A01=Lynn T. Ramey
Alhambra
architecture
Author_Lynn T. Ramey
Bhabha
Bible
Black Knight
Black Legacies
Category=DSBB
Category=JBSL
Category=NHDJ
Christian
colonization
convivencia
death
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
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Ethopia
Europe
Greek
Ham
historiography
Iberia
images
Islam
Jew
linguistic turn
literature
Lynn Ramey
medieval studies
Middle Ages
miscegenation
Moor
Moses
Muslim
Noah
Origen
phenotype
prejudice
Queen of Sheba
race
racial consciousness
rationalism
renaissance
Robin Hood
Roman
Saracen
scientific racism
sin
Soloman
Song of Roland
Song of Songs
Spain
travel writing
Viollet-le-Duc
Washington Irving
xenophobia
Product details
- ISBN 9780813060071
- Weight: 398g
- Dimensions: 161 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 02 Sep 2014
- Publisher: University Press of Florida
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Black Legacies looks at color-based prejudice in medieval and modern texts in order to reveal key similarities. Bringing far-removed time periods into startling conversation, this book argues that certain attitudes and practices present in Europe’s Middle Ages were foundational in the development of the western concept of race.
Using historical, literary, and artistic sources, Lynn Ramey shows that twelfth- and thirteenth-century discourse was preoccupied with skin color and the coding of black as “evil” and white as “good.” Ramey demonstrates that fears of miscegenation show up in all medieval European societies. She pinpoints these same ideas in the rhetoric of later centuries. Mapmakers and travel writers of the colonial era used medieval lore of “monstrous peoples” to question the humanity of indigenous New World populations, and medieval arguments about humanness were employed to justify the slave trade. Ramey even analyzes how race is explored in films set in medieval Europe, revealing an enduring fascination with the Middle Ages as a touchstone for processing and coping with racial conflict in the West today.
Using historical, literary, and artistic sources, Lynn Ramey shows that twelfth- and thirteenth-century discourse was preoccupied with skin color and the coding of black as “evil” and white as “good.” Ramey demonstrates that fears of miscegenation show up in all medieval European societies. She pinpoints these same ideas in the rhetoric of later centuries. Mapmakers and travel writers of the colonial era used medieval lore of “monstrous peoples” to question the humanity of indigenous New World populations, and medieval arguments about humanness were employed to justify the slave trade. Ramey even analyzes how race is explored in films set in medieval Europe, revealing an enduring fascination with the Middle Ages as a touchstone for processing and coping with racial conflict in the West today.
Lynn T. Ramey is associate professor of French at Vanderbilt University, USA. She is the author of Christian, Saracen and Genre in Medieval French Literature: Imagination and Cultural Interaction in the French Middle Ages and coeditor of Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema.
