The Overlooked Medievalist Career of Dr. Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964)
by Erik Wade
We are the heirs of a past which was not our fathers’ moulding.
-Anna Julia Cooper
In 1886, Black feminist Anna Julia Cooper stood before a gathering of Black clergy in Washington D.C.’s Protestant Episcopalian Church and spoke about the place of women in society. Cooper located the origins of modern society’s “noble and ennobling ideal of women” in the feudal Christianity of medieval Europe.
I want to address how white medievalists like myself rarely recognize Cooper as a kindred medievalist and about how white medievalists systematically acted as gatekeepers towards Cooper and other Black women working in medieval studies.
When she gave her medieval talk, Cooper was a not-quite-thirty-year-old schoolteacher with a B.A. from Oberlin College who taught Latin, Greek, German, and mathematics at Washington D.C.’s only high school for Black students. She and her mother had been enslaved when she was young, and she often recalled the efforts that her mother went to ensure Cooper’s education. Cooper went on to give more talks and continued to draw upon medieval literature and history in her principled condemnation of racism and her articulation of the unique position of Black women in America. In later writing, she slyly tweaked white supremacist ideas of white “Anglo-Saxon” superiority (she called them “Angry Saxons”) and their basis in an imagined descent from medieval “Nordic” forebears:
I have not enough of the spirit that comes with the blood of those grand old sea kings (I believe you call them) who shot out in their trusty barks speeding over unknown seas and, like a death-dealing genius, with the piercing eye and bloodthirsty heart of hawk or vulture killed and harried, burned and caroused. This is doubtless all very glorious and noble, and the seed of it must be an excellent thing to have in one’s blood.
In 1892, she published her talks as A Voice From the South, By A Black Woman of the South. She remained active well into her 100s and died at the age of 105.
Over the course of her 1886 talk, Cooper argued that feudalism and Christianity elevated the status of women, yet only certain women benefited from this. Cooper attended to the role of women in both medieval and modern society, and she insisted that “women” was a category splintered by race and class. In later talks, she called out white feminists, saying of one “she had not calculated that there were any wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters, except white ones.”
In her 1886 talk, Cooper suggested that modern society required the Black woman in order to progress: “No other hand can move the lever. She must be loosed from her bands and set to work.” The Black woman, Cooper reasoned, “is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both.” She articulated this in her usual smart, evocative way and described searching for a restroom, only to be confronted by “two dingy little rooms with ‘FOR LADIES’ swinging over one and ‘FOR COLORED PEOPLE’ over the other; while wondering under which head I come[.]” Cooper reminds us of the “reluctance to see black women as women” that Audre Lorde would point out almost a century later in Sister Outsider. Black feminist scholars consider Cooper’s work to be an early example of the theory we now call intersectionality: the idea that the modern experience of Black women cannot be described only through the lens of gender or the lens of race.
As a white scholar, I lack the lived experience to speak fully to the importance and meaning of Cooper’s contributions. Black scholars in classics and medieval studies have written powerfully about Cooper’s importance. Black feminists like Vivian M. May and Brittney C. Cooper have restored Cooper’s career and writing to public knowledge (see recommended readings below). In an upcoming article, Dr. Mary Rambaran-Olm and I argue that Cooper saw the Middle Ages as a potent field in which to contest dominant white-supremacist narratives. Cooper rooted her understanding of the present in the distant past, a past that she thought had shaped the lives of contemporary Black people.
Early in her medievalist career, Cooper worked towards a doctorate at Columbia University with an emphasis on Old French literature, and she produced a painstaking edition of the twelfth-century French romance Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne. Forced to leave Columbia due to residency requirements that conflicted with her obligations in Washington D.C., Cooper started again at the Sorbonne, which refused to accept her edition of Le Pèlerinage. So she began a new thesis on the Haitian revolution. She defended her degree in 1925, at the age of 67, to an all-white committee including a hostile professor whose ideas about “Nordic” superiority Cooper called out during the defense.
