to discuss politics in relation to the material harms done to people as they live within intersectional oppressions. This is not a theoretical discussion, it has material consequences, effects and impacts. It is not a game; it is often about life or death, also known as necropolitics (Mbembe 2003). It should also be seen as a form of social theory in relation to political and social resistance both in the world and also in academia. Pre-modern critical intersectionality situates itself theoretically in the material turn of both gender studies, critical race studies and sexuality. In fact, one of its genealogies is then a move away from the linguistic turn (so emphatically a part of the White canon of queer theory vis-à-vis Judith Butler’s work) to the material turn. This is elegantly laid out in Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s ‘Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory’ (Alaimo and Hekman 2008). This intertwines with the material genealogy of critical race theory that loops in Hortense Spillers (Spillers 1987),

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Sylvia Wynters (McKitterick 2015), Jasbir Puar (2017), Alexander Weheliye (2014) and Katherine McKittrick (2006). It also considers the long-entwined genealogies laid out here as part of the conversation to re-examine the pre-modern past to do the work of intersectional feminist resistance, repair and radical praxis. This is the only way we see to work in the pre-modern archive that will do justice to the political work of gender, race and sexuality now. The next three brief sections are to think about a cluster of different case studies in different regions, conditions and contexts and on different media platforms. Whether it be hagiography, legal codes or visionary life writing, all three reveal different ways in which pre-modern critical intersectionality can realign our methodologies and analysis of the pre-modern gender and sexuality archive.

BYZANTINE INTERSECTIONALITY Roland Betancourt’s book Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender and Race in the Middle Ages (2020) opens with the narrative of the Palestinian Life of Mary of Egypt. He explains the textual tradition of Mary’s hagiography, which has the early documented source in the sixth century in which Mary is ‘a cantor in the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem who removed herself from urban life to avoid leading several men, who were infatuated with her, into sin’ (Betancourt 2020: 1). Subsequent variations of the vita have Mary of Egypt as a Jerusalem nun who escapes to the desert because Mary is being stalked by men’s lust. However, the Palestinian version of this vita decides to take it further into a completely different direction in which Mary of Egypt is a willing, sexually voracious and oversexed woman (‘she’ rejects ‘sex worker’ as a descriptor in this text) and ‘her’ flight into the desert is about turning ‘her’ back on this stereotyped image of ‘her’ as a ‘slut’ (2). This text version decides to relate all the lascivious sexual details and further make ‘her’ into a Black transgender sexual predator: When Zosimas encountered her, Mary had already spent seventeen years in the Egyptian desert. Her figure was significantly altered by deprivation and the elements: the author describes her as a naked figure with short white hair, like that of an elderly man, and says that her ‘body was black, as if tanned by the scorching of the sun.’ Then, the author has her narrative her past for the reader. Filling the text with lurid details, Mary voices her voracious lust, describes how she raped many men, and again stresses her complete bodily transformation through harsh ascetic practices. (Betancourt 2020: 1; Kouli 1996: 76) Betancourt discusses this saint’s life in relation to the phenomenon of ‘slut-shaming: a rhetorical practice of criticizing a person’s appearance, behavior, or both for failing to adhere to gender-based expectation about their sexuality’ (Betancourt 2020: 2). The transformation of Mary of Egypt’s life in this version takes it as far as to place ‘her’ as a rapist. In fact, as Betancourt explains, this version makes Mary of Egypt trans masculine in how Mary’s sexual lasciviousness and sexual predation is described (5). What we see here in the textual source is how a male author can weaponize ideas around intersectionality and how toxic masculine power structures can play into the fantasies of enmeshed racialized and gendered stereotypes while also understanding how compounded harms work. The specific detail that Mary does not want to identify

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as a ‘sex worker’ but rather ‘her’ overwhelming sexual appetite are the reasons for ‘her’ actions. As Betancourt comments, ‘Placing her beyond excuse for her actions, Mary is made to say that her deeds were justified by neither calamity nor poverty’ (Betancourt 2020: 2). This vita reveals that this version’s author understood how pre-modern critical intersectionality works in relation to compounded harms and how in fact, as Kendall discusses, issues of poverty, gender, sexuality, race and sex work really are at the centre of discussing compounded and intertwined oppressions. Kendall explains: Poverty can mean turning to everything from sex work to selling drugs in order to survive, because you can’t ‘lean in’ when you can’t earn a legal living wage and you still need to feed yourself and those who depend on you … When mainstream feminism fails to consider these options as viable, when it relies on the same old tropes rooted in respectability, it ignores that for many, a choice between starvation and crime isn’t a choice. (Kendall 2020: 36–7) Through a pre-modern critical intersectional analysis, what we can see is that instead the vita’s author has utilized every weapon in the arsenal of respectability politics to make clear that identity politics is not the reason for Mary of Egypt’s sinful actions. It must debunk these expectations of how structures of gender, race and sexuality can oppress women into poverty and sex work by explicating exactly how structural compounded oppression can work. Nonetheless, it uses the intersectional stereotypes: first, the sexually predatory transgender person, which has become a discussion point in trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) propaganda (Lady Idos 2016; Kim and Bychowski 2019). Enmeshed in this is the hypersexualized Black woman stereotype that has been more extensively and theoretically discussed in relation to the archive of transatlantic chattel slavery and the wake of that North American aftermath (Wright 2016).3 The latter stereotype was used specifically as a way to deflect from accusations of violent rape towards those men who claimed Black women as property.

JEWISH WOMEN AND THE ENGLISH LEGAL SECULAR COURTS: A TALE OF TWO WIVES This case study involves two Jewish women whose lives were deeply intertwined with each other in thirteenth-century England. We will approach this study through documentary evidence in English secular and Christian religious court cases.4 In general, the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews assiduously documented the legal disputes in relation to Jews and has an archive of material related to Jewish women (Hoyle 2008). This is separate from their involvement in medieval English Jewish courts which mostly addressed family law (Roth 2017). Though this section will focus on pre-modern critical intersectionality and the original legal heft of the formulation in relation to Crenshaw’s work and others on how it is seen in law, the comparison of having both Jewish and secular English court adjudicate Jewish conflict is a good lens to see how pre-modern critical intersectionality can be used as a lens to discuss ‘compounded harm’ in relation to Jewish women. Geraldine Heng has explained both in England and the Jews (2018b) and the Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018a) how England through the machinery of its structural bureaucracy and state enacted one of the first racialized

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systems in relation to English Jews in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England (Roth 2017). Jewish women had intersectional identities involving their racialized religion and their gender in medieval thirteenth-century England. Both of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s early articles on intersectionality – ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’ (1989) and ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color’ (1991) – are useful interlocuters into the case of Muriel of Oxford and Licoricia of Winchester. Both women were married to David of Oxford in the first half of the thirteenth century. Muriel was ‘probably born into a learned family in Lincoln’ where she married David of Oxford (Goldy 2012: 228). They relocated to Oxford around 1217 and worked together in relation to the family business as accounted in several legal deeds (Goldy 2008: 134). David of Oxford was one of the richest Jewish men in thirteenth-century England: ‘By 1240 David was a major figure in the Anglo-Jewish community both locally and nationally, accounting for many loans to powerful political figures’ (134). However, though Muriel had financial privilege while married to David and participated in business transactions, Muriel also was at a marital disadvantage since she never gave birth to a child. This childless state precipitated a legal court battle that traversed both the Jewish court and the English secular court. David pursued a divorce in the Jewish court, and was successful in acquiring a ‘get (a bill of divorce), probably in 1240, on the grounds of infertility’ (134).5 Muriel refused this divorce and countersued because she did not give consent as per Jewish Talmudic law and she pursued a ‘bet din (rabbinic court)’ judgement from ‘the local Oxford rabbi Jacob and rabbis Moses from London and Aaron from Canterbury’ (134). She and her allies appear to have enough power and networks within the English Jewish community to also get further opinions from French rabbis on the case (134–5). As a Jewish woman with some family networks, Muriel was at first able to work the levers of legal response within the Jewish court. However, the secular English court stepped in when David convinced the ‘the royal curia which was sitting at Winchester to intervene’ in 1242 (Goldy 2008: 135). Walter de Grey, archbishop of York, fulfilled David of Oxford’s express wishes but then in the process not only stripped Muriel of her rights within a Jewish legal context but also declared a complete ban on ‘betai din’ from England (135). Muriel and her ‘male supporters’ were summoned to the royal curia, interrogated about their request for French Jewish legal opinion during this process. The archbishop handed David of Oxford the right to divorce and to remarry whom he wished. He ended up marrying Licoricia of Winchester who immediately produced a son before David of Oxford’s death in 1244. The complexities of this case reveal how a single-axis framework cannot work in analysing the moves, nuances and outcomes of Muriel of Oxford’s divorce. In Crenshaw’s ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex’, she discusses several cases that fail in court to address both the intersections of race and gender in relation to anti-discrimination. She writes about several title VII cases that cannot address the compounded harms of intersectionality such as the DeGraffenreid v. General Motors case (1976). In DeGraffenreid, five Black women brought suit against General Motors, alleging that the employer’s seniority system perpetuated the effects of past discrimination against Black women. Evidence adduced at trial revealed that General motors simply did not

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hire Black women prior to 1964 and that all of the Black women hired after 1970 lost their jobs in a seniority-based layoff during a subsequent recession. The district court granted summary judgment for the defendant, rejecting the plaintiffs’ attempt to bring a suit not on behalf of Blacks or women, but specifically on behalf of Black women. (Crenshaw 1989: 141)6 In Muriel of Oxford’s case, a single-axis framework addresses only how the legal systems discriminate against her because of gender. In the divorce case, one can track how gender puts her on inequitable footing in the Jewish legal court and her counter claim pursuit on grounds of her rights of consent within Jewish rabbinical legal frames about marriage and childlessness. However, the English Christian court’s intervention into this high-profile Jewish family court case reveals that one cannot analyse Muriel in relation to a single-axis lens as an issue of gender only, nor as only an issue based on race/religious difference. Instead, the intersection of race and gender is the only way to analyse her case, through a multi-axis lens. What the outcome also demonstrates, since the English archbishop then proceeded to ban this option available in Jewish legal court, is the compounded effect and impact not just on Muriel of Oxford but for subsequent other Jewish legal cases that would have involved a ‘bet din’. The effect of this divorce on Muriel of Oxford’s life would culminate in the last documentary evidence we have of her through another court filing. This case, again in the English court, is secular this time (i.e. the Royal Close Rolls). In 1253, a case is made against Muriel of Oxford because of her house’s disrepair (whose living she received as settlement in the divorce). At this point, her landlord is Licoricia of Winchester who inherited the house after David of Oxford’s death. Muriel of Oxford appears to have sunk into a state of diminished financial means, if not poverty, for her to be unable to make repairs on the house she is living in (Goldy 2008: 135). Pre-modern critical intersectionality reveals how poverty and basic needs are issues for women at the intersections of gender, race and class. Licoricia of Winchester, David of Oxford’s second wife, is this section’s second example. Though Licoricia of Winchester is astoundingly wealthy since she was married first, widowed and then inherited her husband’s estate before she married David of Oxford, this does not mean the issues of gender and race did not impact her in relation to compounded harms. Licoricia’s name is prominent in the English records because of the multiple business and legal cases that she was involved in. However, what we will examine now is the last legal case connected to her name: her murder case. In ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color’, Crenshaw addresses one of the pressing issues in discussions around intersectionality: violence against BIWOC. She writes: My objective in this article is to advance the telling of that location by exploring the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color. Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider the intersectional identities such as women of color. Focusing on two dimensions of male violence against women – battering and rape – I consider how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism. (Crenshaw 1991: 1242–4)

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Licoricia of Winchester was at home with her Christian maidservant, Alice of Bickton, in 1277 when a possible burglary resulted in their murder. The 1275 statute of Jewry forbade the cohabitation of Christians with Jews, though Licoricia clearly ignored this law. Her daughter Belia found their bodies. The court case describes the scene: ‘Licoricia the Jewess and Alice of Bickton, her servant (famula) were found killed in the house of the same Licoricia, each having a blow to the chest made by a knife, to the heart’ (Brown and McCartney 2004: 18). Her daughter and twelve other witnesses gave testimony at the murder trial. Their testimony explained that one ‘Ralph of “Che(s)hulle”’, a saddler of Winchester, had killed Licoricia and Alice and had immediately fled (18).7 Though the testimonies indicated one suspect, ‘Ralph of “Che(s)hulle”’, others were accused of the crime and subsequently cleared though during a jury hearing. These men, Roger Le Scurre, Adam Le Seeler, John Le Sclatiere, also named ‘Ralph Le Seller – presumably this was the original suspect, since his name means “The Saddler”’ as the murderer (19). Brown and McCartney discuss how no one was indicted for Licoricia’s and Alice’s murders even though two of her sons tried to file a murder charge against ‘Rogerum le Ster et alios de morte ejusdem Licoric’ (19).8 This case failed and Licoricia’s and Alice’s murders never received justice. In an intersectional approach, we believe the only way to adequately address the murder and its subsequent failed indictments is to consider Licoricia as the main target and Alice as the other murdered woman. Though multiple witnesses identified and gave testimony to the guilt of Ralph Le Seller, none of the testimony (whether they were Jewish or Christian witnesses) appeared to be enough to indict the consistently accused suspect, Ralph Le Seller, of these homicides. We might consider this a case of, in Crenshaw’s words, ‘structural intersectionality’. Structural intersectionality is described as ‘the ways in which the location of women of colour at the intersection of race and gender makes our actual experience of domestic violence, rape, and remedial reform qualitatively different than that of white women’ (Crenshaw 1991: 1245). In this instance, though Licoricia of Winchester’s class status as one of the wealthiest Jewish women in thirteenth-century England does not immure her to the intersecting issues of gender and race and how that situates her murder and the murder of her Christian maidservant by the purported Christian man, Ralph Le Seller, and her family’s inability to receive appropriate justice for this double-homicide and home invasion. It is impossible to analyse this case in relation to just a single-axis framework of just race (i.e. Jewish racio-religious difference) or gender. It can only be unpacked with a discussion of structural intersectionality, the compounded harms of race and gender, and how that is worked through the English secular legal system and its inability, even with over a dozen witness testimonies, to indict a Christian man for these heinous crimes. These identity politics and situational power issues local to Winchester are the only avenue in which to appropriately tease out this violent legal case. David of Oxford’s two wives, Muriel of Oxford and Licoricia of Winchester, are examples of how pre-modern critical intersectionality can be applied through legal court cases but with different angles. In the case of Muriel of Oxford, we see how her inability to advocate for her marriage rights pushes her into poverty and also how English legal system disenfranchise her rights as a Jewish women and enacts compounded harm that affects the rest of her life. In regards to Licoricia of Winchester, we see how even though she had vast financial resources and a deep network of powerful family, it did not stop what seems to be racialized gendered violence to end her life and the life of Alice her live-in servant. Her family’s inability to obtain justice through the English courts only highlights the unequitable system that allows over a dozen witness testimonies (we discount the others

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accused and acquitted by jury who accuse Ralph Le Seller) be insufficient to bring Ralph Le Seller to trial or indict anyone for the double-homicide and burglary that happened in Licoricia of Winchester’s home.

TERESA OF CARTAGENA Who was Teresa de Cartagena (b. c. 1425)? Not well known either in her own day or now, what work has been done on her focuses on her feminist positioning as a writer and defender of female intellectual ability. More recently, studies have begun looking at her representation as a disabled woman. Her most famous text Arboleda de los enfermos (Grove of the Infirm) is, after all, a meditation on disability as a divine gift. And when accused of plagiarism, or at least deception, after its circulation, she followed the treatise with another – Admiración operum Dey (Wonder at the Works of God), which served as a defence of her own authorship as well as the intellectual abilities of women, disabled persons and conversos. It is this last identity that has been under-examined, and it is this one which has prompted our examination of her here. Teresa’s multiple identities make her an excellent example of the necessity of an intersectional lens being applied to medieval literature. Teresa’s family had long been prominent members of the Jewish community in Burgos, and after her grandfather’s conversion, they continued in their prominence only as conversos. Salomón, her grandfather, was an exceptionally well-educated man who was eventually appointed chief rabbi of Burgos (Serrano 1942; Pérez de Guzmán 2003). This was both a judicial and political post and allowed him to make and use extensive connections among peoples. As it was, Burgos had the largest Jewish community in northern Spain, complete with its own administrators and court system. Although the residents kept to the Jewish quarter, they were generally wealthy enough to pay the heavy taxes imposed on them by the monarchy; many were doctors or financiers of various sorts (Baer 1961).9 As a leader among this group, Salomón was called to royal attention, even going to London on behalf of Juan I of Castile around 1388 in order to assist with negotiations for his son’s marriage (Serrano 1942: 9–13). Shortly after this, either 1390 or 1391, he converted to Christianity. The family changed their surname to de Santa María, and continued to be prosperous and politically savvy. In fact, Salomón became Pablo de Santa María and was appointed both bishop of Cartagena and later bishop of Burgos in 1412 (21–3).10 His sons Alfonso de Santa María (Alonso de Cartagena) went on to become a well-known theologian. We will return to him later, but the significance of being a legitimate son of a Catholic bishop who himself was a bishop cannot be denied. The status of conversos is a tricky one for scholars of medieval race studies.11 On the one hand, the contemporary position held that converts were safely absorbed into the dominant culture. On the other, it was clear that lasting effects and prejudices remained. For the most part, scholars agree that the thirty years following the pogrom against Spain’s major Jewish quarters in 1392 resulted in the conversion of over a third of Spanish Jews. In 1492, another large disruption in the Jewish community came when Granada fell to Christian forces. Both Jewish and Muslim citizens were offered the choice of baptism or expulsion. Medieval Christians primarily saw this as a triumph of the true faith over infidels, but the language used, promoting Spain as a morally and physically purer nation, as well as the establishment of limpieza de sangre (clean or pure blood) laws read as racial. Towards this end, Benzion Netanyahu has argued that through these persecutions,

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especially of Christians of Jewish origin, the Spanish state anticipates Nazi policies. More specifically, he has stated that the motives of Isabella, Ferdinand and their ecclesiastical advisers, in asking Pope Sixtus IV for a Castilian Inquisition, were not religious but racial, and included an appendix entitled ‘Racism in Germany and Spain’ in his major book on the subject (Netanyahu 2002: 517–27, 1141–5). Teresa, born into this prestigious family, had anticipated ecclesiastical success despite the converso background. Instead, her adult-onset hearing loss resulted in her loss of power and reputation, and the accompanying charges of plagiarism. At some point before 1453, Teresa had entered a Franciscan convent, the monastery of Santa Clara outside the walls of Burgos. As we learn from her Arboleda, she studied at the University of Salamanca in some manner. Since medieval universities did not allow women to enroll, this must have happened via a convent exchange of some sort. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that Teresa was well educated in both Latin and the vernacular. As she neared age twenty-five, her uncle, Alonso de Cartagena, now Bishop of Burgos, petitioned Pope Nicholas V for a dispensation to move his niece out of the Franciscan St Clare and move her to a Cistercian convent. This petition, granted on 3 April 1449, states that she was ‘no longer able to remain comfortably with peace of mind in a monastery and Order of this type, for specific and reasonable causes’.12 No clear record remains to indicate what ‘comfortably’ means, but the time period of this petition overlaps with the Toledo riots. These riots erupted in January 1449, and the first limpieza de sangre statute in Spain, the Sentencia-Estatuto, was proclaimed by the Toledan rebels in June 1449 (Maryks 2010: see esp. ch. 1). And her uncle Alonso wrote a major pro-converso work, Defensorium unitatis christianae (In Defense of Christian Unity), later that year. Thus, the likelihood is that Teresa was moved due to increasingly anti-converso sentiment. Moreover, in Spain, one of the leading anti-converso voices was Alonso de Espina, a Franciscan, and worldwide the Franciscans were known for suggesting that Jews were a danger to Christians (J. Cohen 1982). A second petition from Alonso asks that Teresa receive her stipend, and that at age twenty-five, be considered for the position of abbess (Seidenspinner-Núñez and Kim 2004: 145). Clearly, then, she was not yet deaf at that point. Teresa takes on the writing of the Arboleda with this varied and intersectional background deeply affecting its production, it content, and its reception. As Rita Ríos de la Llave notes, ‘Thus, the case of Teresa de Cartagena offers an important perspective on the relevance of religion in defining individual and collective identity, the mechanisms that society and individuals use for forming the identity, and the ways in which individual identity is reaffirmed’ (Ríos de la Llave 2010: 44). Like critical intersectionality, then, Teresa was also always under construction, her identity complicated by competing and overlapping categories such as gender, race, religion and ability. Ríos de la Llave suggests that one particular passage in the Arboleda is especially revealing of this process: ‘“Forget thy people and the house of thy father.” And it does not directly command us to forget our father, but rather his house. Now clearly this does not refer to his material house, for that makes no sense, but rather to his family’ (de Cartagena 1998: 30). Here, Teresa emphasizes that her lineage is important to who and what she is at that moment, and that her converso identity will inform her writing. Ríos de la Llave continues: ‘In any case, Teresa refused to accept the literal meaning of the phrase, and she was reluctant to renounce her people and her father’s house, which she identified with her family, although contemporary Old Christians considered them to be of Jewish lineage. This implies that Teresa refused to renounce her Jewish origin’ (2010: 47). Indeed, the Arboleda reflects

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this most directly in its source materials. She cites both Jewish and Christian sources and pulls from passages that have important interpretations in both cultures. James Hussar in particular focuses on the lack of specific instances of Christ being names in her treatise. He writes: ‘The scarcity of references to Christ in Arboleda, and Teresa’s tendency to describe Christ as a paradigm of virtue rather than as the Messiah, may evidence [deflation of the event of the Cross and] illustrate an intersection of Jewish and Christian tradition that links Arboleda to other fifteenth-century converso theology texts’ (Hussar 2006: 154; see also Rosenstock 2002). Teresa’s uncle Alonso as well as Juan de Torquemada, another prominent converso theologian, both argued that Jews were necessary for salvation of Gentiles. Thus, their ‘affliction’ – the burden of a Jewish lineage – makes them stronger, more passionate and, ultimately, closer to God. This is exactly the message readers receive from Teresa’s writing about her infirmity. Her deafness and other ailments serve as double duty reminders of the frailty of womanhood, yes, but perhaps more importantly emphasize the frailty of her Jewishness. But the final idea comes through very clearly – it is through this weakness that she shall save others: ‘Although Teresa admits that deafness can be socially isolating, she rede fines silence not as a hindrance but as a divine gift: an embodied experience that removes worldly distractions and clarifies her philosophical and literary pursuits’ (Hsy 2015: 24). She actively embraced her various restrictions and actively constructed an identity and a literary persona that reflected the intersectional position she always inhabited. To read her as less is limiting.

