The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages by Matthew X. Vernon

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages by Matthew X. Vernon Nahir I. Otaño Gracia Matthew X. Vernon. The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. xiii, 266. $89.00 cloth; $69.99 e-book. Those of us who take a critical stance toward medieval studies as a field and the ways that it perpetuates white supremacy and expels people of color from its ranks are often asked, especially by scholars from other areas, why we are trying to save medieval studies. Why not move on to other fields of study that are more inclusive? Although the answers vary among medievalists, my answer has always been that medieval literature and culture do not belong to white academia, nor do they belong to white supremacists. Perhaps this is why I found Matthew X. Vernon's The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages to be one of the most important books on medievalism and the Middle Ages to date. Vernon's insightful archival work, the strength of his arguments, and the nuance he brings to discussions of the Middle Ages are but a few of the reasons his book is a must-read in medieval studies, nineteenth- and twentieth-century medievalisms, and African-American studies. Vernon carefully integrates materials from both African-American and medieval studies, demonstrating that nineteenth- and twentieth-century African-Americans used the Middle Ages to reject their erasure from America's founding origin myths, in which the nation was often [End Page 427] presented as Anglo-Saxon in history and identity. The Black Middle Ages is divided into six chapters, and many of these chapters begin by deconstructing the ways that white writers and academics use the Middle Ages to equate the concept of the nation with a concept of whiteness. The chapters' substantive analysis, however, centers on the African-American writers and academics who create counter-narratives to this imagined white nationhood (shaped from a constructed white mythical past) by including African-Americans in national narratives of progress. It is difficult to do justice to the richness of the materials that Vernon brings to each chapter, and the plethora of African-American voices that he brings into the conversation. I can only say that if you can stop reading this review and simply read his The Black Middle Ages, then you should do so right now. The opening introductory chapter, "Reading out of Time— Genealogy, African-American Literature, and the Middle Ages," outlines the ways that political and literary figures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—including Thomas Jefferson, John H. Van Eyrie, and Walt Whitman—drew on and helped create a fantasy of the English Middle Ages as racially pure (and white). These white intellectuals imagined the Middle Ages as a framework through which to construct a narrative of national progress, a narrative that simultaneously erased the voices of those who threatened its logic. At every turn, however, African-Americans challenged these medieval myths by exposing them as false, creating a counter-narrative of the Middle Ages that laid bare the fantasy of whiteness in arguments about citizenship and American belonging (18). W. E. B. Du Bois offers a case in point, with his Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920) clearly demonstrating how the United States and Europe used the Middle Ages to create ideologies that justified colonization and imagined a community of whiteness extending far back into the past (20). Chapter 2, "Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages in African-American Scholarship and Curricula," shows how African-American intellectuals used the Middle Ages to renegotiate terms of belonging by rejecting the notion of the Anglo-Saxon period as an era of racial purity, instead describing a multicultural medieval England that supported the possibility of racial mixing as a means to reach political power. Vernon shows that African-American and abolitionist writers such as Frederick Douglass; Lydia Maria Child, author of the short story "The Black Saxons" (The Liberator, 1841); and William Day, who wrote the poem "The [End Page 428] Black Saxons: A Tale of America" (1850), had a...