Geographies of Difference in the Middle Ages
As we've seen, the Middle Ages are full of questions about how to define the self. In our recent discussions of Aucassin et Nicolette, we questioned the construction of hybridity — specifically, generic hybridity, but also in terms of class, race, and gender.
We also wondered about whether the text is staging hybridity or doubling, that is, whether it advocates mixing identities or embracing cultural parallelism, in accepting differences that exist alongside one another.
One of the questions that remains, however, is about Nicolette's blackface. How do we resolve her easy and fluid transitions between states? Are we meant to? While the text earlier described blackness as "mervellex" in Old French (XX, 15–17), is her transition a marvel — that is, a wonder — or is it horrible? Is she a success story, or is the unpopularity of the manuscript of A&N a testament to medieval readers' reception of the story? How can we situate her identity? Perhaps one way is by thinking along with Jeffrey J Cohen(@jeffreyjcohen), who writes about current thinking about the mutability of medieval race in his article “On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31:1 (Winter 2001): 113–46:
That the body of the medieval other could be a racialized body perhaps needs some elaboration. Robert Bartlett has influentially argued that race in the Middle Ages was closer to what we would today call ethnicity. While observing that the language in which race was expressed (“gens, natio, ‘blood,’ ‘stock,’ etc.”) would seem to be biological, Bartlett nonetheless asserts that “its medieval reality was almost entirely cultural.”8 Bartlett defines medieval race as a compound of language, law, power, and blood. Because only the last of these determinants is rooted in the body, Bartlett stresses, race was a plastic category of identity. Modern technologies of racial discrimination and containment (special badges and clothing, ghet- toization) emerged only after an emphasis on descent and uniformity became prevalent in the late Middle Ages.9 Even then, however, the biological deter- mination of race proceeded from a preoccupation with blood in its relation to lineage and inheritance rather than from a cultural interest in skin color and physiology, making medieval racism different in kind from contempo- rary versions.10
Dermal and physiological difference, the most familiar markers of embodied race, play no role in Bartlett’s formulation because he overlooks race’s humoral-climatological (that is, medical and scientific) construction; race for Bartlett ultimately has little to do with bodies. Another scholar, faced with what seems to be just such a “modern” linking of bodily difference and skin color to racial typing, likewise hesitates to invoke the possibility of a premodern bodily discrimination of race. In a footnote to her magisterial work on the scientific construction of sexual difference in the Middle Ages, Joan Cadden puzzles over a reference by Albertus Magnus connecting the color of black women’s skin to their supposed sexual aptness. Since so little scholarship exists on the medieval language of skin color, she writes, it is difficult to evaluate black skin as a possible racial signifier. Yet skin color is never a mere fact, but is, from the moment a difference in pigmentation is imputed, already caught in the imbricated discriminations that make race inextricable from religion, location, class, language, bodily appearance and comportment, anatomy, physiology, and other medical/scientific discourses of somatic functioning. John Block Friedman long ago stressed that race (even if monstrous race) could be read only by reference to geography, theology, and bodily morphology. Recent work by Steven Kruger maps medieval race as a phenomenon encompassing the imbricated mutability of gender, sexuality, and religion. Suzanne Conklin Akbari has stressed the climatological construction of what eventually becomes European whiteness. Geraldine Heng has underscored the shared work of juridical and textual constructions of racial alterity in ameliorating trauma and precipitating national cohesion. These medievalists stress that race is a phenomenon of multiple category overlap rather than a distinctly reifiable or measurable “thing” (that is, race has no independent ontology), and that race is therefore always written on and produced through the body (race is nonetheless biological). These conclusions, it is worth noting, are wholly consonant with recent work in contemporary critical race theory.
The erasure of embodied race in both Cadden and Bartlett is traceable to the fact that these critics focus their attention silently and almost exclusively on the Christian body, which then functions in their analysis in just the way the medieval corpus Christianum presented itself: as a universal body unmarked by such differentiations. Strictly speaking, the Christian body did not have a race (just as, ideally, it did not have a gender or a sexu-ality), because the body of the other always carried that burden on its behalf.