CONCLUSION Patricia Hill Collins discusses intersectionality as a social theory and particularly the importance of how critical intersectionality helps to understand and unpack how power works: Many intellectual histories overlook the importance of power relations in shaping the questions, assumptions, knowledge, and impact of a given social theory. … Intersectionality itself can be seen as a knowledge project of resistance, one in which critical analysis underpins its intellectual resistance. Intersectionality also confronts epistemological challenges to its intellectual resistance. Particular knowledge projects are sites of intellectual resistance, and critical social theory is a particular form of intellectual resistance. (Hill Collins 2019: 10) Collins’s recent work explains the consequence (and consequences) of working on intersectionality: ‘If practitioners do not pursue intersectionality’s critical theoretical possibilities, it could become just another form of, as a friend of mine put it, “academic bullshit” that joins an arsenal of projects whose progressive and radical potential has waned’ (Hill Collins 2019: 2–3). This then is an activist-scholarly praxis that focuses on pushing for social change. Pre-modern critical intersectionality is an important part of the project since the pre-modern archive has become such a central node in enacting ‘compounded harm’ onto BIWOC, and our tasks as scholars in the pre-modern must to be to help dislodge these pre-modern weapons that uphold White supremacy and colonial violence and fantasies of White heritage.

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In addition, recent discussion of intersectionality point to the importance of making central the issues of the most vulnerable and to highlight issues of access to basic needs, poverty, hunger and, in the ethos of the discussions of intersectionality, centring the most marginalized to lift all. Mikki Kendall explains: This tendency to assume that all women are experiencing the same struggles has led us to a place where reproductive health imagery centers on cisgender able-bodied women to the exclusion of those who are trans, intersex, or otherwise inhabiting bodies that don’t fit the narrow idea that genitalia dictates gender. You can have no uterus and still be a woman, after all. (Kendall 2020: 4) Kendall’s book especially highlights the importance of focusing on basic needs. This requires scholars of the pre-modern to forgo critiques that constantly valorize White women as possessors of power. Power to do what? Is a case study that examines elite White women having power intersectional? Can it be? Are elite women having power a form of intersectionality? If discussing women having White power or White representation is part of second-wave feminism, then why is this still the theoretical bulwark in our premodern gender and sexuality scholarship? Kendall’s answers to these questions are clear. Instead of prestige and royal power, she asks us to consider thinking about food insecurity and sex work, for example, as fundamentally feminist issue (Kendall 2020). These ideas are echoed in Taylor’s reassessment of the power of the Combahee River Collective and their statement: But ‘identity politics’ was not just about who you were; it was also about what you could do to confront the oppression you were facing. Or, as Black women had argued within the broader feminist movement: ‘the personal is political.’ This slogan was not just about ‘lifestyle’ issues, as it came to be popularly understood, rather it was initially about how the experiences within the lives of Black women shaped their political outlook. The experiences of oppression, humiliations, and the indignities create by poverty, racism, and sexism opened Black women up to the possibility of radical and revolutionary politics. (Taylor 2017: 9) It’s this emphasis on critical intersectionality to focus on the issues of most need – poverty, sexual violence, work, class, sexuality, disability, race as intersecting and enmeshed issues that will allow us to think about critical intersectionality as a work of not just theory and self-reflection but also praxis. Pre-modern Critical Intersectionality is how pre-modern critical race, gender, sexuality studies can be used to discuss enmeshed identity politics related to class, race, gender, sexuality, religion, disability. It is a multi-axis pre-modern critical lens that ‘can help rethink specific, contextual “research and teaching projects”’ (Cho, Crenshaw and McCall 2013: 785). This chapter has also been about re-examining intersectional method and theory to address fluctuating and in process medieval identity politics. We hope that our discussions also have the added effect of allowing readers to consider how pre-modern critical intersectionality as a praxis related to community, politics and resistance. The examples and case studies we have assembled – St Mary of Egypt, Muriel of Oxford and Licoricia of Winchester, and Teresa of Cartagena – are different

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contextual cases in the pre-modern archive in which pre-modern critical intersectionality can nuance the issues of toxic masculinity and violent anti-Black TERF propaganda in the form of a saint’s life; where the legal manoeuvres of different courts highlight how pre-modern critical intersectionality is crucial to understand White Christian hegemonic law uphold structural intersectionality; and how race, gender, disability and religion can be an always in-process project of identity politics in relation to the life writing of a religious woman.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Race and Sexuality Conversion Therapy, Christian Conversion and Chivalric Romance M. W. BYCHOWSKI WITH ROBERT S. STURGES

Transgender rhetoric has been misrepresented and weaponized by White supremacist culture. It is an unfortunate reality at present that if you Google search ‘Rachel Dolezal’, you may see my name appear. Ms Dolezal is a woman who changed the colour of her skin and claims to be ‘transracial’, which she defines as a Black person born in a white body (Dolezal 2017). The word’s use in this way appropriates and changes the term, transracial, used by Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) adopted by White parents (Brown 2018). The word transracial is used in adoption discourses to critique the ways in which BIPOC’s racial, national, linguistic and historical cultures are frequently erased or subjugated within the adopting White families. Consequently, the BIPOC children become enculturated within White norms and value systems. To clarify the distinction, I will use the unqualified word, transracial, to refer to the word’s use and meaning relating to BIPOC adoptees (Brown 2018) and the qualified ‘transracial’ to refer to meanings akin to Dolezal’s use of the word (Dolezal 2017). The reason my name is at all associated with her is because I posted to social media combatting remarks she made in 2017 that as a ‘transracial’ person she is more oppressed than transgender people. A screenshot of this social media post was included in reports by The Washington Post (Selk 2017). In my post, I wrote about redirecting questions I had received about Dolezal to already existing and excellent critiques given by BIPOC scholars and activists. In particular, Kevin Young’s book Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, also published in 2017, has an insightful chapter on Dolezal as yet another in a long line of White people using misleading rhetoric (often about their own identities and pasts) in order to exploit the real Black, Indigenous and People of Colour experiences and histories for their benefit (Young 2017). Yet Dolezal’s persistent reference to the language and realities of the transgender community set a further dangerous equivalency between her supposed ‘transracial’ identity and transgender identity. Subsequently, a transgender woman, ‘Ja Du’, also claimed to be ‘transracial’ (Branigin Nov 2017; Yam 2017). By imitating and conflating transgender rhetoric about being born in the wrong body, gender and race as malleable social constructs, and her oppression as a ‘transracial’ person being comparable to the transphobia transgender people experience, Dolezal (as well as Du) creates an equivalency

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between herself and the transgender community that leads to the unspoken conclusion: if you support transgender people then you must support her and if you oppose her then you do not support transgender people. Rebecca Tuvel reinforced this false equivalence in her 2017 article ‘In Defense of Transracialism’, writing that ‘[s]ince we should accept transgender individuals’ decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’ decisions to change races’ (264). Subsequently, Hypatia, the feminist philosophy journal who published the piece, came under intensive critique, resulting in the journal’s editor-in-chief stepping down and a re-evaluation of the editorial process, in particular the vetting of scholarship and the peer-review process. The harm caused by Dolezal includes, among much larger offences, putting BIPOC scholars and trans scholars in the position of having to respond to her misleading claims. In his chapter on her, Young’s opening bemoans that his book was effectively complete until Dolezal arrived into public consciousness and compelled him to add a chapter about the nonsensical and exploitative use of the word ‘transracial’ (Young 2017: 381–90). Following Young’s project on the history of racial fantasies, misrepresentations and exploitations, I find myself in the position of opening a chapter on medieval sex and race with a word on Dolezal. This is necessary because fantasies about converting one’s skin colour and identity is not uniquely American or modern. Dismantling weaponized transgender rhetoric and Dolezalian ‘transracialism’ must expand beyond a few eccentric individuals and the modern era to consider White supremacy’s central workings which stretch well into the Middle Ages. The modern exploitation of BIPOC and transgender signifiers continues millennia old conquest and conversion fantasies developed in the European Middle Ages. This chapter calls for a deeper historicizing and theorizing of ‘transracialism’ within White, Christian, patriarchal, supremacist culture and also compulsory-cisgender-assignment. Important foundations have already been laid for these interventions into the past by numerous scholars, including Geraldine Heng (2018b), Dorothy Kim (2018) and Lynn T. Ramey (2014). In particular, this chapter lifts up Snorton’s Black on Both Sides (2017) alongside Willy Wilkinson’s Born on the Edge of Race and Gender (2015) and Cord J. Whitaker’s Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race Thinking (2019) as works that have significantly influenced this study, especially the resonance with Snorton’s theories on transitivity and transversal identities. Intersectional methods analysing race and sex help unpack the historical iterations of transracial (or ‘transracial’) identities and transgender identities. Although medieval people lacked the modern terminology for intersectionality, race and gender (as a cultural construct distinct from sex as a biological construct), to describe experiences which inextricably cross identity discourses – especially Black women’s lives – the Middle Ages nonetheless engaged in race-thinking and sex-thinking together (Crenshaw 1991). This does not mean that intersectionality totalizes identity – nor transitive identity – but rather intersectionality directs scholars to consider identity along a multi-axis framework: calling on medieval, feminism, transgender and critical race studies to work together. Studies on the Middle Ages, medieval conquest, conversion and chivalric romance need to look for the coordinated tactics that target race and sex together; this may mean putting texts such Le Roman de Silence in conversation with texts such The King of Tars. The earlier of two medieval texts to be considered by this chapter (dated to the early thirteenth century), Silence, is frequently utilized in studies on medieval gender and sexuality (including trans studies). Indeed, I concur with scholarship that has come before

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that situates Sir Silence from Le Roman de Silence within the transgender spectrum – whether the identifiers transgender man, trans man, trans masculine person or gender fluid has coded that experience – thus male pronouns will be used for Sir Silence (Perret 1985; Watt 1998; Clark 2002; Barr 2020). The latter of the two medieval texts (dated to the early fourteenth century), The King of Tars, is regularly discussed in studies of medieval race and religion (Ramey 2014; Heng 2018b; Whitaker 2019). Nonetheless, both romances evidence a cooperation between racist and sexist biopolitical systems as well as between the construction of racial and sexual identities. For instance, it is not enough to merely consider Silence within transgender studies, even so far as scholarship should be concerned. Elizabeth A. Waters described Silence as needing ‘[a] third term, but also a fourth, a fifth, a sixth – an infinite number of terms to express gendered identities’ (Waters 1997). Among these, numerous gendered identities, racial identities, associations and expressions must be considered. Likewise, scholars need to consider, extend and update Robert L. A. Clark’s argument in ‘Queering Gender and Naturalizing Class in the Roman de Silence’ (2002) calling for Le Roman de Silence to be considered not for only the text’s queer and transgender implications but to put the chivalric romance in conversation with ‘transracial’ discourses (Clark 2002: 59). Especially in their conversion scenes, the transitivity in Silence and King of Tars should not be so easily divided between spheres of gender and critical race studies. Towards that goal, I articulate in this chapter how race and sex are entangled together going back to the European high and late Middle Ages, when chivalric romances developed traditions that appropriate and dismiss the markers of real life BIPOC and transgender people via a rhetorical device called ‘transitivity’. Building on Claire Colebrook’s theories, C. Riley Snorton in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017) articulates how contingency defines transgender and transitive racial lives. ‘Trans’, for Colebroke, described ‘a not-yet differentiated singularity from which distinct genders, race[s], species, sexes, and sexualities are generated in a form of relative stability’ (2015). This state of being ‘not-yet differentiated’ Snorton takes as the foundations of transitivity which is central to transgender discourses but which – as Colebrook suggests – also relates to ‘not-yet differentiated’ racial and sexual identities (Snorton 2017: 5–8). The transitivity of race and sex, writes Snorton, ‘invokes a number of concepts that denote impermanence … partial and ephemeral, subject to change, and altered by changing conditions’ (7). Marked as transitive, transgender and BIPOC persons become targets for White Christian conversion projects that promise constancy through wild transformation fantasies. While transitive identities have the beneficial potential to destabilize dominant orders, especially cisgender male supremacy and White colonialist supremacy, Snorton observes that the transitivity ascribed to transgender people and BIPOC has been used time and again to support White Christian cisgender images as unimpeachably constant. The linguistic turn may laud drag and performativity, yet this reifies queer and trans BIPOC as embodiments of a dangerous fluidity. White Christians used this association with inconstancy to rationalize the suffering of LGBTQIA HIV/AIDS patients and to excuse their own inaction. Transitivity becomes racialized and sexualized within White cis Christian patriarchies to justify conquest, colonization, slavery and conversion therapy. Domination and conversion become justified under the fantasies that White Christianity brings constancy to these inconstant populations. Imitating BIPOC and transgender persons through minstrelsy, blackface or satiric cross-dressing performances reinforces the narratives that the play of signifiers define transitive populations. White cisgender

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persons who regard their own identities as reflecting reality and everyday life treat drag, BIPOC culture and transgender rhetoric as mere games and fictions. Transitivity names this asymmetric power relationship with change. Transitivity, Snorton argues, ‘[functions] as a rubric that situates Blackness and transness as within the “order of things” that produce and maintain an androcentric European ethnoclass of Man as the pinnacle of being’ (Snorton 2017: 6). Snorton’s project does not merely declare transgender or Black people as transitive but rather looks into American history to demonstrate how Black and trans bodies are framed as transitive to exploit their narratives to serve European racial and patriarchal sexual supremacy. Together, Bunk and Black on Both Sides historicize practices that misrepresent and exploit Black and trans narratives in the United States. Yet the marking people with dark skin as racially and sexually transitive reaches back into the Middle Ages. To extend Snorton’s and Young’s projects into medieval studies, this study will focus around medieval two cases, one from the thirteenth century, Le Roman de Silence (or Silence) (Heldris 1992), and one from fourteenth century, The King of Tars (Chandler 2015). These two works span around a century and more. They evidence developments in transitivity rhetoric within chivalric romance, one French language and one English language. Each text contains a section towards their conclusions wherein characters marked by racial and/or sexual alterity are changed to be in line with White Christian cisgender heteronormativity. When the trans masculine knight from Le Roman de Silence is turned (supposedly) into a cisgender soon-to-be queen mother of a Kingdom with white skin, this situates transgender identity on disorder’s side and instability and cisgender identity on order and stability’s side. Likewise, in his conclusion, the Black Muslim Sultan from The King of Tars is turned (supposedly) into a White Christian father, placing non-Christian Blackness on the side of disorder and reproductive failure and White Christianity on the side of order and successful reproduction. These scenes depicting coerced transitioning (or de-transitioning) focus the scope of this analysis, spotlighting how medieval fantasies solidified White cisgender racial and sexual identity by marking non-White, non-cisgender bodies as exemplarily transitive. To articulate the development and entanglement of racial and sexual transitivity in chivalric romance through conversion fantasies, this chapter is structured chronologically, beginning with the earlier text, Le Roman de Silence, then proceeding to consider the latter text, The King of Tars, and finally meditating on the fantastic ‘Child’ of this racial and sexual transitivity as leading to a future in which figures such as Dolezal follow centuries of exploiting transgender and BIPOC signifiers, as well as real transracial children adopted into White families, to play into the fantasies of anti-trans and anti-BIPOC narratives. By mapping how racially and sexually transitive figures develop in chivalric romance, we can see how pre-modern conversion therapy and Christian conversion have implications for today’s transgender, transracial and BIPOC children. Yet before moving into this historical examination, it is first necessary to consider a few key critical theories.

