Moors and Moorishness in Late Medieval England

This article explores evidence for the use of the words Moor and Moorish in late medieval England, and considers the mechanisms by which such documentation has been overlooked in the past. Medievalists have understandably concentrated on the more common term Saracen. Yet this concentration has left early modernist English literary critics without important medieval background. While a Moor in Middle English derived from biopolitical racial definitions reaching back to the Roman empire, Moorish had quite different connotations. The late medieval English associated Moorish with sociocultural race markers such as imported textiles and script. Physical remains of Arabic script and pseudo-script from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England exist in textile and ceramic fragments, while references to "Moorish letters" appear in archival documents. By the time Caxton translated and printed the popular fifteenth-century romance Paris and Vienne he employed the terms Moor and Moorish easily, expecting his audience to be familiar with both their biopolitical and sociocultural associations with people, languages, and commodities.