That the body of the medieval other could be a racialized body perhaps needs some elaboration. Robert Bartlett has influentially argued that race in the Middle Ages was closer to what we would today call ethnicity. While observing that the language in which race was expressed (“gens, natio, ‘blood,’ ‘stock,’ etc.”) would seem to be biological, Bartlett nonetheless asserts that “its medieval reality was almost entirely cultural.” Bartlett defines medieval race as a compound of language, law, power, and blood. Because only the last of these determinants is rooted in the body, Bartlett stresses, race was a plastic category of identity. Modern technologies of racial discrimination and containment (special badges and clothing, ghettoization) emerged only after an emphasis on descent and uniformity became prevalent in the late Middle Ages. Even then, however, the biological determination of race proceeded from a preoccupation with blood in its relation to lineage and inheritance rather than from a cultural interest in skin color and physiology, making medieval racism different in kind from contemporary versions.
Dermal and physiological difference, the most familiar markers of embodied race, play no role in Bartlett’s formulation because he overlooks race’s humoral-climatological (that is, medical and scientific) construction; race for Bartlett ultimately has little to do with bodies. Another scholar, faced with what seems to be just such a “modern” linking of bodily difference and skin color to racial typing, likewise hesitates to invoke the possibility of a premodern bodily discrimination of race. In a footnote to her magisterial work on the scientific construction of sexual difference in the Middle Ages, Joan Cadden puzzles over a reference by Albertus Magnus connecting the color of black women’s skin to their supposed sexual aptness. Since so little scholarship exists on the medieval language of skin color, she writes, it is difficult to evaluate black skin as a possible racial signifier. Yet skin color is never a mere fact, but is, from the moment a difference in pigmentation is imputed, already caught in the imbricated discriminations that make race inextricable from religion, location, class, language, bodily appearance and comportment, anatomy, physiology, and other medical/scientific discourses of somatic functioning. John Block Friedman long ago stressed that race (even if monstrous race) could be read only by reference to geography, theology, and bodily morphology. Recent work by Steven Kruger maps medieval race as a phenomenon encompassing the imbricated mutability of gender, sexuality, and religion. Suzanne Conklin Akbari has stressed the climatological construction of what eventually becomes European whiteness. Geraldine Heng has underscored the shared work of juridical and textual constructions of racial alterity in ameliorating trauma and precipitating national cohesion. These medievalists stress that race is a phenomenon of multiple category overlap rather than a distinctly reifiable or measurable “thing” (that is, race has no independent ontology), and that race is therefore always written on and produced through the body (race is nonetheless biological). These conclusions, it is worth noting, are wholly consonant with recent work in contemporary critical race theory.
The erasure of embodied race in both Cadden and Bartlett is traceable to the fact that these critics focus their attention silently and almost exclusively on the Christian body, which then functions in their analysis in just the way the medieval corpus Christianum presented itself: as a universal body unmarked by such differentiations. Strictly speaking, the Christian body did not have a race (just as, ideally, it did not have a gender or a sexuality), because the body of the other always carried that burden on its behalf.
For our purposes, we might focus on thinking with this last paragraph, about the ways things are defined by what they're not — in this case, how the Christian, white body is defined by bodies that are not Christian or white. I'm particularly interested in the intersection of critical whiteness studies (which takes this approach) and class in the medieval period. Here, Cohen points to the construction of whiteness — the immensely glorified construction of the text in signs as varied as physical descriptions to the herb used by Nicolette to transition back to her identity as Aucassin's lover — as something that is unmarked, only delineated by an other. The blackness, the foreign-ness, the otherness of non-Christians, non-whites in this text are the markers that define and delineate the norm, making whiteness a non-thing.
For us, in our discussions, Nicolette's origins were the immutable sign of her unacceptability, but her race was porous. We might then ask whether the same holds true for class? That is, do we assume both an uncritical whiteness for the Christian body, but also, and beyond, an uncritical privilege, too? Is Nicolette designed to in some way make class legible?
Another way to think about negotiating difference is to think with geography. How do we represent the foreign? Where (and what) is the foreign? Consider these representations:
Click on the "Strange Peoples of the World" section and check out the locations and ways that people are depicted on this map.
These images invite us to consider whether we are confronting cultural alterity or simply monstrosity, resonances with the deformity of Marie de France's Bisclavret, for example. Does racial difference align better with monstrosity? If so, what kinds of exchange are even possible in cross-cultural encounters, especially love affairs?
For next time: is hybridity really a possibility in medieval texts?