THE SHIMMERING OF TRANSITIVITY Historically, religious conversion frequently fantasizes about the convert’s total transformation. This transformation involves rejecting the convert’s racial and sexual identities. This fantasy extends in some circumstances to include a physical change on the convert’s body from black to white skin, supposedly to coincide with a change in the converted people from non-Christian to Christian and BIPOC identities to White

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supremacist culture. This imagined transformation fantasy also involved reducing gender diversity among the converted and conquered peoples. Compulsory-cisgenderassignment continues to subjugate gender and sexual diversity, especially among BIPOC populations, through programmes such as conversion therapy. Conversion therapy – as a practice influenced by religious conversion but distinct from it – demonstrates how even after centuries of conversion, conquest and colonization, the total transformation fantasy to White Christian cisgender norms continues. Thus, when unpacking the history of conversion (or conversion therapy), scholars must leverage the combined insights from critical race studies and transgender studies, especially from BIPOC trans scholars. An important entry in critical race studies of medieval conversion is Whitaker’s theorization of shimmering philology. The language of shimmering goes back to Carolyn Dinshaw and Marget Long’s presentation on ‘shimmering philology’, which Michelle Warren subsequently developed further (Dinshaw and Long 2013; Warren 2014: 389–97). Basing his work on Warren’s article, Whitaker describes his work as intending ‘to capture the essence of that which appears alternatively and continually present and nonpresent’ (Whitaker 2019: 5). For converts, their non-Christian identity is perpetually denounced yet remembered within the conversion process. The converts’ significance as converts depends on making their renounced identity present, reifying the constancy of their Christian identity and the inconstancy of their supposedly altered non-Christian identity. Applying this project to medieval conversion fantasies, Whitaker describes converts’ fictional transformation (such as changing from dark to light skin) as shimmering from a rhetorical mirage: ‘blackness and whiteness are alternately present and absent at once, changing places, chasing one another, and shimmering in their coordinated movements’ (26). This double-vision, the constant presence and absence of non-Christian and Christian identity, Blackness and Whiteness, Whitaker calls the shimmer of rhetorical mirage. The convert shimmers not only due to the transformation fantasy from Black to White but due to the way Blackness and Whiteness are perpetually referencing one another and haunting one another to construct the image of the convert; like how a mirage creates a false fantasy by blurring other physical things together such as heat, land and sky. These traits, such as blackness and whiteness, are rooted in reality. Yet just as a mirage ‘funnels material reality through a set of material conditions … that produces illusions that engages the imagination’, so too a visual or rhetorical mirage ‘has its genesis in material reality but quickly moves into the realms of imagination and interpretation’ (5). For the magical conversion to hold meaning, the renounced darkness must perpetually be made present. Conversely, the white skin colour and White cultural norms impose themselves as the always already present essence towards which all converts are imagined to be inevitably subject. The shimmering mirage that fuels conversion fantasies exploit the material traits and rhetoric of BIPOC, non-Christian and transgender persons then misrepresents them to mark these populations as targets for White cisgender Christian conquest. Marked by this shimmering, White Christian patriarchies define these targeted populations by what Snorton describes as ‘transitivity’. Like Whitaker’s concern for Black metaphors and rhetorical mirage, Snorton’s theorization plays both on transitivity’s active and grammatical associations. Citing both the quality of ‘passing into another condition, changeable, changeful; passing away, transient, transitory’ meaning and the grammatical meaning, ‘the expression of an action that requires a direct object to complete its sense of meaning’, Snorton holds up the transitive as a signifier for trans identity but also as a critical theoretical lens by which one can examine other identity constellations, including

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race, ability and sexuality (Cohen 1997, quoted in Snorton 2017: 5–6). For a transgender woman, gender transitivity both acknowledges her difference from other women at the same time as it denies this difference. For a Black man who passes as White, racial transitivity both acknowledges his Blackness and denies it. For some transitive figures, transness and Blackness together enact a ‘double movement’ where a subject becomes marked as ‘doubly trans’ (8). This double movement may become more pronounced in scenarios when transitive racial rhetoric and transitive sexual rhetoric are deployed together. Bridging Snorton’s and Whitaker’s work, we might say that transitivity becomes shimmering as a reader begins to see ‘the double movements’ of ‘acknowledgement and denial’ at play within trans and BIPOC narratives, especially in narratives built upon anxieties around passing, conversion, transition and social correction (Snorton 2017: 8). Transitivity describes something that appears to be both present and non-present at the same time or interchangeably. Within the transitive logos, gender and race do not name objects or objective realities. Rather, gender and race name ‘subject-object relations’ that are ‘neither absolute nor binaristic but changeable’ (6; emphasis in the original). By marking racial and sexual alterity as transitive (both grammatically contingent and changeable), modern and medieval writers craft narratives that utilize conversion and traits associated with real BIPOC and transgender persons, in order to confirm White cisgender Christian identities as constant. By applying transitivity to medieval conversion figures, chivalric romances evidence ways that transgender and Black figures are defined by compounding inconstant gender, race and sexuality during the high and late Middle Ages. Consequently, medieval literature will further evidence how pre-modern transgender studies is inextricable from pre-modern critical race studies, by laying emphasis on racial and sexual transitivity within conversion fantasies. These fictions deploy signifiers associated with BIPOC and transgender histories to imagine Black and trans bodies as extraordinarily inconstant and susceptible to the identarian transformations. Breaking down the centuries long weaponization of trans discourses necessitates going deeper into the development of these cultural fantasies and fictions within the Middle Ages. This work calls on scholars to utilize combined resources from transgender and critical race studies.

THE REIFICATION OF TRANSITIVITY IN MEDIEVAL SCHOLARSHIP If we are to dismantle the ways that transitivity has been weaponized by White supremacy in the Middle Ages, however, it is necessary to first assess how transitivity has been framed within medieval studies. In the academy, including medieval studies, we can continue the work of re-examining the language, assumptions and appropriations in the linguistic turn. The material turn energized transgender studies, disability studies and critical race studies by reasserting the distinction between fantasy and fact, rhetoric and reality. Transgender studies spoke back to the linguistic turn, insisting that transgender lives are not merely performances, disturbances of norms, nor fantasies of crossing signifiers. Likewise, critical race studies insists that the fantasy of crossing racial identities through performances such as blackface and minstrelsy are not the same as experiencing or changing realities. As Kim unpacks in her 2018 talk at Cornell University, the ‘trans-racial’ rhetoric of Rachel Dolezal (and Ja Du) build upon mistakes in the linguistic turn; mistakes based in

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White supremacy and privilege that suppose anyone (but mainly members of dominant cultures) may play with the signifiers of identity to vacation in the lives and histories of marginalized peoples. Influenced by the linguistic turn, gender performativity and queer theory destabilize essential categorization and disrupt dominant heteronormative norms, benefitting gender diverse communities, past and present. As McCracken writes, ‘Transvestite romances … suggest that gender is not essential but performative, that the enactment of a gender through performance and dress may have an authority equal to that of anatomical characteristics in determining gender identity’ (1994: 1). This is one positive and generous way of reading the inconstancy of gender in these texts. Yet, as McCracken herself notes later in this same article, the narrative concludes by making this transitivity into a spectacle, humiliating those marked by transitivity (including Silence and the nun lover of the Queen), and disciplining this transitivity either through correction (Silence is remade into a cisgender woman) or death (the nun is killed) (37–8). For trans persons, transitivity may be a way to escape compulsory-cisgender-assignment or it may be a preparation for institutional elimination or conversion. Medieval literature (such as Silence and King of Tars) and also medieval scholars reinforce the misrepresentation of transgender and trans-racial experiences. Consider the episode from Silence where the knight engages in blackface and minstrelsy, darkening his skin as part of performing a minstrel identity. ‘The tendency in much of the criticism on crossdressing has been to read it exclusively as the crossing of gender boundaries, that is, drag’, Clark observes, ‘What has less often been noticed is the frequency with which crossdressing is not just a transgender but also, as we shall see, a transstatus or transracial masquerade or sartorial event’ (2002: 59). This conflation of race and sex as transitive – equally transitive – is a not uncommon mistake reinforced within the linguistic turn. In the year following, Marjorie Garber argued, ‘One of the cultural functions of the transvestite is precisely to mark this kind of displacement, substitution, or slippage: from class to gender, gender to class; or, equally plausibly, from gender to race or religion’ (1992: 36–7). The work of Clark and Garber signals how scholarship following the linguistic term (1) treats transgender signifiers as transitive and performative, and (2) treats gender, race and class as equally transitive. Using the terms ‘transracial’ and ‘transstatus’ to echo ‘transgender’ grammatical rhetoric, Stock’s and Clark’s work gestures to a medieval romance tradition of marking gender, race, religion and class as all equally open to transitivity and traversing. This misrepresents the biopolitics of Silence and transgender men as performing gender through a practice of cross-dressing, merely rearranging signifiers to experience different identities. This eschews the fact that Silence (like many transgender men) persistently identify as their authentic gender and consistently express that gender when given the safe opportunity. Misrepresenting trans masculinity as transitive also drives those influenced by the linguistic turn to conflate authentic gender performances with acts of racial minstrelsy and blackface. This confuses fact and fiction. As Silence affirms himself, he is a man. Yet Silence’s blackface does not mean he is Black or lower class. Silence is White and upper class. Indeed, the blackening of the face as part of this minstrelsy conflates class and race, a move that White supremacy frequently employs as a way to get around talking about issues of racism. This reinforces the belief that darkness signifies lower-class status. Lorraine Kochanske Stock explores how Silence uses this ‘transracial’ persona (in the Dolezalian sense) to gain access to the space of another social group: the woods. The woods, Stock argues, was the world of racial difference within a post-conquest space: ‘Classified among

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the monstrous races, the Wild People lived an outdoor existence in the unsettled and uncultivated lands of the forest outside civilized society’ (1997: 23). Consequently the minstrelsy of Silence reinforces the belief that people of privilege (White and upperclass people) can vacation in the experiences of other identities; a belief and privilege not afforded equally or without consequence to BIPOC and lower-class persons. The scholarship of Clark, Stock and Garber may remind readers of this rhetoric’s danger for transgender persons, such as ‘Ja Du’, who may participate in the fantasy of ‘transracial’ identity performance (Branigin 2017; Yam 2017). Silence and Du misrepresenting their racial identities demonstrates how White transgender people perpetuate the practices of racist exploitation. In doing so, these transgender persons undermine the BIPOC and transgender people’s experiences by treating them as purely transitive.

THE TRANSITIVITY OF CONQUEST IN THE MIDDLE AGES As a tool of conquest, colonization and assimilation, conversion has long involved practices now associated with the term conversion therapy. Christian conversion historically means racial, sexual and religious conversion to White supremacist norms and hierarchies. This entanglement between class, religion, sex and racial conversions develops into new heights centuries earlier during the crusades, where calls for Muslim peoples to engage in Christian conversion echoed with the calls to submit to European patriarchal culture (Heng 2018b: 354–63). Crusades and conquests used conversion therapy within the programme of religious conversion, perpetuating fantasies of a transformed and pacified population. In texts such as Teresa de Cartagena’s Arboleda de los enfermos, the fifteenth-century author reflects on her life after her Jewish family was coerced into Christian conversion after the ‘reconquering’ of Spain (de Cartagena 1998). It is within these contexts that chivalric romance generated the stories, Silence and The King of Tars, which present Christian conversion and conversion therapy among military classes and contexts. In turn, these texts then reinforce and undergird conversion therapy fantasies within later European and American colonial projects. Conversion therapy extends religious conversion to include any trait considered unchristian, with direct and indirect implications on racial and linguistic differences. In the documentary The Transformation (1996), conversion therapists work to convert a trans Latinx woman into a cisgender man and to train her in White Anglophone culture. Conversion therapy and Christian conversion are not identical, however, medieval and modern narratives use both to mark a figure as immorally transitive within supposedly constant White cisgender Christian patriarchies. Conversion therapy (or reparative therapy) names the practice of attempting to change a transgender person into a cisgender person or a queer person into a heteronormative person (Human Rights Campaign n.d.). Most major medical institutions – including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association – have decried conversion therapy as bad science, espoused by (often unaccredited) anti-trans, anti-queer Christian therapists (Human Rights Campaign n.d.). The conversion component of the therapy builds on Christian conversion practices and theories, wherein a non-Christian is transformed on an external and internal level into a proper Christian (Hartke 2018: 20). Conversion therapy extends Christian conversion to include other components of identity, especially gender and sexual expression, that are considered unchristian: transgender unchristian people become cisgender Christian people and queer unchristian

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people become heteronormative Christian people. As a subset of conversion therapy, reparative therapy further adds salvation concepts derived from White Christian social practices to corrections of identity. Yet fantasies about transforming transgender persons into cisgender persons without any lingering queer taint falls into the same traps that religious conversion fantasies have promoted for centuries. Conversion therapy (as a subset within religious conversion) aimed at purifying non-Christian, non-White, non-cisgender, non-able-bodied and non-patriarchal persons in substance and behaviour necessarily fails. The anxiety and mistrust of converts, the fears of deception and inauthenticity, and the suspicion of the taint of racialized, religious and sexualized difference persists. Consequently, while modern conversion therapy clinics did not exist in the Middle Ages, the term’s concepts and practices occur throughout chivalric romance, marking figures such as Sir Silence as transitive targets that might be converted into ‘properly’ White cisgender Christians.

THE TRANSITIVITY OF CONVERSION THERAPY IN LE ROMAN DE SILENCE At the conclusion of Le Roman de Silence, Nature’s allegorical embodiment reshapes the knight’s body from masculine to feminine norms, enacting a form of conversion therapy on Sir Silence that is analogous to the Sultan’s conversion transformation in The King of Tars, written a century afterwards. Both Silence and the Sultan are disrobed, redressed and altered in skin colour from a dark to a light complexion to express fantasies steeped in racism and colourism alongside sexism. Le Roman de Silence contains references that point towards medieval theories of skin colour. These medieval theories position darkness and masculinity on the side of heat. Meanwhile, these theories position lightness and femininity on the side of coldness. Some in the thirteenth century (e.g. Bartholomeus Anglicus in his De Proprietatibus Rerum) extend this theory to explain the complexions found among people from different climates, connecting heat and the sun both to sexual as well racial markers (Heng 2018b: 16). Within medieval fantasies based on these frameworks, more heat application could make a body darker, such as tanning in the sun. Likewise, the same theories might allow that a body might become more masculine from the same exposure to heat. Consequently, Silence’s darkness may be read either as a marker of masculinity (as medieval scholarship has traditionally done) or as a marker of racial difference or disturbance within White supremacist norms. An intersectional approach would encourage us to consider the darkening of Silence’s skin – which is regarded as Nature’s problem by the King’s court – as speaking across racial and sexual discourses. To clarify: Silence does not alter his racial status. The relative freedom Silence possesses to transgress power networks and identity speak to his White upperclass martial privilege. Yet his skin darkening may be seen as cooperating with other embodied traits and his behaviour in disrupting White supremacist standards for a person the courts finally assign as properly a fair White female. Introducing the conversion therapy and the related transformation fantasy involving compulsory-cisgender-assignment and White supremacist norms, the King orders Silence to be undressed. Heldris writes, ‘It was just as Merlin had said: he found everything in its proper place’ (1992: 6571–4). Compulsory-cisgender-assignment in White medieval literature and history frames the revelation Silence’s genitals as tantamount to disproving his masculine gender identity. This revelation supposedly justifies the court subsequently

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coercing Silence into a submissive sexual position: turning Silence from the King’s prized knight into the King’s new wife. Yet a naked body never escapes cultural assignments and associations. While Valerie R. Hotchkiss argues, ‘it would appear complexion, not genitalia, mutates’, Aristotelian models of sex allowed for potential gender transitions, if enough heat was applied to the female body later in life to produce male characteristics (Hotchkiss 1996: 111). In Le Roman de Silence, Nurture makes Silence a man by exposing him to the heat of the sun and consequently the knight exhibits masculine behaviour and rejects feminine behaviour (Heldris 1992: 2472–4). The French here is key: rhyming ‘heat’ (‘halle’) with ‘man’ (‘malle’) and female behaviour (‘use’) with refuse (‘feme refuse’). Tying heat and masculinity together follows medieval associations. According to Aristotelian theory, the difference between male and female sex characteristics arouse from the degree of heat and form given to the child in the womb (Laqueur 1990: 7, 33–6, 40). Less heat produced girls and more heat produced boys. There was a sense that female genitals were the inverted male genitals but folded up and still inside the body. More heat in the womb would push these internal organs outward to produce a penis and testes (127). The extent to which heat has affected Silence’s body are not detailed. Yet the text suggest that Silence’s skin colour was not the only masculine trait he embodies. The knight pronounces that his mouth and arms are too roughly masculine for feminine uses, decrying that it would be foolish to gender him as a woman in any sexual encounter, declaring himself a man, ‘car vallés sui et nient mescine’ (I am a young man and not a girl; Heldris 1992: 2646–50). Does the text suggest that Silence has a penis? This is not conclusively confirmed nor conclusively denied beyond a doubt. Silence’s present and absent phallus shimmers in and out of the text. Even in the illustrations from Le Roman de Silence, the phallus is and is not there (Figure 8.1). As Michelle Bolduc argues, ‘This image [of Silence’s bare skin] (fol. 222v) follows the passage in which Ebain orders both Silence and the nun disrobed … While the miniature presents Silence as a woman, her pubic area has been obscured, perhaps effaced’ (2002: 109). With Silence’s genitals directly in question in the scene, to show his nudity and not to show the phallus’ presence or absence is significant. If the image showed a labia and it was effaced (for whatever reason), this re-enacts Silence’s refusal to let his genitals define his gender. No one needs to know what is under Silence’s clothes for his gender to be legitimate. If the image showed a phallus and it was effaced, this visualizes the court denying Silence’s embodied male-associations or definitions. If the image intentionally left this portion of Silence’s body blank, this only re-enacts the text’s ambiguity around Silence’s gender and Silence’s refusal to show this body part until forced to do so. If the image is effaced, this only underlines the trauma of the coerced disrobing and the coerced conversion therapy. Once Nature has taken control over Silence, concludes Le Roman, she spent three days refinishing ‘repolir’ Silence’s whole body, ‘tolt le cors’, removing ‘tolir’ every last remnant of masculinity from his body (Heldris 1992: 6669–73). The masculine traits are not enumerated or detailed, for the most part. Is a penis part of this constellation? Stripping Silence naked supposedly shows the King something. Afterwards, the King concludes that the naked Silence should be assigned female. Yet the text does not specifically describe or define Silence’s genitals. Although the text confirms that heat has effected Silence’s body to better articulate his masculinity to others. It is these masculine effects that Nature struggles to remove. Not merely linguistic or performative, Silence’s

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FIGURE 8.1  The conversion of Silence’s gender. WLC/LM/6, fol. 222v, Middleton Collection, University of Nottingham. © University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections.

masculinity is notably material and biopolitical. So is a physical transition akin to bottom surgery imaginable in the Middle Ages? Does Silence have a penis? The text leaves the question open. With its absence suggested but not confirmed and its presence suggested but not confirmed, the phallus shimmers in the text. Yet disrobing both marks and erases more than just genitals. Skin colour metonymically replaces the shimmering phallus as a key gender signifier in the romance (Gilmore 1997: 114). Covering the largest portion of his now naked body, Silence’s skin and dark complexion becomes a sexuality issue that causes anxiety for the court. When Silence

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stands before the King to answer for his trans identity, he explains that it was only by embracing the life, clothes and heat of masculinity that he could inherit his family’s estate (Heldris 1992: 6598–600). Living as a man darkens Silence’s skin. This darkness signifies masculinity to the knight’s society. This masculinity reinstates Silence’s right to inherit. While most of the trans masculine traces… that are removed are not named, except one key trait: skin colour. Silence’s skin is ‘refinished’ or ‘re-polished’, much like how wood tables might be sanded down and given a new colour (McCracken 1994: 31). As she works, Nature concentrates on Silence’s complexion, removing all the remnants of heat and darkness from his skin until his face reflected the combined the whiteness of the lily and the blush of a rose (Heldris 1992: 6674–6). The darker complexion is considered a burn to be removed during Silence’s conversion therapy. The reference to roses and lilies existing in ‘conjugal harmony’ certainly signify the sexual changes that are supposed to be occurring. Here, it is helpful to return to the fol. 222v illustration (Figure 8.1). Regarding the image’s skin colour, Bolduc writes, whereas the image depicts Silence as already extraordinarily pale, in the text it is 75 lines later that Nature refashions Silence’s coloring, replacing the ruddiness with delicate pink and white. The image thus presents Silence as an already entirely female woman at the time of the discovery, with not only the breasts but also the fair, pale skin of a woman. (Bolduc 2002: 6674–6) This echoes Whitaker’s observation about the Sultan’s shimmering Whiteness in The King of Tars. The text treats the Sultan as always already White and Christian, only needing baptism to bring the White Christian identity to the surface. Thus, before his conversion, the text assumes absent but still somehow present Whiteness, even as the text depends on the Sultan’s Blackness to persistently present even after conversion to serve as a sign and reminder for conversion and conquest’s power. Likewise, Silence’s image in the manuscript treats him as always already White and cis female, reinforcing the notion that Whiteness and cis identity are essential, natural and constant; even as it reminds readers about Silence’s denied darkness and masculinity. For readers familiar with Silence’s expressed gender identity, the absence of masculinity markers speaks loudly. For those familiar with Silence’s usual skin tone, the absence of a darker complexion also speaks loudly. Silence’s phallus (real or metaphorical) and darkness shimmers together, in and out of sight. Transforming Silence’s skin colour in such fantasies may not primarily be a matter of race, yet it is a racialized signifier that is supposed to register an ontological change and constancy. Traversing skin colour for Silence thus not only destabilizes gender but racial identity as well. Darker skin helps Silence pass as a man; lighter skin helps him pass as a woman. The transitivity in Silence imagines a world in which the body traits have little essential connection to the person’s identity. If a person can pass as another gender, could the same person pass as another racial or religious identity? These questions are central to medieval romance. Yet Le Roman de Silence puts forth conversion as a tool which reifies and exploits mutability to serve fantasies of constant sexual and racial supremacy. Until The King of Tars and afterwards, conversion therapy and related transformation fantasies endure: transitivity may be an adventure but these imagined adventures end within a return to White cisgender patriarchal dominance.

