Black Africans in Renaissance Europe ed. by T. F. Earle, K. J. P. Lowe (review)

REVIEWS 221 deftness in combining beauty and deformity. In one section Bettella describes how dark hair begins to be praised as beautiful when before blond hair was the ideal. Part of this trend was the praise of women of different races. The ideal previously was a fair skinned woman, but in the Baroque period poetry is written about the beauty of dark skinned women. These women were seen as both exotic beauties and compliments to fairer skinned females. Originally written as a dissertation in Italian, the book is very clear both in style and organization. Bettella briefly traces the themes mentioned in previous chapters in the new time period, which allows the reader to follow her narrative easily. Bettella describes the ugly women as transgressive throughout the book, yet she provides no definition of her meaning of transgressive. Also especially in the first two chapters, Bettella judges poems and poets to be misogynistic without providing guidelines to these choices. These ahistorical judgments are disconcerting to this historian. Overall the book is a good treatment of an aspect of Italian poetry that has received little attention. SARAH WHITTEN, History, UCLA Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University 2005) 417 pp., ill. This new anthology serves as a thought-provoking contribution to the field of early modern European history. The presence of black Africans in Renaissance Europe has long been overlooked by most scholars, as editor Kate Lowe carefully points out in her introduction. She astutely notes that specialists on fifteenth - and sixteenth-century Europe have avoided investigating the legacies of black Africans in Europe, and specialists on the African continent have neglected the subject. In response to this apparent void in the scholarly literature, the editors organized a conference on the subject in 2001, and subsequently produced the present volume, in which the papers presented by sixteen scholars are published in expanded form. This book serves to reevaluate the presence of black Africans in European society through a variety of cultural perspectives. By examining literature, works of art, and historical documents from England, France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, the authors explore issues of race and representations of “blackness.” The text is organized into an introduction, sixteen chapters, a lengthy bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and an index. The sixteen chapters have been divided into four parts. The first, “Conceptualizing Black Africans,” discusses the ideas which were promoted about black Africans through literature and art in Renaissance Europe. Kate Lowe’s chapter considers the large number of ways black Africans in Europe were stereotyped during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the following chapter, Jean Michel Massing analyzes illustrations, which rely heavily on stereotypes, of African people, animals, and landforms depicted on a world map likely produced in France around 1550. The next three chapters, by Jeremy Lawrance, Anu Korhonen, and Jorge Fonseca, demonstrate how the stereotypes discussed by Lowe and Massing appear in literature from Spain, England, and Portugal, respectively. The second part of the volume, “Real and Symbolic Black Africans at Court,” contains three chapters on the role of black Africans in three very REVIEWS 222 different Renaissance courts. Paul H. D. Kaplan, who has examined the presence of blacks in numerous Renaissance works of art, explores the depictions of black Africans in Isabella d’Este’s court in Mantua. His chapter centers on a discussion of a drawing, which includes the depiction of a black servant, entitled Judith and her maidservant with the head of Holofernes (currently in the Uffizi), by Isabella’s court artist, Andrea Mantegna. As in the court of Mantua, owning black Africans was also a sign of status in the court of Catherine of Austria in Lisbon. Annemarie Jordan discusses this queen who reigned for most of the sixteenth century (1507–1578) and the use of black Africans in her meticulously constructed public image. Lorenz Sellig’s chapter, which analyzes a late Renaissance drinking cup in the form of a Moor’s head, is the most unique in the book. The author focuses on this drinking cup and its many decorative motifs in order to identify the patron, who in this case was likely...