While her letters, speeches, and memoirs are now available in new editions, her Le Pèlerinage remains out of print and difficult to access. In the epic, Charlemagne travels to the Byzantine Empire to prove he is greater than the Byzantine King, but the quest ends up with the drunken Europeans making foolish pledges that they cannot fulfill without God’s help. Cooper makes little comment on the epic’s subject-matter, but her decision to focus on a satirical medieval text about European perceptions of their own superiority is in accord with her other writings.
Cooper’s struggle to publish her edition of Le Pèlerinage reveals the anti-Blackness of white medieval studies — anti-Blackness that has scarcely changed in the hundred years since. She wrote to her alma mater Oberlin in 1926, hoping that they would help her publish her edition of Le Pèlerinage. She deliberately kept her race out of the edition and its advertising: “Frankly I think my color will be a barrier in this country, & that is why I would have the work taken solely on its merits without reference to the personality of its editor[.]” She was fully aware of the obstacles she would face, despite the rigor of her scholarship.
Katherine Shilton has analyzed the letters between Cooper, Oberlin, and various medievalists about Cooper’s Le Pèlerinage. Three white male medievalists — Oberlin’s own Hermann H. Thornton, the University of Chicago’s T. Atkinson Jenkins, and Benjamin Parsons Bourland at Case Western Reserve University — reviewed Cooper’s book for Oberlin. All three men suggested that the edition shouldn’t be published, though they all kept copies for themselves. According to Thornton, “Jenkins thinks the work is pretty bad.”
Thornton seemed to recognize Jenkins’ racism but kept silent about it. (How many of us white scholars have remained silent in similar situations? How many other Coopers have we lost in medieval studies?) Thornton suggested that Jenkins’ opinion was likely “to prevail in this country[,]” a hint that Thornton himself thought Jenkins’ opinion reflected the racism of “this country[.]”
Evidence shows that Cooper’s edition, however, was well-used, even by these three medievalists who refused to endorse it publicly. Thornton, like Bourland, used the edition for both teaching and research: “Needless to say, I have mentioned it and shown it to my class in Old French Literature, as well as to the little Faculty French Circle.” Harvard faculty taught her edition in their classes, and a letter survives asking Cooper for the right to reprint parts of her translation in an anthology of medieval French poetry. As Shilton notes, this is “evidence that Cooper’s work was not, in fact, ‘pretty bad’, but that an element of her race or gender kept her work from being accepted[.]”
These three medievalists’ policing of their scholarly community proceeded according to what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has called “color-blind racism,” in which white people avoid overt racist claims and instead police based on seemingly objective criteria. Jenkins (at the time the president of MLA) and company dismissed the significance of Cooper’s work, attributed the edition’s usefulness to its quotations of Koschwitz (a white medievalist whose work Cooper used as the basis for part of her edition), and yet drew upon it for their own research and teaching. They would not acknowledge the work of Black medievalists but still mined that work for useful material for white academia.
No doubt all three men thought themselves progressive and above racism. Their rejection, however, shows how white academics policed the borders of academia, offering seemingly objective opinions that often mark Black scholars as subpar medievalists (Such policing continues today, as senior white medievalists dismiss Black scholars’ work as “8th-rate”). As Cooper once noted, “‘Learned societies’ do not seek colored workers.”
The white medievalists’ racism did not register to their white colleagues. An obituary of Jenkins in Language notes his “peculiarly kind and sympathetic nature[.]” Jenkins and his colleagues made medieval studies into a segregated community, a state that has hardly changed in the subsequent century.
Anna J. Cooper was not the only early Black scholar in medieval studies. Georgiana Simpson, the first Black woman to earn a PhD in the United States in 1921, did a master’s degree in medieval studies, with a thesis on the early High German poem Merigarto. Mary Rambaran-Olm has drawn attention to Gordon D. Houston, a Black professor who taught Old English from 1912 to 1919 at Howard University and whose medieval pedagogy prefigured the work of later white scholars like J. R. R. Tolkien. As Rambaran-Olm and Kathy Lavezzo have both shown, Tolkien himself discouraged a young Stuart Hall’s theoretical approaches to medieval literature.