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THE TRANSITIVITY OF CONVERSION IN THE KING OF TARS From the thirteenth to the fourteenth century, chivalric romances used conversion fantasies to imagine converted BIPOC, non-Christian and transgender figures as extraordinarily transitive. These conversions may make the religiosity more overt (using rituals such as baptism) or less overt (reinforcing White Christian sexual and racial norms). Yet in both cases, conversion fantasies promise religious, social and physical domination. The conquering White cisgender Christians’ traits are imagined as constant whereas the conquered non-White, non-cisgender or non-Christian traits are imagined as transitive. In these fantasies, the dark skin of the Sultan in The King of Tars and Sir Silence in Silence marks racial and sexual transitivity. Sex and race in these texts have frequently been considered separately. For Silence, dark skin emphasizes sexual difference more than racial difference. Whereas for the Sultan, dark skin emphasizes racial and religious difference more than sexual difference (Figure 8.2). Yet racialization rarely occurs without dimensions of sexualization and sexualization rarely occurs without dimensions of racialization. These transformations into a White cisgender properly subjugated wife or a White cisgender properly patriarchal father are based on White Christian supremacist racial and sexual standards.

FIGURE 8.2  The conversion of the Sultan’s religion. Auchinleck manuscript, 19.2.1 (f. 7ra), National Library of Scotland. © The National Library of Scotland.

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The conversion fantasy that transform’s the Sultan’s skin colour in The King of Tars frames dark skin as undesirable and transitive. This dark skin metonymically stands in for a variety of traits that do not adhere to White Christian patriarchal standards. Because the skin colour stands in for these traits, they do not need to be listed. As a fantasy, White Christian readers are open to imagine any number of traits that do not adhere to their norms which arise from adjected desire or fear. Whatever these other non-Christian traits or desires may be, they will be removed along with the dark skin within the conversion fantasy. All that will remain from the adventure are White Christian patriarchal standards. In The King of Tars and Silence, skin takes on the role of a metonymic stand-in for chivalric manhood. While the conversion of the Sultan’s skin colour has been studied in relation to race and religion, there are also notable signs of a transversal of gender and sexuality. Following grammatic transitivity, the changes in the Sultan’s gender signifiers emerges in relation to the body of his child; his relation to his son defines the meaning of the Sultan’s masculinity. The child supposedly lacks limbs, nose, eyes, blood and bone (Chandler 2015: 574–82). The significance of the child’s disability is a judgement upon the parents. Scholars such as Ramey have already noted that the child is a criticism of the father in particular (Ramey 2014: 64–74). The specific condemnation of the father arises from an Aristotelian theory of reproduction whereby the mother provides the physical matter for the child and the father provides the form for the child (65). Thus, when a child is born seemingly with matter but no form, the Aristotelian fingers point towards the father (68–9). By failing to fulfil this role of fatherhood, the text suggests that the Sultan is not properly a man. The Sultan uses male pronouns before and after his conversion but the child’s changing status suggests that the Sultan was less or other in his masculinity. The pronouns used for the child are the gender neutral and dehumanizing ‘it/its’. This gender indeterminacy presents both from the narrator and characters within the story. The descriptions of the child’s first appearance use it/its, narrating that when the child was born there was great distress, ‘For lim no hadde it non’ (because it had no limbs), and, ‘For it hadde noither nose no eye’ (because it had neither nose or eyes), lying dead still as a stone (Chandler 2015: 574–82). From the outset, the text denies the compulsorycisgender-assignment that occurs within White Christian patriarchies. Instead, the narration codes the child with the sexually indeterminate it/its. Later, characters affirm this pattern of identifying the child via it/its language. When the Sultan tells the mother, he also uses it/its, saying of the child, ‘Bothe lim and lith it is forlorn’, all because of her false religion (590). These pronouns are not merely neutral. Akin to ableist language for a child with disabilities, the language and descriptions deny the child the same personhood given to other children. Likewise, akin to transphobic language for intersex and transgender persons, the it/its language also marks the child as sexually transitive. Like Silence and the Sultan, this transitivity sets the child up for White Christian conversion fantasies. As the narrator in Le Roman de Silence at times affirms Silence’s masculine gender by using he/him pronouns and at other times reflects medieval compulsory-cisgenderassignment, the narrator’s use of it/its pronouns in The King of Tars plays a significant role in shaping and reshaping the audience’s shifting views of the child. The narrator and characters switch from the sexually indeterminate it/its pronouns for the child to primarily using the sexually determinate he/him pronouns only after the conversion which transforms the Sultan and his offspring’s religious, racial and sexual identities. After conversion, the child’s body takes on able-bodied norms, the child’s skin becomes white and the child’s gender becomes assigned by the pronouns he/him. Additionally,

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insofar as the disabled Muslim child with dark skin is erased to make way for the ablebodied Christian child with white skin, this is true also of the Sultan’s masculinity. All of these markers in the child engage in a transitive grammatical logic with the father, shimmering in and out of view to comment on the conversion’s morality from Muslim to Christian and the conversion therapy from Black un-man to White Christian father. Noting how the child’s skin becomes white, as does the father’s skin, Ramey writes, ‘when the child is transformed, the part that was attributable to the Black Muslim father is no longer found in the son’ (2014: 69). The series of associations divides Blackness, Islam, disability and the Sultan’s unsuccessful pre-conversion masculinity on one side and Whiteness, Christianity, able-bodiedness and the Sultan’s successful postconversion masculinity on the other side. The metaphoric associations are supposed to suggest that as a Muslim with dark skin, the Sultan was a lesser man and a failed father. Additionally, something about conversion supposedly gives the Sultan light skin and fixes him as a father, giving his child the form the Sultan was previously unable to provide. As Ramey observes, ‘in Aristotelian terms … the sultan’s paganism prevents him from occupying a paternal position’ (68–9). The child at once presents the proof of the Sultan’s heteronormative phallic ability to continue the patriarchal line and also the proof of his transitive unmanliness (68–75). The transformation of the child – literally the trans(itive) formation or formation via transversal of categories – is tied to the father’s baptism and change in skin colour but also his gender. Following the chain of metonymy, the Sultan’s child also takes on the role of embodying his shimmering manhood. Transitivity marks BIPOC and transgender persons differently, yet White supremacist Christianity marks diverse populations with transitive signifiers to reify conversion fantasies. The Sultan’s shift in gender and sexual identity is not the same shift that Silence undergoes in his conversion therapy. The Sultan is not converted from a woman into a man or like Silence from a trans man to a cis woman. Instead, the Sultan is an un-man or a non-reproductive/semi-reproductive man. This lack of successful reproduction relates the Sultan to a wide range of trans, queer, asexual or eunuch masculinities which are eschewed once the Sultan converts and can boast evidence of being a successful heterosexually reproductive man. While focusing her analysis on Silence’s instability (read: transitivity), Stock’s argument about the significance of a father’s gendering in his engendering of children also would apply to The King of Tars: ‘The moral and social worth of the progeny are also evaluated by the identity and status of the father and by how successfully he sired. The Old French verb “engendrer” denotes the biological act of begetting, but it is difficult not to see in it the male’s responsibility to determine the gender (or rather biological sex) of the begotten’ (1997: 15). Chivalric romance marks Silence and the Sultan as too transitive to properly reproduce either White Christian social norms or White Christian children. Consequently, conversion fantasies in the medieval past are as much about medieval Christianity trying to control its present populations as they are about trying to control the future (leading to our present era). As dangerous as BIPOC and transgender figures, in the White Christian imagination, is the spectral Child of transitivity.

THE CHILD OF TRANSITIVITY IN MEDIEVAL ROMANCE To conclude, this chapter looks towards Child promised and the Child denied, the the heteronormative Child and the queer expectations and the Child birthed with

the shimmering mirage of the Child: the cisgender Child and the transgender Child, Child, the Child birthed with able-bodied disability, the Child of vertical traditions

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and the Child of horizontal horizons, the Child of White supremacy and the Child of miscegenation, the BIPOC Child and the transracial Child. Indeed, this chapter returns to the words transracial and ‘transracial’ as we consider the futures and consequences of medieval romances of transitivity. One of the central criticisms of the word ‘transracial’ and narratives of transitivity is how they exploit and erase the very real experiences of transgender people and BIPOC for the purposes of White cisgender supremacy. Yet the word transracial has another connotation which is still older and still more embroiled in the project of White supremacy as it erases the pasts and futures of BIPOC children. In an article for Rewire.News, ‘Being “Transracial” Is Real – but It’s Not What Racist White People Claim It Is’ (2018), Lydia X. Z. Brown, a non-binary transgender and transracial child of Asian descent, critiques the conflation of transracial identities as well as the traditions of White supremacy that leverage transracial adoptions in ways that erase BIPOC histories and futures. Historically, Brown explains, transracial has been used for decades to describe children who are adopted by parents of a different racial identity. In particular, critical uses of the term transracial have been invoked to critique the ways White parents come to adopt and raise BIPOC children (Brown 2018). Consequently, BIPOC children are cut off from important BIPOC cultural and identarian backgrounds as they are raised within and under the norms of White culture (Brown 2018). In the language of Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, the transracial children are cut off from the vertical racial identities of their birth parents as they are brought into the histories of White families and trained to continue the cultural genealogy of White vertical identities into the future (Solomon 2012). It may only be later that these children find community through non-familial peers, establishing what Solomon calls a ‘horizontal identity’ (Solomon 2012: 1–2). Because most transgender persons and many people with disabilities are likewise born to non-transgender and non-disabled parents, Solomon includes transgender and disability within this category as well (599– 676). Consequently, transracial children such as Brown may experience many degrees of alienation within their White cisgender Christian families as they are raised with the expectations of continuing the vertical genealogy of White cisgender Christianity supremacy (Brown 2018). The alienation from the transracial child’s BIPOC roots is further complicated when the child is adopted out of non-Christian communities and raised within Christian families with the expectation of continuing the vertical identity of Christianity with their own children. While the transracial adoption of Lydia X. Z. Brown is not identical to the conversion or conversion therapy which Silence or Sultan experience, nonetheless, transracial adoption of a trans BIPOC child has similar effects of erasing non-Christian, non-White, non-trans pasts by raising them to perpetuate White cisgender Christian traditions into the future. Real life transracial children, as well as transgender and BIPOC people in general, are haunted by the Child of transitivity. Queer theory has critically interrogated the use of the Child as a figure of utopic heteronormative futurity which society must protect, resulting in the straightening of genealogies – through the rewriting or erasure of queer pasts – to guarantee the reproduction of heteronormative identity. Lee Edelman critiques modern heterosexual fixations with the safety of children and the normative family unit as expressions of concern not for actual living babies but as actions taken in the service of the fantasy of the Child, a future in which their identities will be preserved (Edelman 2004). Concurring with this general premise, another White cisgender gay scholar, Solomon, troubles the fixation with heterosexual ‘reproduction’ as a symptom of anxiety in which parents attempt to live on through their children (which he acknowledges is an

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impossibility) or at very least preserve their identity via a vertical transmission from parent to child, then from child to their children, then from those children to their children (Solomon 2012: 1–2). Each of these scholars add to the work done by Eve Sedgewick (2003) on paranoid histories, which work hard to straighten the past to provide the past and the future with a secure lineage (Sedgewick 2003). The Child’s promise of straight histories and straight futures results in the compulsion to mark the lives of those who do not fit within the prescribed vertical identities (e.g. White, cisgender, heterosexual, ablebodied Christian) as transitive in a pretense of converting and/or erasing them from the genealogy. Understanding how transitivity works as a theme in medieval literature and culture is important because it sets up the compulsion towards straight timelines and genealogies which are a generic feature of chivalric romance as well as related genres of royal annals and histories of kings. Within the context of medieval chivalric romance, the narrative supposedly unfolds in the service to the Child of the Kingdom, a literal or metaphorical heir to the nation’s dominant imagined identities, morals and supremacy (Tanner 2012: 140). Annals and histories of kings that provide lists of genealogies could suggest as much as possible (despite inevitable breaks, splits and turns) the fantasy of some level of uninterrupted purity and linearity to the lineage of national leaders. In Le Roman de Silence and King of Tars, the texts provide visions of multiple generations and conclude with the transitive identities of the children corrected to bring them back in line with the supposedly straight and horizontal genealogy of racial and cis-heterosexual descent. In Le Roman de Silence, the body of Silence is transformed to make him into the proper wife to the King and mother to the nation (Heldris 1992: 6569–706). At the same time, the law of the nation is changed with the hope that no more trans masculine children with dark skin will arise and that instead (thanks to the promise of sharing in the inheritance) more White cisgender women will be willing to perpetuate the dominant White cisgender vertical identity (6640–5). Likewise, the child born at the end of The King of Tars is the son of parents from different racial, religious and cultural backgrounds. Yet the child’s transformation along with the Sultan marks the son with a sharing of transitivity as his own religious conversion (insofar as he is now being raised as a Christian and no longer being raised as a Muslim) causes him to transverse disability and able-bodiment categories (Chandler 2015: 766–77). As a fantasy of Christian conversion and child baptism, the son becomes an emblem of the Child of Transitivity, used as a figure to convert and/or erase the pasts of transgender and BIPOC people as well as to guarantee the future without transitivity or miscegenation. On this point, Robert Sturges has insights on how even within heterosexual reproduction and futurity, miscegenation existed as a specter of the Child which crosses lines (genealogical, royal and moral) so that the imagined future may look dangerously different from the past: Robert Sturges writes:1 Sexual reproduction passes on moral as well as physiological traits. Sex is race, and race is also morality. The linkage between theories about blood on the one hand and sexuality on the other is made manifest through the policing of miscegenation or interracial desire. Concerning cisgender heterosexual reproduction between racial groups, Loomba and Burton write, ‘[A]s contact between different groups proliferated in new and often bewildering ways, so did the fear of unregulated sexuality across nations, peoples, and groups’ (Loomba and Burton 2007: 20). This fear is manifested in the discourse of monstrous birth, itself an aspect of the larger discourse of monstrosity that dominates

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much late medieval and early modern representation of the relationships among race, the body and sexuality (Figure 8.3). Although the dominant figures and images of racial difference shifted throughout the centuries, the cultural fantasy now known as the ‘Plinian races’ (after Pliny the Elder, the first-century Roman natural historian who catalogued them in his Natural History) remained influential throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period

FIGURE 8.3  John Mandeville Witnessing Monstrous Races to the East of Europe. Harley Manuscript, Harley MS 3954 (f. 42r), British Library. © The British Library Board.

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(Ramey 2008). Using markers of difference beyond merely skin colour, it imagined monstrous races such as the Blemmyes – men without heads, bearing their faces on their chests – as living on the margins of the known world. Blemmyes, for instance, were placed in the Libyan desert. These monstrous races also included such semi-human anomalies as the mouthless Astomi, the dog-headed Cynocephali, etc. (Friedman [1981] 2000: 3–25). Including forms of racial difference that included among them monsters with white skin, the concept of the Plinian races was passed on to medieval and early modern Europe in such texts as the pseudonymous Mandeville’s Travels, which originated in late fourteenthcentury France and was widely translated by 1500. Perhaps we may find its influence even in such accounts as the one mentioned above comparing the Inuk woman to an English dog, suggesting something of the monstrous hybridity of the Cynocephali. Pliny and his followers additionally catalogued alongside Blemmyes and Cynocephali such races as the Black Ethiopians (Friedman [1981] 2000: 15), suggesting that racial distinctions recognizable to modern readers might be included by European observers among these monsters. Indeed, the ascription of anomalous sexual organs and practices, for instance, to ‘the land of Negros’, as mentioned above, tends to reinforce this suggestion, and real-world racial differences could be perceived as monstrous, hence the anxieties surrounding sexual relations that crossed racial boundaries, however those boundaries were defined. What gives rise to George Best’s quasi-Biblical account of the origins of Blackness, cited above, is the need to explain the outcome of an act of miscegenation: I my selfe have seene an Ethiopian as blacke as a cole brought into England, who taking a faire English woman to wife, begat a sonne in all respects as blacke as the father was, although England were his native countrey, and an English woman his mother: whereby it seemeth this blacknes proceedeth rather of some natural infection of that man. (cited in Newman 2005: 146) A much-discussed manifestation of these anxieties is the fourteenth-century English romance The King of Tars, which was originally composed c. 1330 but continued to be copied through the end of the fourteenth century. The racial difference at issue in this text is that between Christian and Muslim: it is one of a group of romances (Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale is another) in which a White, Christian European princess is married to a Black, non-European Islamic sultan. All such romances imply concerns about racial intermarriage and sexual relations, but The King of Tars makes these anxieties explicit through the image of the monstrous result of the interracial union: the princess gives birth not to a child, but to a formless lump of flesh. As Ramey notes, ‘this formless child is an indictment of the mixed marriage’ (2008: 5). This point is reinforced when the lump of flesh is baptized and is miraculously transformed into a perfect boy. Furthermore, when the Black (‘blac and lothely’) sultan himself is baptized, he becomes all white (‘al white’) through the power of God (Chandler 2015: 922–3). Sexual relations between the races, whether defined through religion, skin colour or both, produces monsters; the non-Christian, non-European racial Other is marked by the monstrousness of the Plinian races. The cultural fantasy of race in which The King of Tars participates insists that only Christianity and Whiteness are fully human, and that this problematic of race is worked out specifically in sexual relations. Cognate to The King of Tars is Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale (c. 1387), in which the monstrous child of miscegenation is literally a fantasy; like the whole of The King of Tars.

