Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (review)

While the African diaspora is most often studied as a New World experience, this interdisciplinary volume calls our attention to its European dimensions. Together, these learned essays cover the British and the more neglected Iberian and Italian contexts and provide a multidisciplinary examination both of how Europeans perceived Africans and of how Africans experienced their enslavement in European societies. It is good to have in one place evidence and interpretation of the impact of Africans in European court culture and within local religious institutions during the period when the transatlantic slave trade had only begun to take shape. Showing how "black African life" in Europe was shaped by Renaissance receptions of classical and medieval knowledge of Africa—and of how changing perceptions of blackness informed European notions of whiteness and beauty—this collection suggests ways of integrating slavery and Africans into our broader understanding of the Renaissance. Tracing "processes of differentiation" and discrimination in legal and cultural practices, the essays also identify paths of African assimilation and resistance.