Even recent medievalists of color are often not recognized. Jacqueline de Weever was one of the first medievalists to study race and incorporate postcolonial theory, presenting on medieval Orientalism in 1984. Her 1998 book Sheba’s Daughters analyzed the intersection of race, gender, and religion in how medieval French epics depicted Muslim women. She showed how Europeans projected their guilt about the Crusaders who committed cannibalism at Antioch and Marra onto Muslim figures in an early act of Orientalism. Fellow medievalists rarely acknowledge de Weever, like Cooper, as one of the first to write about race. When medievalists cannot prevent scholars of color from entering the field, they pretend that they were never in it in the first place. The pressures Cooper faced remain familiar to many premodernists of color, especially Black ones, and revelations continue to emerge about how powerful white scholars have driven scholars of color out of the field.
White medievalists continue to overlook Black writers’ long history of writing about the Middle Ages. However, recent work by scholars of color like Kim Hall, Margo Hendricks, Jonathan Hsy, Mary Rambaran-Olm, and Matthew X. Vernon shows people of colors’ centuries of engagement with the Middle Ages. Two hundred years of Black thought about the Middle Ages lie stretched out behind us, exemplified by a sixteen-year-old Black student writing in 1834 in Cincinnati who saw the story of King Alfred as a lesson about how education can combat racism: “I think if the colored people study like king Alfred they will soon do away the evil of slavery. I cant see how the Americans can call this a land of freedom where so much slavery is.”
Only for white scholars is intersectionality a recent import into medieval studies. Cooper was one of the first major voices of intersectionality as a framework and through her career in medieval studies, we see a thread of anti-Blackness and colorism that persists in our field today. Medieval studies should acknowledge that Black scholars have carried out intersectional analysis of the Middle Ages since the nineteenth century. It is time for medievalists to catch up, to cite foundational Black medievalists, and to engage with their scholarship.
This is not a call to objectify Cooper as white scholars often do to scholars of color — particularly Black scholars — by naming them as important, but never engaging with their work. It means for us to engage, when appropriate, with her scholarship as medievalist scholarship.
We are not making a seat at the table for Cooper. Cooper’s work on intersectionality and anti-Blackness made it possible for us to have seats at the table. We are the heirs of a past which was of Cooper’s molding. Let’s recognize her for the medievalist she was.
My thanks to Drs. Mary Rambaran-Olm, Carissa Harris, Tarren Andrews, Marjorie Housley, and Geoff Way for their help and feedback on this article.
Further Reading:
Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South
Anna Julia Cooper, Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne
Anna Julia Cooper, The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper, including A Voice from the South and Other Essays, Papers, and Letters, edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan
Anna Julia Cooper, The Portable Anna Julia Cooper, edited by Shirley Moody-Turner and Henry Louis Gates
Vivian M. May, Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction
Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women
Anna Julia Cooper Collection, Howard University
Shelley P. Haley, “Black Feminist Thought and Classics: Re-membering, Re-claiming, Re-empowering,” in Feminist Theory and the Classics, eds. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin
Caitlin M. J. Pollock and Shelley P. Haley, “‘When I Enter’: Black Women and Disruption of the White, Heteronormative Narrative of Librarianship,” in Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS, eds. Rose L. Chou and Annie Pho
Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade, “Race 101 for Early Medieval Studies: Selected Readings”
Erik Wade is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the State University of New York at Oswego. He studies the global origins of early medieval English ideas of sexuality and race. He is co-writing a book, Race in Early Medieval England, with Dr. Mary Rambaran-Olm, under contract at Cambridge University Press, and he is also working on a monograph about sexuality, race, and rape culture in Old English literature. His work can be found in English Literary History, Exemplaria, postmedieval, JEGP, The Medieval Globe, Journal of Medieval Worlds, Early Middle English, Yearbook of English Studies, Smithsonian Magazine, Inside Higher Ed, NBC, and elsewhere.