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In this analogous fantasy, the Christian heroine Constance, defined by her Whiteness as well as her religion (Czarnowus 2009: 50–1), marries, first, a Muslim sultan who converts for her to Christianity, and then, when that marriage is subverted by her mother-in-law, the pagan king Alla of Northumbria. Here, too, she faces the machinations of an evil mother-in-law, who claims by letter, during Alla’s absence, that Constance has given birth to a monster that was so horrible no one in the castle could endure it (Chaucer 1987: 2:751–3). Although this monstrous birth is a fiction, undergirding it is the same anxiety about miscegenation manifested more directly in The King of Tars: anxiety about conversion and the purity of blood is suggested by the Muslim mother-in-law’s false conversion, and that it lingers as a source of anxiety in Alla’s own conversion is suggested precisely by the fantasy of the monstrous child. A similar anxiety appears in a third romance in this group, the anonymous late fourteenth-century Breton lay of Emaré. Here the titular heroine herself manifests a certain suspect hybridity: European and Christian by birth, she is also defined by the Islamic gown she habitually wears (a synecdoche for Emaré herself, as noted by Heng 2003: 194). Not surprisingly, she too is subjected to an evil mother-in-law’s fantasy of a monstrous child with three non-human animal heads, ‘A lyon, a dragon, and a beere’ (Mills 1992: line 539). The fictional child is a human/animal hybrid like those of the Plinian races, but the more immediate association is with Saracen/Christian racial hybridity. (For a fuller analysis of monstrous births in this group of Middle English romances, see Czarnowus 2009: 43–97; and also Metlitzky 1977: 140.) M. W. Bychowski continues: With Sturges establishing the stakes of reproductive futurities for Christian patriarchies in chivalric romance, we can turn back to the ways these themes of transitivity are used and exploited. Framing the supposed purity and straightness of White cis-heteronormative nations as at risk, the Child of miscegenation could serve as an ongoing spectre across the centuries. Ever on the horizon, the spectre of this Child seemed to be perpetually signalling from an imagined future, warning the present of what could happen if the distinct vertical identities of Whiteness, Christianity, cis-heteronormativity and patriarchal masculinity were not preserved. From the thirteenth to the fourteenth century, Silence and The King of Tars represent a century of romances that concern not only individuals but also nations. The Sultan’s conversion corresponds to the child’s and his kingdom’s conversion. This asserts a supposed correction for a whole generation of children. Existing scholarship has pointed to Silence’s transitivity as a problem for dynastic national genealogy. In ‘Lords, Wives, and Vassals in the Roman de Silence’, Heather Tanner frames the concentration on genealogy and dynastic national identity within chivalric romances and argues for the significance of Silence’s prologue before the birth of the main character, as ‘a signal to the contemporary audience that lordship will be a central theme of the story’ (Tanner 2012: 141). Consequently, the central character – the transitive knight – may be more representative of genealogical anxieties than transgender or transracial realities. In her 1994 article, Peggy McCracken clarifies the role of the trans knight in their own romance, ‘the medieval transvestite romance presents a profoundly troubling spectacle to an aristocratic society founded and maintained by dynastic marriage and succession because ambiguous gender threatens the disruption of dynastic structures – a woman dressed as a man cannot engender a child’ (McCracken 1994: 2). Almost three decades later, Jessica Barr expands on the argument that Silence’s transitive gender is marked as a crisis for national identity and genealogy, ‘the patriarchal system of the post-Conquest court’, with

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the conversion therapy likewise seen as both marking this transitivity as a disorder at the same time as correcting it (Barr 2020: 3). ‘Silence’s masculine identity is a problem to the extent that his sexual and reproductive potential is invoked in Ebain’s court’, writes Barr, ‘“Nature” is the enabling force of patrilineal reproduction … Silence, in his transgender state, cannot produce an heir, either by fathering or by mothering one, and – while it is never overtly explored – this is a problem with his masculine identity’ (11). In one form or another, each of these scholars emphasize how the romance pins an inheritance legal crisis as the cause of Silence’s transitivity, framing the political crisis’s correction to be correcting the gender; the conversion therapy that Silence undergoes corresponds to a law change which allows girl children to once again inherit. The suggested conclusion is that if future generations of girls are allowed to inherit, if money is allowed to cross genders, then the children themselves will not cross genders. The Sultan’s and Silence’s conversions represent not only individuals but the conversion of whole nations: from racialized dark skin to white skin and Whiteness, from immoral to properly Christian, from transitive to cisgender. Thus, narratives which exploit the narrative traits of BIPOC and transgender lives may yearn for that old ominous dream: a future with no more transgender or BIPOC children. A century later, the forecast of the Child of transitivity is still being preached and developed. In The King of Tars, the Sultan’s child, whose disability, race and religion shimmer between presence and absence, has his story told to the nations. The child’s disability will continue to be invoked in relation to his Muslim and multiracial origins only to cause a rejection of all non-White, non-Able-bodied, non-Christian identities. The Child of transitivity becomes a promise that the instability represented by transgender and BIPOC lives concludes with the restored fixity of White cisgender Christian identity. Such romances promise this nation a future in which the transitive threats of transgender children, non-Christian children or BIPOC children will forever be corrected, assimilated and dismissed. Centuries afterwards, the Child of transitivity keeps getting invoked and dismissed. Transgender children are called freaks, disordered or abused. Doctors and schools deny trans children the care they need to find livable lives. Thirty per cent of trans girls, 41 per cent of non-binary children and 50 per cent of trans boys will attempt suicide in their life (Scutti 2018; Toomey, Syvertsen, and Shramko 2018). We hear the number repeated: the average life expectancy of a Black trans woman is only thirty-five years (Arheghan 2018). Transracial transgender children, such as Brown, are adopted into White families and have to fight to reclaim their histories, their identities and their pasts (Brown 2018). BIPOC see women such as Dolezal and Du misrepresent and exploit their stories, while a White supremacist society denied their histories and cut short or imprisoned their futures (Branigin 2017; Yam 2017). For centuries and centuries, transgender stories, BIPOC cultures and transracial rhetoric have been misrepresented and weaponized. The weapons forged centuries ago have been used to mark, convert and erase those deemed too transitive to have a future. But the weapons of exploitation may be beaten into new tools to liberate those crushed by such anti-trans, anti-BIPOC visions of the past and by such transphobic, racist and sexist visions of the future. As trans BIPOC writers remind us, transitivity may be reclaimed as a critical mode of critiquing and breaking oppressive systems of history. Overserving the interplay of temporalities, Whitaker writes how this work, ‘necessary involve[s] temporal play: to examine the construction of something so often thought to be an exclusively modern phenomenon during its nascent stages in premodernity will

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at times feel like an anachronistic move’ (Whitaker 2019: 7). In a collaborative TSQ roundtable article with Snorton, Jack Halbertstam, Howard Chiang, Jacob Lau, Kathleen P. Long, Marcia Ochoa and me, I considered a goal set forth by Black on Both Sides: ‘holding in tension the desire (or social compulsion) to tell and hear linear narratives with the nonlinear resources given to and retained by those whose stories are being told’ (Bychowski et al. 2018: 667). Just such anachronic tools and non-linear methods of history are necessary to tell better stories and tell stories better. With these tools, this piece joins the ongoing work of liberating the past from subjugating and straightening narrative fantasies that uphold White cis patriarchies. May change break free again from conversion’s aspiration for control and constancy. And breaking free from the past’s old confines, may the children of transitivity, those transgender, transracial and BIPOC youths, build histories and futures all the more unimaginable and true.

CHAPTER NINE

Anti-Race The Need for Colour-Sightedness in Medieval and Renaissance Studies ASA SIMON MITTMAN

When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. —Revelation 8:1, NIV

INTRODUCTION: ON RACIAL SILENCE1 What does silence look like? Is it an absence, or a vibrant presence? Is it a vacuum, an emptiness, a nothingness that requires no attention? Or is a deafening, blinding, debilitating force? The Spanish Beatus Apocalypse manuscripts, celebrated for iconographical innovation, grapple with illustrating Revelation 8:1, and each finds a colourful solution: a blank, fringed yellow square (‘Beato de Silos,’ 1109, London, British Library MS Add. 11695, fol. 125v), Figure 9.1; a series of rosettes in an even grid pattern (‘Beato de El Escorial’, c. 1000, El Escorial, Biblioteca del Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo, cod. & II.5, fol. 91v); the letters of the word ‘SILENTIUM’, in two rows divided by and surrounded by dots (‘Beato de Fernando I y Sancha’, 1047, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS. Vit. 14.2, fol. 162r). These images reflect attempts to render in a single, static visual illumination the absence of an auditory phenomenon. Francisco Prado-Vilar says that the ‘monochromatic golden and reflective panel … indicates an interruption of the apocalyptic narrative, representing, in this way, an extension of time without sound, where the voices of the page are silent’ (Prado-Vilar 2013: 29).2 I begin with the remarkable images of Figures 9.1 and 9.2 because they remind us that silence is a powerful rhetorical strategy. Remaining silent, suggesting silence and enforcing silence are modes of argumentation and expressions of power. As Audre Lorde reminds us, silence does not protect the vulnerable (Lorde 1978a, b). It protects those already in power, as silence is a vital pillar of the strategy of the preservation of current hierarchies. To challenge the status quo of our fields – medieval and early modern studies – and of our cultures more widely, we must resist silence. Those of us with the most power to speak, that is, tenured faculty with regular classes, speaking opportunities, access to publishing venues and the like, bear the greatest onus to do so. My subject in this chapter is ‘anti-race’ ideology, often referred to by the ableist term ‘colour-blindness’. Though ‘colour-blind’ is more common, I will use ‘anti-race’

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FIGURE 9.1  Beato de Silos, ‘Silence’, Spain, 1109. London, British Library MS Add. 11695, fol. 125v. Courtesy of the British Library Board.

throughout to describe the notion that focusing on race, talking, teaching and writing about race, is a key source of or even, perhaps, the only ‘real’ racism. Yes, ‘race’ is not a biological fact – in anti-racist historian Ibram X. Kendi’s straightforward formulation, ‘there are no genetic racial differences’ (2019: 9) – but it is nonetheless a massively powerful phenomenon, and has been for two thousand years, and more (Whitaker 2019: 1). ‘Race’, in the formulation of Geraldine Heng, instigator of much of the current Global Middles Ages work, ‘is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content’ (Heng 2018b: 27; emphasis in the original). As such, as Dorothy Kim – scholar of pre-modern race, gender and

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FIGURE 9.2  Morgan Beatus, ‘Silence’, Spain, perhaps in Tábara, c. 940–5. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS. M. 644, fol. 133r. © The Pierpont Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

sexuality – explicates, race is sociocultural and biopolitical (Kim 2019: 4–8). Language is not a biological fact, nor are religion, nationality, class, education, political allegiances, economic systems, state alliances, sports team fandom or any other tribes into which we continually sort ourselves, and in which we imprison others (Chakrabarty 2008: ix). Not speaking of them will not cause them to vanish. In Kendi’s words, ‘Denial is the heartbeat of racism … and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it – and then dismantle it’ (Kendi 2019: 9; and Kendi 2018). As legal scholar and advocate of critical race theory (CRT) David Theo Goldberg argues, much work that frames itself as anti-racism is really just anti-race work. He asks: What is refused in this collapse, what buried, what buried alive? What residue of racist arrangement and subordination – social, economic, cultural, psychological, legal, and political – linger unaddressed and repressed in singularly stressing racial demise? (Goldberg 2009: 1) A bit later in his text, Goldberg puts a fine point on it: ‘Antiracism requires historical memory’ (Goldberg 2009: 21). Our fields have been largely silent on race since their

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inceptions, and mostly carry on in this vein, and as should be abundantly clear, racial thinking – and racism – carry on in the silences. These create phantoms and specters that haunt our work and teaching. Like the Beatus manuscripts’ vibrant rectangles of silence, like the yellow panel that conceals behind its ‘golden and reflective’ face the gaping horror of the apocalypse, the silence that anti-race advocates seek hides the all-pervasive systems that comprise race. As Mathias Möschel argues: A critical theoretical analysis of White race-consciousness would also help uncover how the ideology of colourblindness operates and perpetuates the system of White dominance. In fact, colourblindness acts to curtail race-conscious efforts addressing race discrimination, while at the same time denying the existence of structural racial subordination … colourblindness undermines any serious and substantive effort at changing the status quo. (Möschel 2014: 60) So long as we live within these systems – and we all do, some benefitting and others suffering – the effects of race will continue to exist (Whitaker 2019: 11). Goldberg asks of anti-race work, ‘what is curtailed, simplified, effected, forgotten, denied? In short, how is the bearing of racist weight shifted in the name of its shedding?’ (Goldberg 2009: 19). There is a mountain, a mountain range, a constantly growing, pullulating, planetary mass of evidence that we live, move (Britton and Goldsmith 2013), learn (Kenty-Drane 2004; Lawrence and Mollborn 2017), work, play, drive, read (Kenneavy 2006), watch, listen, eat, drink (Duncan, Strycker and Duncan 2012), rear children (Kruse et al. 2006), interact with technology (Smith 2017) and in all other ways exist in a race-based world. In essence, those who argue for anti-race positions are, in Kendi’s nomenclature, assimilationists who, in their ‘glorious struggle against racial discrimination’, hide ‘their inglorious partial blaming of inferior Black behavior for racial disparities’ (Kendi 2016: 3). Paul Gilroy, for example, in his Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (2000), first suggests that ‘the old, modern idea of “race” can have no ethically defensible place’, thereby establishing his anti-racist goals, but then proceeds to argue that if we were to eliminate discussions of race, we would thereby eliminate ‘subordination along racial lines’ (Gilroy 2000: 6, 13). In feminist/queer/critical race theorist Priya Kandaswamy’s words, this approach ‘protects racism by making it invisible’ (2007: 6–11, 7). The half-hour’s silence at the opening of the seventh seal does nothing to forestall the doom that follows; putting a moratorium on discussions of race will do nothing to dismantle the systemic structures of racism that pervade European and North American cultures. Where race has been discussed in pre-modern studies, it has drawn on two separate ‘genealogies’, defined by literary scholar Margo Hendricks and Dorothy Kim as ‘premodern race studies’ and ‘premodern critical race studies’ (Hendricks n.d.; emphasis added; Kim 2019: 2–5). The former, often relying on etymology, prefers ‘ethnicity’ to ‘race’ while ‘neither cit[ing] nor be[ing] involved in addressing the critical scholarship on race and ethnicity for the last 60 years in the social sciences’ (Kim 2019: 4; Kim 2021). The latter relies upon active engagement with CRT – and ‘celebrates that lineage’ through citational practices (Hendricks n.d.; Kim 2019: 3). That is, even when pre-modernist are, in theory, discussing race, even in volumes and journal issues explicitly dedicated to the subject, they

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are often doing so without the scholarly apparatus developed for this discussion, a body of work, it bears mention, pioneered and advanced largely by scholars of colour, and doing so relying on rhetoric that is embedded in a problematic assimilationist ideology out of step with current CRT (Kim 2021; Kendi 2016: passim). I see this chapter as something of a coda to what has come before, a final statement that is made implicitly and explicitly on every page here: that, because racism is pervasive and powerful, we must talk about race, and that, because we can trace racial (and therefore racist) thinking back at least as far as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and because these periods are the subject of considerable modern fantasy, we must talk about race in medieval and early modern studies. ‘Antirace’ arguments are, in effect, ‘burying the physical and epistemic violence done by racialisation and racism’ (kennedy-macfoy and Lewis 2014: 3–8, 7). In her survey of anti-racist pedagogies, ethnic studies scholar Kyoko Kishimoto reminds faculty to consider ‘the role of their discipline in perpetuating academic racism’, a charge than must be laid at the feet of medieval and early modern studies (2018: 543). As Cord J. Whitaker remarks, we have a particular need to do so because of the way that ‘the European Middle Ages’ is seen by modern White supremacists as ‘a golden age of white racial homogeny’ (2019: 3). Of course, ‘race’, as a cultural artefact, is not a constant. Geraldine Heng’s landmark study, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, is divided into chapters on ‘religious race, colonial race, cartographic race, and epidermal race’ (2018b: 6) and Whitaker adds ‘spiritual race’ to this quartet (2019: 74). These structures of oppression are justified here by God and there by science, used yesterday to enslave, today to exploit and tomorrow, well, surely it will be used tomorrow, certainly if we in our teaching and our research and our politics remain silent. As Goldberg argues: Race refuses to remain silent because it isn’t just a word … it is a way (or really ways) of thinking, a way(s) of living, a disposition. It is … a passion released or charged (up) and put into gear by events, concerns, troubles … both prompt and product of social tensions and catastrophes. (2009: 156) The opaque silence of the yellow panel, Prado-Vilar argues, reflects ‘a spiritual goal’ (2013: 36). The silence on race in our fields, in contrast, reflects fear of change and desire for the maintenance of a deeply problematic status quo. Since race refuses to be silent, we should refuse to be silent about it. And, as Lorde writes, ‘there are so many silences to be broken’ (Lorde 1978b: 15; see also Kendi 2019: 114).

RACE IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE: ON RACIAL MARGINALIZATION Few studies in medieval and Renaissance cartography focus on race, in part owing to the genealogical issues discussed above, and in part owing to the racist origins and practices of the discipline of art history that normalizes seeing Whiteness as both default norm an universal ideal. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the founder who gave the discipline its name, declared in History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), ‘A beautiful body will be all the more beautiful the whiter it is’ (2006: 192–5), and this ideology remains largely unexamined in the field. Kim discusses the lack of work on the term ‘race’ in medieval

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history (Kim 2021). The same could be said of medieval art history, with a few exceptions (e.g. Friedman 1981; Strickland 2003, 2012; Bettancourt 2020). As Kim puts it: Medieval history’s uncritical definition of race … has stopped medieval studies from having a sustained, well-informed discussion … Thus, medieval history has upheld a white supremacist historical methodology in discussing race and ethnicity. (Kim 2021: 1; see also Wekker 2016) I have been working on medieval images of racialized others on maps, though not always explicitly in those terms, for twenty years (Mittman 2006, 2015a, 2015b). In early modern cartography, the leading scholar dealing with such issues is Surekha Davies, whose masterful Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (2016) has cleared the field. As she writes, ‘maps were key artefacts in the fluctuating shape of the human in the European imaginary in an era of transformative, often catastrophic, cultural contacts’ (Davies 2016: 2). In scholarship on medieval maps, the fascinating clusters of so-called ‘monstrous’ peoples (the dramatically different firebreathing, dog-headed Cynocephali and headless Blemmyes, but also the less dramatically divergent people who speak with gestures, people who drink through straws, people who are immune to snake venom, cannibals and on) in southern Africa on several of the maps – most prominently the Hereford, Psalter and lost Ebstorf maps – have received some attention. Their earliest known cartographic appearance is on the small Psalter map (London, British Library, MS Add. 28681, fol. 9r, c. 1262; British Library n.d.), just a few inches in diameter and oriented to the east, where these fantasized races are locked into a series of tight boxes at the right edge of the map (Figure 9.3) (Van Duzer 2019: 179, 186– 7). These beings have often been called ‘monstrous races’, though a few years ago I wrote an article objecting to this terminology as encouraging modes of thought whereby race (a property only assigned to the non-normative marked) is construed as monstrous or, as medieval art historian Debra Strickland puts it, ‘apportioning the world’s monsters into discrete races … invites contemplation of race as monstrosity’ (Mittman 2015a; emphasis in the original; Strickland 2012: 367). In discussion of the ‘monstrous races’, the race that is really being constructed, though only implicitly, is the unnamed, purportedly nonmonstrous race, which is to say, European Christian Whiteness. In this project, I fell into what Hendricks refers to as ‘the trap of trying to pinpoint the “actual first use of race” as a definitional or critical device’ (n.d.). I would now revise the argument (itself a revision of an argument I made in 2006) by still avoiding the term ‘monstrous races’ but retaining ‘race’ for other contexts, and in larger discussions of these very beings. That the wondrous beings of Africa on the Psalter map are painted absolutely white has gone without comment (Figure 9.4). By presenting these othered beings as purely white, as the same shade of white used for the figure of Christ above the world (likely painted in white lead, ironically, ‘the lowest status metal’; Bucklow 2009: 129), as whiter even than the censing angels that flank him, who are largely left the unpainted colour of the velum support, their function as racialized Africans is obscured. The tiny figures are not treated by the preponderance of scholars who have studied them as if they are really intended as images of Africans, though of course, that is exactly what these inhuman cannibals and animalistic hybrids and headless horrors – naked and therefore apparently cultureless, though still armed with weapons and therefore dangerous – are intended to present. Such care was expended on these minuscule, delicate figures. Their variety and intricacy are diverting. Inculcated into an ‘ocularcentric fixation’ (Kim 2019: 4), that sees

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FIGURE 9.3  The Psalter map, England, c. 1262. London, British Library, MS Add. 28681, fol. 9r. Courtesy of the British Library Board.

race as first and foremost colour, as ‘epidermal race’ (Heng 2018b: 6, 181–256), trained to ‘grant skin color pride of place above all other differentiating factors’ (Whitaker 2019: 76), modern viewers tend to gloss over the African-ness of these beings. Indeed, Ladislas Bunger’s introduction to the landmark series The Image of the Black in Western Art expliticly argues the colourist position: ‘[t]he element of color has always been used as the principle sign of differentiation’ (Vercoutter et al. 1976: 16). These Psalter map figures nonetheless present a collective mass of African monstrosity, jammed between the Nile and the Ocean, contained within their little boxes. And all of them are white. Almost no attention has been paid to the curious presentation of the winds around the map’s circumference, the place where race has been banished. Whiteness is elevated, literally, in the person of Christ on the maps on both sides of this folio (London, British

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FIGURE 9.4  Detail of Monstrous Peoples, the Psalter map, England, c. 1262. London, British Library, MS Add. 28681, fol. 9r. Courtesy of the British Library Board.

