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• 1 2020-07-28T23:08:32+00:00 The Role of Color 40 Race and Color Page plain 52 2020-08-17T20:32:46+00:00 The second claim you'll hear or read in regard to race in the Middle Ages is that it was not about color. We've learned that geography, language, and religion played a role in defining and classify the people of the Middle Ages. But, what role did color play? What role did blackness play?
  
  Pamela Patton explores religious meanings around varying displays of Blackness in medieval art. Early Christian theologians believed Blackness to be an external manifestation of sinfulness. 

  ...moral blackness became a metaphor so powerful that they could describe the newly baptized as literally whitened by the washing away of their sins.

  You can learn about this image from the Victoria and Albert Museum here!
  
  Patton shows how color and religion also extended the reach of Christianity. She briefly discusses the case of Black Madonna or Black Virgin Mary and shares a common theory that the Black Virgin could have function to convert people of color to Christianity. (add more detail here) She continues by stating that today, religious figures' identities may also be strengthened by their skin color and thus connect them to the communities that respect them. 
  
  Patton states that color can also point to geographic origins outside of European lands. The British Library homes a manuscript titled Travels of Sir John Mandeville that I think explores this idea of geographic origins and color. If you navigate over to folio 30r, you can see what I'm about to cover.
  
  What I noticed about this folio (folio 30r) was the stark contrast between the blue figures at the top of the page and the pale figures at the bottom. The blue figures are covered in cloaks and their feet are abnormally long. When compared to their pale counterparts with small noses and gentle eyes, they have snout-like noses and larger eyes. Deborah Strickland discusses this in her chapter “Monstrosity and Race in the Late Middle Ages"

  The main elements of monstrosity would appear to be remote location, unusual physical form, and bizarre behavior.

  
  
  When I think about Barlett's explanation of gens and natio and consider the elements of monstrosity described by Strickland, it seems clear to me how the two concepts relate to physical appearance, such as skin pigmentation. It's important to note how broad the categories are and groups people in blanket statements. For medieval poeple, monstrosity was the operative concept because it relied on location, physical appearance, and behavior. When we think about the way Fordun wrote about the lowland Scotts for their behavior and location, it's important to question what happened when where were people of color as well. 
  
  We will briefly explore this question with Nadia Altschul.
  
  
   
• 1 media/BODLEIAN_10310774610.jpg 2020-07-25T05:14:31+00:00 Middle Ages and Race 26 Our Understandings of Race plain 36 2020-08-04T03:03:18+00:00

  Typing the keywords ‘race’ and ‘middle ages’ into one of your favorite search engines will bring you to a plethora of resources and authors both spouting various understandings of one similar notion; race in the middle ages is far more complicated than you may think. Robert Barlett explores 'race' in the Middle Ages in the article Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity.
  
  He shares that the Medieval terminology includes the words gens and natio among many others. Which when translated as Barlett puts it, 'most neutrally', can mean people and nation. Continuing, Barlett explores Medieval classifying a bit further by sharing Scottish chronicler John Fordun's passage. Fordun illustrates the supposed differences between lowland and highland Scotts by naming the lowland or coastal Scotts as 'civilized' and the highlanders as 'wild...primitive'. This example clarifies how the words gens and natio were central to classifying individuals.

  Our understanding of the Medieval labeling of people is but a mere topping on the large Medieval Supreme Pizza we have before us. Urging us to consider other aspects of the classifying words 'people' and 'nation', Barlett points to genealogy and descent.

  This was a world in which blood and descent were seen as fundamental... solidarities were central to shaping patterns of property, power, and violence. To people who constantly saw fate and fortunes of individuals determined by their birth and descent, it was natural to conceptualize humanity in similarly genealogical terms

  
  Pamela Patton writes on this in her chapter of Whose Middle Ages? titled '"Blackness, Whiteness, and the Idea of Race in the Medieval European Art"

  The human classification of the Middle Ages... enabled them to assign status, control movement, and limit agency for groups that they identified as different from, and thus in their view inferior to, their own.

  
  We've covered genealogy, people, and nation. What role did color play in classifying people? Patton writes that early Christian theologians saw blackness as an external manifestations of sinfulness.