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

Abstract

Ramey, Lynn T. 2014. Black Legacies: Race and European Middle Gainesville: University Press of Florida. $69.95 hc. 192 pp.The question of whether scholars can profitably study in Middle Ages has become increasingly pressing in recent years. Race and studies have not traditionally mixed, and Geraldine Heng has written that studies suffers from a blind spot . . . a cognitive lag that makes theory unable step back any further than Renaissance (2011, 262). Heng and other scholars, such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, have argued that medieval texts reflect and participate in creation of human hierarchies with lived effects (Cohen 2013, 111). Thomas Hahn has claimed that examining descriptors of identities affirm(s) cross-cultural usefulness and stability of notion of (2001, 26). In my forthcoming (March 2015) special issue of Postmedieval, I point out that, while to be black is, in European Middle Ages, be other . . . be black is also be other European Middle Ages. The notion of a homogenously white space has for far too long dominated popular and scholarly notions of European Middle In Black Legacies, Lynn T. Ramey adds her voice cadre of scholars who have registered importance of studying when she succinctly states, It is not necessary have word 'race' have concept of race (26). The answer that Black Legacies gives question of race's relevance Middle Ages is resoundingly affirmative.In fact, Black Legacies registers magnitude of race's impact on Middle Ages by painting with broad brushstrokes. The approach is fitting; boasts a vast body of evidence that points large-scale cultural effects. After dealing in her first two chapters with foundational entanglement of in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origins of studies and rehearsing major points of inquiry into (convivencia in Spain, unstable meanings of blackness, rationalist philosophical investigations as what constitutes humanity), Ramey moves on in chapter 3 role of Christian biblical tradition in development of racial ideology. The chapter, titled Biblical Race?, achieves its goal not so much through comprehensiveness-the topic could easily take up a book longer than Black Legacies; Willie James Jennings's The Christian Imagination (2010) and J. Kameron Carter's Race: Theological Account (2008) come mind-as through nuanced treatments of several exemplary narratives and figures. The chapter effectively asserts that a racializing spirit is shared among tradition of Moses's Cushite wife, genealogical and geographical division of world according Noah's three sons, story of Queen of Sheba and her encounter with Solomon, and figure of black bride in Song of Songs. Ramey's fourth chapter explores understanding of heredity, focusing on implications and results of reproductive pairs mismatched by religion, culture, and phenotype. Ramey rightly notes that this study requires turning late popular literature. While Bible, Greek and Roman philosophies, and medical writings rarely address miscegenation, the vernacular literature of twelfth and thirteenth centuries seems particularly preoccupied with intermarriage (68). Black Legacies paints its picture of vividly and dynamically with late popular literature as its brush.Fluid interplay between past, present, and future is an important thread in Black Legacies. The book's fifth chapter lays out in some detail how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New World exploration relied on racializing paradigms developed in Middle Ages: notion of monstrous and late debates about whether these races could be categorized as human. Ramey claims that early modern culture developed a hierarchy of humanness that transcends conclusions that a group was either human or not. …