Library, MS Add. 28681, fol. 9v), while blackness, or any other human tonal variety, is erased from the face of the earth (Figure 9.5). Indeed, even ruddy tones are evacuated from the ecumene – the inhabitable world. But both blackness (of a sort) and a ruddy beige tone are present in the image: they are both used for the anthropomorphic winds that surround the world (Figure 9.6). The four winds blowing from the cardinal directions are presented as white, though not white-white, not lead white; the eight lesser winds filling the spaces between them are presented in the curious blue-black colour commonly used in medieval imagery to denote African and Muslim figures (called ‘Ethiopians’ and ‘Saracens’, respectively, in the Middle Ages. The former is a racist term applied to any

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FIGURE 9.5  The Psalter list map, England, c. 1262. London, British Library, MS Add. 28681, fol. 9v. Courtesy of the British Library Board.

Black African peoples and rooted in the Greek αἴ θειν + ὄψ [aithon + óps], literally meaning ‘burned-faced people’; the latter racist term is a ‘lie … that brilliantly names the enemy as liars in the very act of naming them as enemies’; Heng 2018b: 110–12, 138). The lie is the claim that ‘Arabs took for themselves the name of Saracens to falsely claim a genealogy from Sara, the legitimate wife of Abraham’, rather than Hagar (112). As feminist literary historian Shokoofeh Rajabzadez argues: The label is a racist reference to Muslims, and it is Islamophobia at work in its most genius and powerful form. Every time the label is pronounced, Muslims are presumed guilty of fabricated genealogy, of co-opting Christian history, of misrepresenting themselves and their faith, of manipulating those around them. (2019: 3; regarding connections Christians formed between ‘Saracens’ and Cynocephali, see Strickland 2012: 37)

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FIGURE 9.6  Detail of Racialized Winds, the Psalter map, England, c. 1262. London, British Library, MS Add. 28681, fol. 9r. British Library. © The British Library Board.

The blue-black used for the racialized winds on the Psalter map is the same colour assigned to four ‘Sarzin’ Blemmyes in the Cursor Mundi (c. 1325): ‘Blac and bla als led thai war … O thair blac heu it was selcuth [marvelous]’ (Morris 1875: 8072–3; glossing from Hahn 2001: 14; see also Heng 2011a; Mittman 2015b). Lest the ‘selcuth’ nature of this colour perhaps be seen as an indication that it is being described as a positive quality, the text lets us know that ‘sagh man never forwit that hore, / Sua fraward scapen [horribly shaped] creature’ (Morris 1875: 8074–5; glossing from Hahn 2001: 14). A Middle English manuscript of The Book of John Mandeville contains an illumination of a group of such figures (Figure 9.7). Chet Van Duzer provides textual sources for the black winds that occasionally appear at the edges of Renaissance maps. These include passages like that from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (lines 264–5), describing ‘Notus … terribilem picea tectus caligine

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FIGURE 9.7  Giants and Blemmyes, The Book of John Mandeville, England, c. 1430. London, British Library, MS Harley 3954, fol. 42r. © The British Library Board.

vultum’ [the south wind … his terrible face shrouded in pitch-black darkness] (Van Duzer 2008: 200). It is not entirely clear what these passages imply, since wind is colourless, so ‘blackness’ here must bear a different valence, and, given the surrounding adjectives, seems to refer to some sort of malignancy. Van Duzer notes that he has ‘not managed to find any passage in medieval literature where a wind is described as black’ (200) though as Madeline Caviness argues in her groundbreaking study of whiteness in medieval art, ‘visual models do ideological work more powerfully than texts’ (2008: 1). So, both the reference to black skin in the Cursor Mundi and to black winds in the classical texts that may have inspired the faces on the Psalter map are in immediate

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proximity to language intended to control the reader’s response: this blackness is supposed to be viewed as horrible and terrible. On the Psalter map, it is not only blackness that is banished to the world’s edge, but human variety and physicality, itself. In the world constructed by this manuscript, even supposedly racial difference is constructed in terms of whiteness, and any other potential racing, especially the racing of Europeans as people of colour, is forced out of the ecumene itself. This map was likely made for a royal patron c. 1262, and expresses the twinned security and anxiety of that position. The map was made in the wake of the loss of the Crusader Kingdom and sack of Jerusalem by the Khorezmians. This historical moment influenced the design of several medieval English maps, most notably those of Matthew Paris (Mittman 2013, 2017). The loss of the kingdom was a substantial failure, the end of the only success that the crusaders had achieved in well over a century. On the Psalter map, this loss is encoded in a few ways: the obsessive centrality of Jerusalem (and concomitant marginality of Britain, small, deemphasized and only marked with three inscriptions); the aggressive absence of indicators of any Islamic presence anywhere on the surface of the earth; and, perhaps most powerfully, the dislocation of the blue-black Muslim figures to the map’s periphery, beyond and outside of what Matthew Paris called, ‘the body of the earth’ (corpus … terrae) (Van Duzer 2019: 190). The only other figures presented within the world are Adam and Eve, in the circle of Eden at the apex of the ecumene (Figure 9.8). The first couple, progenitors of humanity, like the monstrous peoples to the right, and like Christ above, are straight White. In an unusual move, the negative space of the Garden is filled in with black paint, so that the whiteness of the figures positioned as humanity’s origins is emphasized. Whitaker draws attention to a passage from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde that reads: By his contrarie is every thing declared … Eek whyt by blak, by shame eek worthinesse, Ech set by other, more for other semeth. (Everything is understood by what is contrary to it … Also, white by black, shame by worthiness. Each set by the other seems more itself for that other.) (discussed by Whitaker 2019: 87; passage, quoting lines 637–44, here from Skeat 1900; Chaucer 2008: 14; my translation) It is not only the rivers of paradise that flow out from Eden, but the Whiteness of the primordial pair, in open and hostile defiance of the ruddy, cheerful face that blows its coloured wind down against the wall that shelters them. Indeed, at least since Augustine’s City of God, it was a ‘fundamental Christian tenet that all races descended from the same parents – Adam and Eve … [T]here can only be one human race to which even the monstrous races, if indeed they exist, must belong’ (Strickland 2012: 385; emphasis in the original). Perhaps this is behind the decision to paint the tiny beings, the Cynocephalus, Sciapod, Ethyopes and all the rest, in Caviness’s sly phrasing, ‘as, should we say pure white?’ (2008: 13). In essence, the Psalter Map frames the dog-headed cannibals and headless Blemmyes of fantasy as more human – their linage of descent from Adam and Eve clear in their Whiteness – than the North African and Middle Eastern groups with whom European Christians were in frequent contact, othered by their epidermal racialization. The tiny circle containing Eden, then, is a microcosm of the Psalter map’s construction of the round world as a space of whiteness, but it is one ringed with the perceived threat of

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FIGURE 9.8  Detail of Eden, the Psalter map, England, c. 1262. London, British Library, MS Add. 28681, fol. 9r. © The British Library Board.

race encroaching on all sides. This makes more complex the apparent dichotomy between Whiteness and Blackness, which in the Middle Ages often amounts to good and bad, as well as ‘pagan’ and Christian. Strickland points to the famous dichotomy-enforcing line from the Song of Roland, ‘Pagans are wrong and Christians are right’ in her paraphrase: ‘in visual terms, pagans are black and Christians are white’ (Strickland 2012: 383). This apparent dichotomy, though, is often undercut in medieval texts and images (Whitaker 2019: 82); on the Psalter map, it is certainly more complicated. The key, though, is that in both cases – white monsters within the earth, Black people outside it – it is not only other races that are being constructed here, as is ubiquitous in pre-modern art, literature, cartography and on, but – always unspoken – also whiteness, and it is whiteness that is allowed to continue to operate in the shadows, in the ‘umbra’ of European colonialism and racial thinking (Heng 2018b: 42–4). To not talk about race, as anti-race advocates would have it, is to abandon the field, as the Psalter map grants the entire earth, to a Whiteness that stands unquestioned at the heart of Christian European thought. Isaac Newton, in his Opticks (published in 1704, when he was president of the Royal Society) constructed a colour wheel that presents a centre containing ‘white of

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the first order’. The rest of the colours are categorized based on their ‘distance from Whiteness’ (Taylor 2005: 296–300). Kendi explores the role that Robert Boyle’s Of the Nature of Whiteness and Blackness (1664), which characterizes black skin as ‘ugly’, played in inspiring not only Newton but also John Locke, Cotton Mather and other racist theorists of the period (Kendi 2016: 44–57). As Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, ‘the so-called universal ideas that European thinkers produced in the period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and that have since influenced projects of modernity and modernization all over the world, could never be completely universal and pure concepts’ (2008: xiii, 3–5). Since critical thought always ‘remains related to places’, it will bear the prejudices of those places (xiii, xvi). Newton’s work brings us full circle, back to England and back to the Psalter map, where the black faces of the winds are pressed to the outside, where they have been marooned3 for more than seven hundred years, looking in at a world from which they have been purposefully excluded. The world created on the Psalter map, then, is integral to the larger, multi-century construction of race that would take its most extreme form in the institution of transatlantic chattel slavery. As medieval literary historians Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Karl Steel write, ‘across time … [r]ace matters differently, and yet with a recurring sameness’ (2015: 99).

RACE IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES: ON RACIAL INNOCENCE Race is marginalized in medieval and Renaissance studies, as it is on the Psalter map, made to exist in isolated spheres on the fringe, looking in anxiously from the margins like the puffy-cheeked winds, but increasingly they blow their message across the surface of the field. We have all heard the excuses: Race isn’t my area. There wasn’t really ‘race’ in my period. Et certera. Ijeoma Oluo – writer on race, gender and social justice – quotes a friend as saying, ‘I mean, I just feel like we would have gotten further if we’d focused more on class than race’ (Oluo 2018: 9). These excuses are surely familiar to many of us, but are insufficient. Oluo addresses some head on, including the well-meaning, ‘compassionate narrative’ about class, which, she writes, is ‘a narrative that hurts me, and so many other people of color’ (10–11). The discourse of intersectionality should remind us that class (and gender and sexuality and on) cannot be disentangled from race (21). For those working in medieval studies, there is a particular strain of thought that holds that the period was ‘preracial’ – disconnected from ‘chattel slavery, colonialism, and thus the formation of the term “race” and general ideas of global oppression’ (Kim 2021: 2) – and therefore that problems of race are, in essence, someone else’s problem to worry about, an approach that prevents good, intersectional work on the period and therefore a complete understanding of the transhistorical problem of racism. If we were not trained in graduate school in anti-racism and the history of race and then do not teach our students how to deal with these subjects, they too will not be trained in anti-racism and therefore will be unable to teach it to their students, in an infinitely recursive pattern that prevents any change. This is precisely what will ensure the maintenance of the (racist) status quo; if change is what we want, we must bring it about. Intersectional theorist Sara Ahmed, in her thoughtful study of institutional ‘diversity’ work, paraphrases a defeatist claim made by a dean in a meeting on equality: ‘race is too difficult to deal with’. As she counters, ‘Saying that race is “too difficult” is how racism gets reproduced’ (Ahmed 2012: 3–4). We need great numbers (relative to the

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size of the field) to work with discipline to change our disciplines. We constantly argue to our administrators, in an effort to justify funding our departments, that even if our immediate subjects are not of interest in their neoliberal educational models, what we really do is teach students how to think, how to write and how to conduct thorough, meaningful research on any topic. We all have the capacity to find and understand the resources we need (e.g. UVa Graduate Student Coalition for Liberation 2017; Hsy and Orlemanski 2018; Robinson 2018; Sturtevant n.d.; Medievalists of Color n.d.). These are, like all scholarship, imperfect and need to be approached with a critical eye. Sierra Lomuto, for example, critiques The Public Medievalist’s series on ‘Race, Racism and the Middle Ages’ (Sturtevant n.d.) for its ‘protection of white innocence rather than … antiracist intervention’, its framing of ‘the racist appropriation of the medieval as an external problem out there that threatens an innocent love for the medieval past’ (Lomuto 2019). Hendricks more generally criticizes ‘the practice of approaching race studies as if “you’ve just discovered the land”’, and the failure to document its ‘genealogies’ and ‘lineage’ through citation (Hendricks n.d.). However, these issues should not prevent us from taking what we can from these resources. In her autobiography, Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor, Patricia J. Williams writes: I think that the hard work of a nonracist sensibility is the boundary crossing, from safe circle into wilderness: the testing of boundary, the consecration of sacrilege. It is the willingness to spoil a good party and break an encompassing circle. (Williams 1992: 129) We need to spoil the good party, if that’s what this silence is, and break the boundary that keeps discussions of race outside the ecumene of our fields.

‘TO CELEBRATE THESE UNKNOWN OUTSIDERS’: ON RACIAL REVELATION From January through June of 2019, there were, in the corridors that connect Hereford Cathedral to its famous chain library and to the room that houses its extraordinary world map, a series of large, boldly coloured textiles by Yinka Shonibare. The Cathedral commissioned this series of works, ‘Creatures of the Mappa Mundi’, inspired by the Hereford map in conjunction with Meadow Arts, an English arts organization that strives to fund ‘unique contemporary art projects in unusual places’ (Meadow Arts n.d.) (Figure 9.9). Shonibare, a highly celebrated British-Nigerian artist, refers to himself as a ‘“postcolonial” hybrid’ so his interest in the colonial hybrids of medieval cartography is fitting (Shonibare 2019). The large Hereford map is home to a series of marginalized, racialized and monsterized people more extensive than that on the small Psalter map. In Shinobare’s series, we find the map’s Sciapod, bird-people Ciccone Gentes and Cynocephali, among others. The Cynocephali on the Hereford map (labelled gigantes) are presented as a pair, reaching out to one another (Figure 9.10). They are presented just outside of the Garden of Eden, as part of what I have elsewhere described as a three-part series (Mittman 2006: 46–50). Adam and Eve are in the Garden, plucking the fruit from the mouth of the serpent,

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FIGURE 9.9  The Hereford World Map, Hereford Cathedral, England, c. 1305. © The Dean and Chapter of Hereford and the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust.

who hangs from the Tree; Adam and Eve are expelled, and tearfully turn back to look at the angel who chases them away with his burning sword; the Cynocephali reach out to one another, raising their hands in apparent gestures of despair as they seem to howl at the sky. The dog-headed person on the right is clearly sexed as male. The sex of the one on the left is unclear. I have long thought of these as a sort of transformed primordial couple, barking their misery at their state of separation from God. Alternatively, bearing in mind the Augustinian claims cited above that all humans descend from the first couple, though, perhaps these are some of their progeny. Unlike the monstrous peoples of the

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FIGURE 9.10  Eden, Adam and Eve, and the Cynocephali, the Hereford World Map, Hereford Cathedral, England, c. 1305. © The Dean and Chapter of Hereford and the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust.

Psalter map (see Figures 9.3 and 9.4), none of the monstrous figures on the Hereford map are painted in, so none are white-white, but then, neither are Adam and Eve, nor Christ and his heavenly host in the Last Judgement scene above (Figures 9.11 and 9.12). They are only coloured by the unpainted calfskin on which they are drawn. Shonibare’s Cynocephali exist in a far more colourful world. They are presented against a backdrop of blazing fabrics, with a green sky and multicoloured and patterned hills (Figure 9.13). The Cynocephali, themselves, though, are jet-black, as are all the ‘creatures’ of Shonibare’s series. He has left many of the threads of his textile dangling untrimmed, giving something of an impression that we are looking at the back of the wall hangings, at some sort of usually hidden backstory. Long threads hang down from the Cynocephali’s eyes, as if they, like the map’s figures of Adam and Eve, are weeping as they cry out. Shonibare depicts these racialized beings – often in the Middle Ages associated with racialized Muslims – and all the rest of his figures as Black. He states that this work was ‘[i]nspired by the ability of the Mappa Mundi to still be reflecting our contemporary concerns of fear of the stranger or “other” which often leads to xenophobia’ (Shonibare 2019: n.p.). Shonibare is, in essence, providing an artistic response to the injunction of

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FIGURE 9.11  Detail of Monstrous Peoples, the Hereford World Map, Hereford Cathedral, England, c. 1305. © The Dean and Chapter of Hereford and the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust.

Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark that, ‘[t]he contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination’ (1993: 5). The seminal 1976 multivolume study of images of Black people in art history, The Image of the Black in Western Art, maintains a position antithetical to Morrison’s, claiming (against its own evidence of thousands of images) that ‘[w]hen an evaluation of the place of the black in Occidental art in general is undertaken, one is forced to conclude that his role is marginal’ (Vercoutter

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FIGURE 9.12  Detail of Last Judgement, the Hereford World Map, Hereford Cathedral, England, c. 1305. © The Dean and Chapter of Hereford and the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust.

et al. 1976: viii). Indeed, the series opens with a note stating, ‘Obviously, these volumes do not constitute, nor can they, an anti-racist manifesto’, and Bunger’s introduction directly ‘pose[s] as a premise that the black is other’ (19; original emphasis), though a new revised and expanded edition of the series was issued from 2010 to 2014, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr, with a new introduction by Jeremy Tanner that sets the collection in the context of the substantial changes to the field over the past forty years. As Shonibare’s work answers Morrison’s call, so too, it refutes The Image of the Black’s deeply problematic ideological stance. In rendering these ‘extinct creatures of legend’ (Shonibare 2019) as black, Shonibare restores or reveals the racialization foisted on them from the start, obscured by their whiteness on the Psalter map and by their calfskin bodies on the Hereford map, but more fundamentally by our internal strategies of avoidance.

CONCLUSION: ON ANTI-ANTI-RACE AS RACIAL ACTIVISM Anti-race sounds so much like anti-racist – the two concepts are separated by only a few letters! – but is, in fact, its opposite, indeed, its active opponent. Anti-race has become among the most potent arrows in the quiver of the racist status quo, halting necessary conversations and doing so while actively claiming to support progress towards racial

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FIGURE 9.13  Yinka Shonibare, ‘Creatures of the Mappa Mundi – Gigantes’, 2018. © The artist. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Commission by Meadow Arts, 2019. Courtesy of Mark Blower.

equality. Anti-race approaches, including the post-racialism critiqued by Sumi Cho, a legal scholar of feminist critical race theory, hold that: race does not matter, and should not be taken into account or even noticed. Thus, one who points out racial inequities risks being characterized as an obsessed-with-race racist who is unfairly and divisively ‘playing the race card’ – one who occupies the same moral category as someone who consciously perpetrates racial inequities. (Cho 2009: 1589)

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And yet, ‘if we stop using racial categories, then we will not be able to identify racial inequity. If we cannot identify racial inequity, then we will not be able to identify racist policies’ (Kendi 2019: 54). The Equality Institute has produced a diagram they label The Pyramid of White Supremacy (Figure 9.14), itself based on a similar diagram used in a course at Salisbury University (Maryland) that received much condemnation from conservative media outlets (e.g. Dillon 2018). As The Equality Institute writes, ‘White supremacy starts with indifference, and builds upon that with racism, discrimination and violence, slowly normalising these behaviours and systems. We need to work together to dismantle this system’ (2018). The pyramid contains seven tiers, with the topmost being ‘Mass murder’. It should be clear that we do not wish to be anywhere on a pyramid that culminates with genocide. The concerns I have been attempting to explore here would all fall in the lower tiers, of course, with ‘post-racism’ (in essence, the handmaiden of anti-race) under the second tier, ‘Minimisation’. The diagram locates ‘Euro-centric curriculum’, where anti-race intersects with academia, one tier higher, under ‘Veiled

FIGURE 9.14  The Pyramid of White Supremacy, Equality Institute (8 September 2018), https:// www.instagram.com/p/BnfCDt_AxdU/. © EQI.

