University Press of Florida Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages

Black Legacies looks at color-based prejudice in medieval and modern texts in order to reveal key similarities. Bringing far-removed time periods into startling conversation, this book argues that certain attitudes and practices present in Europe’s Middle Ages were foundational in the development of the western concept of race.Using historical, literary, and artistic sources, Lynn Ramey shows that twelfth- and thirteenth-century discourse was preoccupied with skin color and the coding of black as “evil” and white as “good.” Ramey demonstrates that fears of miscegenation show up in all medieval European societies. She pinpoints these same ideas in the rhetoric of later centuries. Mapmakers and travel writers of the colonial era used medieval lore of “monstrous peoples” to question the humanity of indigenous New World populations, and medieval arguments about humanness were employed to justify the slave trade. Ramey even analyzes how race is explored in films set in medieval Europe, revealing an enduring fascination with the Middle Ages as a touchstone for processing and coping with racial conflict in the West today. Review "Impressive. It at once summarizes the state of medieval race studies and examines the field's indebtedness to its nineteenth-century roots. Perhaps its most exciting contribution is that it posits the Middle Ages as a canvas upon which twentieth- and twenty-first century media paints in order to explore, in something like a safe space, our era's concerns with phenotypic, religious, and cultural racialization."--College Literature About the Author Lynn T. Ramey is associate professor of French at Vanderbilt University, USA. She is the author of Christian, Saracen and Genre in Medieval French Literature: Imagination and Cultural Interaction in the French Middle Ages and coeditor of Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema.