Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages by Lynn T. Ramey (review)

Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages is a valiant effort of scholarship in the current academic environment. The criticisms of the so-called linguistic turn, the complex history of the modern concept of race, and the weight of the idea of a clean break between the medieval and renaissance periods have made the study of “race” in a pre-modern setting a dangerous endeavor. Ramey’s goal is to point out that many important elements that would become much more explicit in “scientific racism” and nineteenth-century European colonialist discourses were already present in the Middle Ages. She supports this point armed with post-colonial and literary analyses of a wide variety of sources: medieval prose and verse, Classical ethnographies, medieval commentaries on the Bible, fifteenth-century colonial debates and, most surprisingly, modern films and nineteenth-century depictions of the Middle Ages.

Given that few scholars today would consent to the un-qualified use of the term race before the modern period, Ramey’s first task is to explain how she plans to use it and what she really intends to study. She settles on treating racism as “a form of xenophobia,” often utilizing the concept of “the Other” (1). She describes medieval culture not as “color blind” as many older studies of this topic have asserted but as “proto-racial” and containing a “cacophony of discourses” regarding race, before modern conceptions of phenotypic difference cemented a hegemonic idea of race (2). Ramey focuses on “prejudice against darker-skinned persons from non-Western cultures precisely because of their skin color and their usually imagined, always unfamiliar, cultural practices” (1). Lest there be some confusion, Ramey explicitly states that she is not arguing that racial consciousness was born in the Middle Ages, but that the medieval period did play an important role in its subsequent development (3).

There are two central critiques in the book: first, of the scholarly tradition that asserted that a categorical rupture existed between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; second, of the role of the nineteenth century in shaping not only our modern conceptions of race but also of the medieval period itself. The first tradition helped to isolate the study of race solely to the modern era and consequently resulted in the interpretation of the medieval period as a “golden age of cohabitation,” and erased “the history of prejudice that was present from what many consider to be the foundation of European civilization” (3). Writers of the nineteenth century displayed a particularly Romanticized view of the Middle Ages, for example evident in the development of professional history and its relationship to the creation of the modern nation-state based on supposed and Romanticized ties to medieval predecessors. This view became intertwined with a search for essentialist origins and a scientific racism that reflected certain nineteenth-century concerns on race back into the medieval period.

Chapter 1 looks at various examples of this Romanticized view of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century. Washington Irving’s tales of medieval Spain in The Alhambra (1832) are imbued with a fear of “racially linked degeneration more appropriate to his own American culture” (9). For example, his praise of the Arab elite of Muslim Spain, which he portrays as white and worthy of intermarriage with the “Gothic” Christian elite, is contrasted with depictions of the decay of the monarchy of Granada through its intermarriage with Berber groups, characterized as dark and governed by emotion. Eugène-Emmanual Viollet-le-Duc, as the architect in charge of restoring many of France’s most famous medieval structures (Vézelay Abbey, Mont Saint-Michel, Notre Dame Cathedral) between 1838 and 1879, not only had an immense influence in the representation and re-interpretation of medieval architecture, but he also helped to strengthen the notion that “elementary characteristics of… race” and environment were linked to ethnically essentialist aesthetic and architectural choices (23).

Chapter 2 is an overview of how race has...