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racism’. Kendi charts his own journey from academic to activist through his realization that he ‘became a college professor to educate away racist ideas, seeing ignorance as the source of racist ideas’, but eventually concluding that ‘the source of racist ideas was not ignorance and hate, but self-interest’ (2019: 230). It is well beyond time for us to see our complicity in these structures and to actively work to challenge them. We can be timorous about bringing some of our politics directly into the classroom, and some may have very good reason for concern, but it is worth remembering, as education scholar Stine H. Bang Svendsen writes, that ‘racism is enacted in the classroom partly as an effect of the denial of “race” as an current effect of racism’ (2014: 9). I would suggest five potential remedies for the concerns some faculty feel about bringing these issues into their classrooms: 1. Read up on the literature of anti-racist pedagogy. Kishimoto provides a helpful introduction and encapsulation of prior work. As she states, ‘Anti-racist pedagogy is not about simply incorporating racial content into courses, curriculum, and discipline. It is also about how one teaches, even in courses where race is not the subject matter’ (2018: 540). Kishimoto provides an excellent, detailed series of strategies for how faculty of any identities, in any field, can take up this work. 2. Read your university’s statements on diversity, its diversity action plan, the mission statement of its Office of Diversity and Inclusion. Such statements and offices are ubiquitous in higher education. Our Diversity Action Plan, for example, lists as a strategic priority that we ‘[e]nsure that all curricular and co-curricular programs foster diversity competencies and engagement’ (Diversity Scorecard Committee 2010). 3. If your school does not have such statements and offices, it is high time to rally the supporters, faculty senate, senior administrators, student groups and anyone else who will listen, and get these things on the books. If this does not prove effective, I suggest (with apologies) that you take on the administrative roles that are empowered to adopt rhetoric and policy. Start at the department or programme level, if that is more achievable at the outset. Of course, systemic racism and sexism are likely to be barriers to faculty of colour and women here. A decade ago, full-time college professors were still 84 per cent White (Chronicle of Higher Education 2009). This is far from atypical in the United States. As DiAngelo lists: ‘US Congress: 90 percent white, US governors: 96 percent white’ to ‘People who decide which music is produced: 95 percent white’ and ‘Owners of men’s professional football teams: 97 percent white’ (2018: 94–5). A Chronicle of Higher Education report from 2016 suggests that this has fallen to about 75 per cent. These numbers are likely even more stark in medieval and early modern studies, which means that the preponderance of this work must be done by White academics (Myers 2016). It is also incumbent upon White faculty to do this work because it is Whites who have been both the generators and the beneficiaries of racist policy. This places an obligation on White (and male) academics to use these positions, if they hold them, to actively advance an anti-racist agenda – towards which such statements are only the most minimal contribution, but still an important one. 4. Take your institution’s statements at their word, regardless of whether or not you believe them to have been written in sincerity, even if you have reason to believe that they are in ‘the “lip service” model of diversity’ (Ahmed 2012: 58). Once there, these documents exist as points of reference. ‘Why are you bringing all of this into a class on [fill in here]?’ ‘Because the President’s Commission on Equality lists such engagements as among the campus’s Best Practices.’ Or, ‘because issues of diversity and inclusion

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are part of the university’s stated mission, as laid out in our University Values statement’. (For example, my university’s ‘Our Values’ statement includes the assertion: ‘We hold dear the values of multicultural respect, awareness, and understanding and we pursue diversity not just as an idea to embrace, but as a community to form’; California State University, Chico n.d.) However, as Ahmed rightly notes, often ‘it is as if having a policy becomes a substitute for action’, and that ‘if diversity work becomes paper work, then practitioners can end up feeling as if it is “all a paper exercise”’ (2012: 11, 87). It is therefore incumbent on us to strive to turn policy into action, and teaching is a key way for teachers to do so. 5. Speak to your university’s legal counsel. Ask them for a clear statement about academic freedom and what some might frame as ‘bringing personal politics into the classroom’ (as if there are types of teaching that are not political). What are you allowed to discuss? If you have a supportive office, great. If not, bring the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) ‘Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom’ with you (and be sure to consult footnote 4, added in 1970: ‘Controversy is at the heart of the free academic inquiry which the entire statement is designed to foster’) (AAUP 1940). And, if needed (again, I apologize), become the administrator who will have the authority to influence these decisions. As Kishimoto wisely asserts: Anti-racist pedagogy is not a ready-made product that professors can simply apply to their courses, but rather is a process that begins with faculty as individuals, and continues as they apply the anti-racist analysis into the course content, pedagogy, and their activities and interactions beyond the classroom. (Kishimoto 2018: 543) My final recommendation, therefore, is to start today, imperfectly and advisedly, but today. In an earlier draft, I relied on the cop out of enjoining academics to make use of tenure. Yes, those fortunate enough to have it are among the most securely employed people in the world’s history, even more so those of us tenured at unionized campuses, and they (myself included) should certainly take on this work. But, of course, something on the order of two-thirds of faculty are now not only not tenured but not even on the tenure-track (a recent study indicates that 66 per cent of all university faculty are in nontenure-track positions, and another 10 per cent are tenure-track – and 50 per cent of those in non-tenure-track positions would like to be in tenure-track posts; Chronicle of Higher Education 2019a, 2019b). We can neither rely on the tenured 24 per cent of the workforce to do this work, nor can we wait for those in tenure-track positions to achieve tenure. The trends in tenured posts are only moving downward, in any case. The work, if it is to be done, must therefore be taken up by as many faculty in our fields as possible, and must be taken up now. The ‘violence [of] colour-blind anti-racialism’ is ‘allowed to flourish in destructive ways in schools when teachers are in denial of their significance’ (Svendsen 2014: 21). It flourishes in silence. In pursuit of civil rights, people have faced teargas and water cannons, truncheons and dogs, prison and death. The small contribution of anti-racist researching, writing and teaching – which should include anti-anti-race as a component, given the prevalence of anti-race thought – is not without some risk (unequally borne). And yet, we can only speak up and out, or we are complicit.

NOTES

Introduction 1 This was the topic of a symposium, ‘Race and Periodization’, co-sponsored by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Folger Shakespeare Library (5–6 September 2019) [https://doi.org./10.1111/soc4.12507; accessed 31 July 2020]. The symposium was part of the RaceB4Race symposia series that ACMRS has been organizing and hosting twice a year since February 2019. 2 You can see this argument deployed in Nirenberg (2009: 237). See also Bartlett (1993). 3 See The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ([2002] 2020). The entry sketches out the term’s history succinctly. See an excellent discussion of these issues in Prescod-Weinstein (2018). 4 This is discussed extensively with a historiography of how the term ‘race’ is defined in Dorothy Kim, ‘The Politics of the Medieval Preracial’ (2021). 5 For accessible introductions to genetic analysis and molecular biology, see Griffiths et al. ([2008, 2012, 2015] 2020) and Divan and Royds (2016). 6 See also Heng (2011a: 324). On this point, see also Sanchez (2021). 7 We are paraphrasing Dennis Britton here, from his talk ‘Race After the Reformation’, ‘Race and Periodization: A RaceB4Race Symposium’ (6 September 2019). Britton astutely observed that perhaps there was never a time when race and religion were not entwined. Indeed, perhaps they cleave together so tightly precisely because both operate within the same atemporality: ‘if race and religion are mutually constitutive in the medieval and early modern periods … studying race alongside Christianity also begs for [both a] transhistorical … and historically specific analysis’ (Britton 2019; emphasis in the original). Our thanks to Dennis for generously sharing his talk with us. 8 As Heng notes, the English Crown was ‘the universal heir to all Jewish property’, as a point of legal theory because ‘the Jew truly can have nothing that is his own, because whatever he acquires he acquires not for himself but for the king’ (Heng 2018a: 23–4). 9 Other scholars have examined how race-thinking in the medieval period grounds the constructions of modern racism. See in particular Kaplan (2013, 2018), Lampert-Weissig (2010) and Whitaker (2019). 10 Or, as Toni Morrison has written, ‘The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act’ (1992: 46).

Chapter 1 1 In 1290, England was the first European country to expel its Jewish population; in 1496, Portugal was the last (France expelled and readmitted Jews several times, and only permanently in 1394). Trachtenberg surveys several biopolitical lies about Jews, including Jewish possession of horns, a tail (1943: 44–52) and a goat’s beard (46). On a male menses or haemorrhoidal flow, see Biller (1992, 2001), Ziegler (2009: 187) and Johnson (1998). On the Jewish stench, see Biller (2009: 177) and Marcus (1997: 255). For Jewish phenotypes and somatic features in art, see Mellinkoff (1993: 1:127–9) and Strickland

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(2003: 95–155). Trachtenberg also surveys the tarring of Jews with diabolism (1943: 11–31), bestiality (187) and sorcery (57–87); Bonfil (1988) has a broad survey on Jews and the devil. For how Jews turn into Antichrist’s servants in Christian eschatology, see Frey (1991) and Gow (1995). For an important distinction between blackness as the colour of sin – sin and repentance are posited as vital conditions for salvation in Christian theology – and blackness as the colour of the devil, demons and the infernal (all personifications of evil that are not recuperable in Christian theology), see Heng (2011a, 2011b, 2018b: ch. 4). Modern critical race theory in the last three-quarters of a century has been a vast and expanding field. Racial formation has been twinned with conditions of labour such as plantation slavery and the slave trade, the rise of capitalism or bourgeois hegemony, modern state apparatuses, nations and nationalisms, liberal politics, class war, colonialism and imperialism, globalism and transnational networks. For examples and bibliographies, see Goldberg (2002) on state apparatuses; Balibar on nations and nationalisms (Balibar and Wallerstein 1992); Mehta (1990) on liberal politics; Foucault (2003) on class war; and Holt (2000) on the global economy. Race is a prime category of analysis in postcolonial theory and scholarship on plantation slavery and the slave trade; examples in these fields are too numerous to list. Lilley points out that the claim that the Welsh and Irish ‘lacked urban life before the AngloNormans imposed their statutes on them and “perserveringly civilized” them is, of course, nonsense. It is now well known that both Ireland and Wales were urbanized before the AngloNormans … [yet] despite the presence and existence of important Hiberno-Norse towns in Ireland (such as Dublin and Waterford), many of which were thriving in the mid-twelfth century, William of Malmsbury [like other English chroniclers] nevertheless talked of “rustic Irishmen” in contrast with the “English and French”’ (2002: 25). Contesting the English colonial fantasy that colonized Ireland was locked in primordial stasis forever, by the end of the twelfth century there were 225 towns in Ireland (Davies 2000: 137–8). Indeed, ‘Ireland in the century or so after 1170 underwent “a radical social and economic revolution”’ (139). Irish variation in liturgical practice, degrees of consanguinity in marriage, calendrical marking of the liturgical year, etc., became grist for the mill of theorizing the Irish as ‘pagans in fact’, even if, as Muldoon observes, ‘the existence of a distinctive Irish liturgy and of various adapt[at]ions to the local culture was not unique in the early Middle Ages …. until the twelfth century there was wide variation in liturgical practice within the Christian Church’ (2003: 70). The militia from the West kept once-Greek lands for themselves, establishing crusader colonies, ports, cities, fortifications and hinterlands, and extracting the wealth of the East for their own enrichment, as Fulcher of Chartres’ paean of praise for Latin Christendom’s twelfth-century experiments of colonization in Syria and Palestine triumphantly makes plain (1913: 748–9; 1969: 271–2). See Heng (2003: 32; 2015: 359–60) on Fulcher’s celebration of colonial mastery and colonial profit. Worse than the Jews: If the racialization of medieval European Jewry teaches us anything, it is that there is nobody ‘worse than the Jews’. Racial form in the early modern period was, of course, varied and labile. The scholarship on early modern race is too large to detail here, but for literary studies, especially drama, see the pivotal work of Hall (1995), Loomba (1989) and Thompson (2008) as points of entry. Hawkins argues that communities of Cagots existed from the tenth century on, but notes that documentary evidence is much more abundant from the thirteenth century (2014: 4). That poetic term, ‘deep time’, is Wai Chee Dimock’s (2006), adapted from the physical sciences.

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Chapter 2 1 2 3 4

All translations of Pliny are by H. Rackham. The translations of Augustine are my own. The translations of Isidore of Seville are my own. All translations of John Trevisa’s Latin text are my own. My modern English renderings of the Middle English translations by John Trevisa and the Anonymous fifteenth-century translator are my own. 5 Not all Black Africans are ‘yuel doers’, as Trevisa suggests. In the Middle English prose version of Mandeville’s Travels, in Numidia there is a Christian community ‘but thy aryn blake of colour for the ouergret hete that is there and brennynge of the sonne’ (Mandeville 1973: 34–5). The metrical version does not mention the Black Christian Numidians.

Chapter 3 1 I use the term ‘sensorium’ here to reference the medieval senses with the Latin. I am not using it to align with some undifferentiated ‘universal’ default senses that is usually through a White Western gaze. 2 The image from British Library (n.d.-b). 3 My discussion of the sonic colour line and this section on racialized soundscapes is based on and excerpted from a forthcoming article: Kim (fothcoming-a).

Chapter 4 1 In our reading of this literature, it seems to be implicit that being ‘northern European’ or ‘European’ is synonymous with having White ancestry. We are most grateful to Dr Jessica Lutkin for discussing the project with RR and for explaining the difficulties about including and interpreting information about physical appearance/ancestry affiliation from the primary sources. 2 Over the past decade in the United Kingdom and United States, professional bodies representing physical anthropology (of which bioarchaeology is a part) have been critically reviewing the extent to which they are diverse and inclusive, and how that has affected research questions and outputs. This has led to new guidance, and they urge members to ensure their research addresses these issues (Antón, Malhi and Fuentes 2018; BABAO 2019; Bolnick, Smith and Fuentes 2019). 3 The charter also stipulated that they should care for pregnant women until they had their babies. If a mother died during delivery, St Mary Spital would care for the child until it was seven years old (British History Online 1957). The later SRP98 excavation encountered the burials of pregnant females, newborn babies and young children (Connell et al. 2012). 4 The first emergency burial ground was established at West Smithfield, and part of the cemetery was excavated for the Crossrail infrastructure project. Ancient DNA analysis of those human remains confirmed the presence of Yersina pestis (Pfizenmaier 2016). The first author (unpublished) was able to study one male from this excavation and concluded that they had Black African ancestry. 5 aDNA analysis of Roman and Medieval individuals with ‘Asian’ MMS classifications has failed to find the population haplotypes found in Asian populations (Klunk et al. 2019) (H. Schroeder, personal communication). 6 For example, the Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth has created a new display explaining the diverse origins of the crew (The Mary Rose n.d.).

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Chapter 6 1 Omi and Winant stress how the dangerous historical effects of racial discourse assume abiding structural dimensions, with ‘structural’ referring to how race can play ‘a fundamental role in structuring’ legal, economic, religious, political, civic and other institutions and societal systems (Omi and Winant 1994: 55). The structural nature of racism means that simply acknowledging the mythic and wrongheaded nature of race does not ‘dispense with’ race as a problem (55). Instead, structural racism entails a much more difficult anti-racist project, that of revising racist institutions themselves. 2 As Hall puts it, ‘the question is not whether men-in-general make perceptual distinctions between groups with different racial or ethnic characteristics’ (1980: 338; my emphasis). 3 Hall, drawing on Antonio Gramsci, stresses the particular historical ‘conjuncture’ (a specific time and place) at which a racial formation is articulated (1986: 6–8). 4 I focus here on the nationalisms of Western peoples who have engaged in large-scale racist practices, as opposed to the nationalisms of the non-Western peoples who experience the harmful effects of Western racisms (for example, Black nationalism). 5 Gilroy offers a powerful critique of Anderson’s claims about the non-racial aspects of the nation (Gilroy 1987: 44–5). 6 Edmund Spenser and others would later reiterate those constructions in England and elsewhere at least into the nineteenth century (e.g. Ignatiev 2009; Feerick 2010: 25–77). 7 ‘Such privileges and exclusions were often no doubt ignored in practice; but they could be, and were, activated whenever convenience dictated’ (Davies 2006: 117). 8 I have silently made small changes to Berry’s translation. 9 On gens and natio, see Davies (1994: 1–20 at 6). 10 This is not to say that the English of England and English of Ireland were uniformly opposed to one another (e.g. Crooks 2005: 124). 11 My discussion of Chrystede is indebted in many ways to Sponsler (2004). 12 I silently make minor changes in Brereton’s translation. 13 On the image of a wild Ireland elsewhere in Froissart’s work and its relation to his biography, see Sponsler (2004: 314–17). 14 Adrian IV, Laudabiliter, in Gerald of Wales (1978:144–47); the colonizers themselves evinced a savage brutality (Bartlett 1993: 21–3). 15 On the politics behind the statutes, see Crooks (2005). 16 On the motives of Chrystede as well as Froissart, see Sponsler (2004). 17 On the phrase ‘cosas de Indias’, see Francisco de Vitoria’s 1534 letter (Pagden 1982: 65). 18 Another key aspect of the debates was the practice of human sacrifice (see Pagden 2015: 60–1). No ‘winner’ was declared, but Las Casas was so persuasive as to convince Charles to retain his New Laws of the Indies, which regulated the encomienda system, although those laws were eventually revoked. 19 He especially relies on Augustine’s idea of natural hierarchies and Aristotle’s notion of natural slaves (Pagden 2015: 41–50). 20 On Sepúlveda’s nationalism, see Hanke (1959: 45–8). 21 Las Casas, who himself may have had Jewish ancestors, reserves his most vicious comments for Muslims and Jews (1992: 47, 78, 155–6). 22 I have silently adjusted Briffault’s translation. 23 On the origin of the term, see Greer et al. (2008b). 24 Other key internal sources were debates regarding ‘purity of blood’, Muslims and Jews (Nirenberg 2008).

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Chapter 7 1 One of the few exceptions is Carissa Harris’s work in her book Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (2018). She uses the work on sexual violence and intersectionality to discuss her pre-modern archive. 2 See David Sterling Brown, ‘“Hood Feminism”: Segregation, Post-Postracialism and the Cult(ure) of Early Modern English Domestic Criticism’ (2020) for a further discussion on how domestic culture discussions in English early modern studies have been whitewashed. 3 See Nazera Sadiq Wright, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (2016) for a discussion of this, particularly her introduction and the chapters ‘Moving the Boundaries: Black Girlhood and Public Careers in Frances E.W. Harper’s Trial and Triumph’ and ‘Black Girlhood in Early-Twentieth-Century Black Conduct Books’. 4 Our thanks to Emma Cavell of Swansea University for sharing her database of court pleas involving in the published plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews. This information pushed us in the right direction. 5 For more details of the case, see also Davis (1893) and Bartlet (2000). 6 See also DeGraffenreid, 413 F Supp at 143. 7 For further discussion of this legal case, see Rokéah (1984: 126–7). 8 For the documentation of this case, see Sarah Cohen (1992: 98). 9 The finance dealings, however, did not include money-lending for the most part, which was unusually controlled by Christians. 10 His wife had refused to convert, and so their marriage was dissolved by episcopal courts. 11 Converso is Spanish for convert and is traditionally used to describe Jewish converts to Christianity as well as their descendants. Islamic converts were called moriscos. 12 A transcription and English translation of this document is appended to SeidenspinnerNúñez and Kim (2004: 142–6). The originals are found in Registra Supplicationem 436, fol. 114v–115, Vatican Archives.

Chapter 8 1 In this subsection, Robert S. Sturges articulates medieval race and sex as concerns over futurity, concentrating on cisgender heterosexual reproduction. While I have assisted in providing some revisions to this section – upon the request of editors and peer-reviewers – and removing some surrounding argumentation which branched off in divergent directions, care has been given to sustain this portion of Sturges’s argument and retain as much of his original writing as possible. Rather than assimilating Sturges perspective and work into my own, the goal has been to preserve the voice of Sturges in his own subsection.

Chapter 9 1 Thanks to Professors Shyama Rajendran and Maggie Williams for feedback on drafts, and Dean Tracy Butts for the loan of several books. Thanks to Professors Dorothy Kim and Kim Coles for inviting this contribution and for providing excellent feedback as I dug into this difficult material. 2 All translations are mine. 3 This verb comes from the noun meaning, ‘A member of a community of black slaves who had escaped from their captivity or (subsequently) of their descendants, esp. those

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who settled in the mountains and forests of Suriname and the West Indies’ (OED Online 2000). This term first appears in John Davies’s The History of the Caribby-Islands (1666), a translation of Charles de Rochefort’s Histoire naturelle et morale des iles Antilles de l’Amerique (1658). The passage reads: ‘They will run away and get into the Mountains and Forests, where they live like so many Beasts; then they are call’d Marons, that is to say Savages’ (Davies 1666: 202). Race dwells throughout our language.

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CONTRIBUTORS

M. W. Bychowski is the Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow at Case Western Reserve University in  Cleveland, USA. Her research is funded in part by the Cleveland Foundation to promote her work on racial justice, feminism, disability equity and LGBTQ rights. This work has seen her partner with programmes such as Inter | Urban. She is the co-editor of Medieval Trans Feminisms (2019, with Dorothy Kim). She has also published numerous articles on medieval and early modern transgender studies, women’s studies, disability studies and critical race studies. Her current book projects include a work on transgender in the Middle Ages and on trans literature and literary theory. Kimberly Anne Coles is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, USA. She is the author of Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (2008) and co-editor of The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500–1900 (2015) and The Routledge Companion to Women, Sex, and Gender in the Early British Colonial World (2018), and a special Spenser Studies volume on ‘Spenser and Race’ (forthcoming). Her forthcoming book, Bad Humour: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England, deals with the medical and philosophical context that makes religion (or irreligion) a physiological, heritable feature of the blood. Joseph T. Hefner is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Michigan State University, USA. He previously held a position with the US Department of Defense (JPAC-CIL) and served as a Senior Research Fellow with the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. His research interests cover modern human variation, quantitative methods in biological anthropology and the history of forensic anthropology. Amongst his publications are the monographs Atlas of Human Cranial Macromorphoscopic Traits (2018, with K. C. Linde) and Biological Distance Analysis: Forensic and Bioarchaeological Perspectives (2016, with M. Pilloud), in addition to various manuscripts on forensic and bioarchaeological topics. Geraldine Heng is Perceval Professor at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. She is the author of The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018) and England and the Jews (2018), and the editor of The Global Middle Ages (2022). She co-edits the Cambridge University Press Elements series on The Global Middle Ages, and the University of Pennsylvania Press series RaceB4Race: Critical Studies of the Premodern. Her co-authored book The Global Middle Ages: An Introduction is forthcoming. She is currently writing a new monograph, Early Globalisms: The Interconnected World, 500– 1500 CE. She is also Founder and Director of the Global Middle Ages Project (G-MAP: www.globalmiddleages.org). Dorothy Kim teaches medieval literature at Brandeis University, USA. Her books Jewish/ Christian Entanglements: Ancrene Wisse and Its Material Worlds and The Alt-Medieval: Digital

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225

Whiteness and Medieval Studies are both forthcoming. She has received fellowships from the SSHRC, Ford Foundation, Fulbright, Mellon and AAUW. She is the co-project director in the NEH-funded Scholarly Editions and Translations project An Archive of Early Middle English. She is a project co-director for the Global Middle Ages Project (http://globalmiddleages.org). She has co-edited two Digital Humanities collections: Disrupting the Digital Humanities (2018, with Jesse Stommel) and Alternative Histories of the Digital Humanities (2021, with Adeline Koh). Kathy Lavezzo teaches English literature at the University of Iowa, USA. She is the author of Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature and English Community, 1000–1534 (2006) and The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton (2016). She is also the editor of Imagining a Medieval English Nation (2004). She is currently working on a student-oriented book about race in medieval Europe. Asa Simon Mittman is Professor of Art and Art History at California State University, Chico, USA. He is the author of Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (2006), coauthor of Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (2013), and author and co-author of many articles on monstrosity and marginality in the Middle Ages. He edited the Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (2012), and co-edited Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World (2019) and Demonstrare (2018, 2 vols). He also co-curated Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders at the Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum (2018). Adam Miyashiro is Associate Professor of Literature at Stockton University in New Jersey, USA. He completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University and his research interests are in the intersection of race and colonialism in medieval literature from a comparative perspective in western European and Mediterranean literatures in Iberia and North Africa. He has participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Mediterranean Seminar in 2010. His current research focuses on the global text-network of the Alexander Romances in Latin, French and Arabic and how constructions of race and geography differ between Mediterranean traditions. He has published articles in Neophilologus, postmedieval and Literature Compass. Rebecca Redfern is curator of human osteology at the Museum of London, UK, a Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University, UK, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (London), UK. Rebecca is a bioarchaeologist, whose current research focuses on population diversity in Roman and medieval London, and enslavement and inequalities in past societies. She has published numerous publications about medieval lives, including ones on impairment, syphilis, dental health and population change after the Second Plague Pandemic. She is the author of Injury and Trauma in Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Violence in Past Lives (2016), and is currently President of the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology. Michelle M. Sauer is Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of North Dakota, USA. Her publications include the books Celebrating St Albert & His Rule: Rules, Devotion, Orthodoxy, & Dissent (2018, with Kevin Alban), Gender in Medieval Culture (2015), The Lesbian Premodern (2011, with Diane Watt and Noreen Giffney), How to Write about Chaucer (2009) and The Companion to Pre-

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1600 British Poetry (2008), as well as numerous articles. Her current projects include the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Global Women’s Literature, the Companion to Sexuality in the Medieval West and a database of the manuscripts of Saint Birgitta of Sweden. Robert S. Sturges is Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he teaches medieval literature, critical theory, and queer studies. His books include Medieval Interpretation: Models of Reading in Literary Narrative, 1100–1500; Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse; Dialogue and Deviance: Male-Male Desire in the Diaolgue Genre (Plato to Aelred, Plato to Sade, Plato to the Postmodern); The Circulation of Power in Medieval Biblical Drama: Theaters of Authority; and a facing-page edition and translation of Aucassin and Nicolette. He is also the editor of an essay collection, Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Matthew Vernon is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis, USA. His work explores the intersections of race and the Middle Ages. He is the author of The Black Middle Ages (2018). His is currently working on a monograph about the figure of the host in medieval English literature.

INDEX

Adelard of Bath 95–6 Africa 9, 24, 26, 30, 33, 64, 77, 94, 129 climate 87 coast 99–100 European myths about 21, 34–5, 41–7, 49, 94, 97–8 North 57, 87, 96, 176 people 3, 12, 23, 31, 118, 123 visual representation 171–6 see also Benin, Kingdom of; Blackness; colonialism; slavery Al-Andalus, see Iberian peninsula; Portugal; Spain Americas 17, 67, 77, 107, 111, 117–24 European myths about 26, 33 people 7, 9 see also colonialism; Indigenous peoples; slavery anti-racism 18, 135, 167–8, 178, 185–6 anti-Semitism 56 (see also Jews) apocalypse 165, 168 Arabic (language) 48–9, 56 Aristotle 94, 95, 121 apocryphal writings 51 Arabic translation of 96 Augustine of Hippo, St. 37–9, 41, 48, 56, 176 Averroes, see Ibn Rušd Baldwin, James 91, 93, 101, 129 Barbary, Kingdom of 103 (see also Africa, European myths about; Othello) Bartholom(a)eus Anglicus (writer) 21, 41, 44, 151 Benin, Kingdom of 97, 99 Bernard of Clairvaux, St. 21, 26–7 Best, George (author, Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher) 97–8, 161 Blackness 33, 44, 47, 51, 54, 70, 146–8 anti-Blackness 17, 25, 50 Biblical origin (Ham) 97, 161 negative stereotypes 25, 49, 55, 97, 157, 177 fictional 103, 154 visual representation 172–6 see also Africa; Americas; intersectionality

bioarchaeology 3, 8, 10–12, 58, 62, 75–9, 82 biology 8–10, 16, 87, 108, 109, 110 pre-modern study of 33, 51 racist assumptions 22, 23 Bonaparte, Napoleon 1 Byzantium 17, 29, 125, 132 Constantinople (capital city) 29 stereotypes 26–7 cannibalism 20, 24, 35, 48, 117 myths about 60–2, 170, 176 Cagots 31–2 Cantigas de Santa Maria, Las (text) 21 cartography 24, 169, 170, 177, 179 see also maps Casas, Bartolomé de las (writer) 17, 119–24 cemetery 11, 31, 63, 76, 79–82 Charles V Hapsburg, Holy Roman Emperor 118 Chaucer, Geoffrey 17, 41, 176 Man of Law’s Tale 161–2 Christianity 21, 30, 35–6, 38, 41, 69, 76 colonialism 19, 28, 64, 67 in Ireland 26–7 in the Americas 119, 121–2 Eastern 27, 28, 71 fantasy of whiteness 59, 61, 62, 92, 98, 141, 170 conversion 144–8, 150–1 visual representation 177 fictionalized accounts 60, 100–1, 154–9, 161–2, 163 law and 133, 135–6 in the Iberian peninsula 63, 64, 69–70, 117, 137–9 racialization 22, 29, 32, 37, 55, 56, 57, 96, 173, 176 see also Cagots, monstrous races violence against heretics 20, 21, 27–32 Western 27, 28, 35, 53, 70, 71–2 See also Crusades, Whiteness, colonialism Chrystede, Henry (knight) 114–17 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 38 climate 7, 75, 87, 99, 151 premodern theories 21, 24–5, 46, 49, 51

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cluster analysis 83, 86–90 colonialism 3, 6, 12, 19–20, 33, 123, 130, 169, 178, 179 Africa 64–5, 67 anti-colonial framework 130, 139 Asia 22, 25 Americas 17, 67, 119, 122 Christianity and 145, 150 Ireland 114 justification for 8–9, 23–6, 35, 51, 145, 177 see also Crusades, slavery, White ­supremacy Combahee River Collective (CRC) 4–5, 126–7, 129, 131–2 see also Crenshaw, Kimberlé, intersectionality, identity politics converso(s) 17, 117–18, 137–9, 192n.11 (see also Teresa of Cartagena, St.) COVID-19 6, 10 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 11, 107, 125–7, 131, 133–6, 140–1, 144 see also intersectionality, Combahee River Collective critical race theory (CRT) 3, 10 Crusades 21, 27, 76, 77 First 19, 28 Fourth 29 mythologization of 59–60, 69–70, 150, 176 see also colonialism under Christianity; Islam Cursor Mundi (book) 174–5 David, Jacques-Louis 1, 12 David of Oxford 134–7 disability 5, 11, 54, 137, 140–1 deafness 138–9 discrimination 32 in The King of Tars 156–9, 163 studies 127, 131, 148 see also intersectionality, Teresa of ­Cartagena, St. Du Bois, W.E.B. 6, 8, 10, 107 Elizabeth I Tudor, Queen of England 103, 104 encomienda system 118 (see also colonialism) England 11–12, 17, 24, 47, 103, 104, 109, 124, 125, 130, 161 colonialism 25–7, 107, 110–17, 119, 123 literature 41, 44, 96–8, 146, 174 Old English 51 Middle English 33, 47, 50, 60, 61, 162 see also Chaucer, Geoffrey; Shakespeare, William maps 176, 178, 179

INDEX

plague sites 16, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 90 racio-religious segregation 14, 20, 57 Jewish courts 133–7 environment 16, 24–5, 33–51, 62, 63, 75 Ethiopia 21, 161 in Higden’s Polychronicon 41, 47 in Kyng Alisaunder 47, 48–50 myths about 24, 36, 39 people 11, 97 visual representation 172 ethnicity 4–5, 9, 14, 20, 107, 168, 170 definition 109–10 see also race Eurasia 27, 30 forensic anthropology 12, 16, 73–5, 90 France 27, 31–32, 111, 113, 123, 161 Froissart, Jean 111, 114–17 genetics 3–12, see also bioarchaeology geography 7, 16, 24–5, 33, 53, 54, 63, 74–6, 93, 125, 131 fictional 47–8 pre-modern theories of 35, 37, 38, 39, 41–2, 44, 96, 97 see monstrous races racialization of 9, 53, 54, 57–8, 70–2, 115 geographic origin 6–7, 74–5, 83 Gerald of Wales (writer) 25–6, 46, 96, 97, 112, 115, 116 Greek (language) 173 history 36, 38, 47–8 philosophy 113 (see also Aristotle) Guicciardini, Francesco (writer) 122–3 hagiography 57, 132 see also Teresa of Cartagena, St. Hall, Stuart 17, 107–9 Henry II Plantagenet, King of England 27, 111 Higden, Ranulf, Polychronicon (1342) 33, 40–7 hooks, bell 60 human remains 16, 35, 73–82 Iberian peninsula (Iberia) 62–4, 67, 69–70, 125 see also Spain, Portugal Ibn Rušd, Abū I-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn ’Aḥmad 95–6 Aristotle, translation of 96 see also Aristotle; Averroes

INDEX

identity politics 4–5, 126–9, 131, 134, 140–1 pre-modern case studies 133, 136 see also Combahee River Collective India 20, 21, 26, 30, 100 caste system 31 European myths about 25, 44, 47–8, 96, 101 monstrous races 36–7, 38–9 people 79 Indigenous peoples 7, 9, 17, 77 practice 35 marginalization of 75, 107, 110–11, 119–24 scholarship 5, 6, 10, 129–30, 143 intersectionality 4–5, 11–12, 17, 126–36, 138–41, 144, 178 Inuit 98–9 Ireland 25–7, 33 colonization by England 111–15 stereotypes about 46 Isidore of Seville 35, 38–9, 44, 47–8, 113 Islam, Muslims 3, 11, 26, 31, 76, 54, 95–6, 98 conversion narratives 150, 157, 159, 163 fictional accounts of 60, 148, 157, 161, 162 in the Iberian Peninsula 62–4, 69–70, 117–18, 123, 137 in North Africa 30 in the Middle East 28, 30, 57, 71–2 racialization of 5, 21, 24, 32, 33, 57, 70–2 as consumable 61–2 as monsters 32, 48 (see also monstrous races) visual representation 172–3, 176, 181 see also Crusades, racialization Jerusalem (city) 19, 28, 71–2, 101, 132 Siege of (romance) 61–2 visual representation 176 Judaism, Jews 3, 26, 57, 92, 99, 125 in England 14, 17, 20, 57, 76, 111, 133–7, 188–9n.1 fictional accounts of 61–2 in the Iberian Peninsula 63, 76, 117–18, 123, 137–9 in Jerusalem 70, 72 racialization of 23, 26, 29, 31, 99, 55–7, 138 as monsters 24, 32 see also anti-Semitism, racialization

229

Kaphar, Titus (artist) 12–13, 14–15, 18 Khan Mongke 27, 92 Khanate 101 King of Tars, The (romance) 144–6, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155–7, 159, 161–3 leprosy 31–2, 76, 77 Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, The (poem) 96–7 Licoricia of Winchester 134–7, 140 London (city) 11–12, 73–4, 79–90, 103, 130, 134, 137 people 93, 16 Lorde, Audre 11, 129, 165, 169 macromorphoscopic (MMS) trait 73, 81, 82 Mamluks 30 Mandeville, John (writer) 35, 51, 92, 161, 174 influence on Othello 100–1, 103 images from 34, 160, 175 maps 24, 47, 48–9, 170–84 images of 40, 45, 180, 181, 182 Psalter Map 171, 172, 173, 174, 177 London plague sites 80, 81 marginalization 11, 37, 73, 75, 140, 149 within scholarship 127–8, 129, 178 visual representation 179 Mary of Egypt, St. 17, 125, 132–3, 140 Mediterranean 28, 30, 33, 36, 57, 87 methodology 3–4, 59, 62, 107, 125–6 Mongols 23, 24, 27, 32, 92–3 monstrosity 34, 35, 36, 44, 47 monstrous races 7, 24, 32, 41, 150, 159 birth 161–2 in medieval histories 37–40 in romance 47–51, 161–2 visual representation 160, 170–1, 172, 176, 180–1, 182 morphology 72, 83, 88 Morrison, Toni 18, 130, 182, 188n10 Muriel of Oxford 134–6, 140 Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (painting) 1–2, 3, 12; 2 natural history 16, 33, 38, 40, 47 Newton, Isaac 177–8 Nogent, Guibert de 19 Orientalism 20, 28 Paris, Matthew 175 pedagogy 186, 187 Persian Empire 28 periodization 1, 14, 30, 33

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Pinteado, Anthonie Anes 99 Pizarro, Francisco 118 plague (Yersina pestis) 74, 77, 79–85 Pliny the Elder 37, 38, 42–3, 44, 48 Natural History 35–6, 38, 39, 47, 160 (see also monstrous races) ‘Plinian races’ 160–1 Portugal 19, 62, 69, 82, 94 colonialism 99 slave trade 65, 76 pre-modern critical race studies (PMCRS) 3, 7–8, 59, 62, 130, 131, 144–5, 147–8, 168–9 premodern race studies (PRS) 168 Prester John 94, 100–1 queer theory 58, 127–31, 149–51, 157, 158 Black feminism and 5, 17, 126, 129–30, 168 racialization 5, 8–9, 10, 70, 93, 94, 155, 176, 183 colonialism and 96–9 Jews 23, 26, 29, 31, 99, 55–7, 138 justification for 31, 51, 96 Muslims 5, 21, 24, 32, 33, 49, 57, 60, 70–2, 92, 95, 162, 172–3 olfactory 10, 53, 55, 57 in Shakespeare’s Othello 102–4 sonic 70–2 Richard II Plantagenet, King of England 114 Roman de Silence, Le 17, 144–6, 149–59, 162–3 Roman Empire 24, 26, 28, 29, 37, 51 colonialism and 19, 23 Rome, Church of, see Christianity Romani people 20, 23, 30, 31, 32 language sensorium 16, 53, 59 Sepúlveda, Juan Gines de 17, 118–24 sexuality 5, 32, 62, 109, 127–33, 140, 143–64 see also queer theory, transitivity sex work(ers) 133, 140 Shakespeare, William 33 Othello (play) 29, 33, 34, 101–3 Shonibare, Yinka 179, 181, 183, 184 slavery 3, 6, 8, 23, 24, 30, 74, 77 in Asia 25 fictional representation 29, 102 justification for 25, 55, 121, 145, 169 (see also White supremacy)

INDEX

methodological implications 11–12 Romani 20–1 transatlantic 7, 9, 22, 25, 63, 64–5, 67–8, 75, 118, 133, 178 visual representation 12, 13 see also colonialism, White supremacy Spain 21, 76, 104, 150 colonialism 64, 111, 117–24 Islamic 30, 62–3, 69, 137–8 sugar 60, 63–8 Teresa of Cartagena, St. 17, 125, 137–9, 140, 150 Thomas Aquinas, St. 94–6, 102, 113 transitivity 17, 144, 145–6, 159, 162–4 and conversion therapy 150–1 gender 17, 127, 132–3, 162–4 in The King of Tars 156, 157–8, 159 race 143–5, 146, 149–50, 158, 162, 163, 164 in Le Roman de Silence 145–50 see also queer theory; Snorton, C. Riley transgender, see transitivity transhistorical 1, 14–16, 20, 24, 30, 109, 125, 178 transracial, see transitivity Trevisa, John (translator), see Higden, Ranulf; Bartholom(a)eus Anglicus Urban II, Pope 21, 28 vernacular 19, 28, 39, 109, 138 Walker, Kara 66–8; 66, 67, 68 Whiteness 17, 59, 99, 101, 104, 147, 169, 183 decentering of 127–8, 129–30 pre-modern constructions of 44, 51, 111 in medieval romance 154, 157, 161–3 visual representation 170–1, 175–8 sonic color line 70 see also Blackness; Europe; race as ­rhetorical mirage under Whitaker, ­Cord J. White supremacy 2–3, 5–6, 10, 185 decentering of 130, 139 gender/sexuality and 17, 143–4, 148–9, 158 see also colonialism; racialization Wiley, Kehinde 1–2, 3, 12; 2

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