Race, periodicity, and the (neo-) middle ages

Modern Language Quarterly

Volumn 65, Issue PART 3, 2004, Pages 391-421

  Lampert, Lisa ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67650027602     PISSN: 00267929     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00267929-65-3-391     Document Type: Article

References (113)

1. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin's, 2000);
2. Thomas Hahn, ed., "Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages," special issue, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001);
3. Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Eantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
4. Robert Bartlett, "Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 42.
5. On the different but related topic of the so-called monstrous races see the classic study by John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
6. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 267-91.
7. Kwame Anthony Appiah, review of Racism: A Short History, by George M. Fredrickson, New York Times Book Review, August 4, 2002, 11.
8. For an argument against the use of the term race in medieval contexts see William Chester Jordan, "Why 'Race'?" Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 165-73.
9. John Ganim, "Native Studies: Orientalism and Medievalism," in Cohen, The Postcolonial Middle Ages, 125.
10. Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Race," in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 275.
11. See David Aers, "A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the 'History of the Subject,'" in Culture and History, 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Willing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 172 - 202;
12. Lee Patterson, "On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies," Speculum 65 (1990): 92-95;
13. and Jennifer Summit, Lost Properly: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
14. Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 147.
15. See Margaret Schlauch, "The Allegory of Church and Synagogue," Speculum 13 (1939): 448-64;
16. and Wolfgang Seiferth, Synagogue and Church in the Middle Ages: Two Symbols in Art and Literature, trans. Lee Chadeayne and Paul Gottwald (New York: Ungar, 1970).
17. For the historical development of the figure of Synagoga see Christine M. Rose, "The Jewish Mother-in-Law: Synagoga and the Man of Law's Tale," in Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings, ed. Sheila Delany (New York: Routledge, 2002), 3 - 24;
18. and Achim Timmermann, "The Avenging Crucifix: Some Observationson the Iconography of the Living Cross," Gesta 40 (2001): 141-60.
19. See Sander Gilman, "Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Modern Jewess," in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 97-120.
20. For discussion of the "beautiful Jewess" figure in literary history see Lisa Lampert, "'O My Daughter': The schone Jüdin and the neuer Jude in Hermann Sinsheimer's Maria Nunnez," German Quarterly 71 (1998): 254-70.
21. References to periodization boundaries between medieval and modern that resemble Hannaford's in their rigidity are perhaps nowhere more apparent than in discussions of prejudice against the Jews, in which scholars often employ the term anti-Judaism to reflect the theological ideas of the Middle Ages. The term anti-Semitism is associated with the biological theories of the nineteenth century, when it was coined. In his entry "Anti-Semitism," in the important reference work The Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer, 13 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1982 - 89), 1:338-42
22. Robert Chazan asserts that this term, whose usage has been "loose and idiosyncratic," is "in many ways inappropriate to the Middle Ages." This division between medieval and modern extends beyond academic contexts, as evidenced by the 1998 Vatican Commission document "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," which emphasizes nineteenth-century notions of anti-Semitism, drawing a sharp distinction between the religious anti-Judaism that developed most fully in the Middle Ages and the modern "biological" forms of racist anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust. This view is strongly challenged by David Kertzer, The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Knopf, 2001). The text of the Vatican Commission document appears in First Things, May 1998, 39-43.
23. For an overview of terminologies see Johannes Heil, "'Antijudaismus' und 'Antisemitismus': Begriffe als Bedeutungsträger," Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 6 (1998): 92-114.
24. The best historiographical discussion of the problem is the introduction to David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
25. See also the introduction to Lisa Lamport, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
26. For an insightful recent discussion of Burckhardt and periodization see Timothy J. Reiss, "Perioddity: Considerations on the Geography of Histories," MLQ 62 (2000:430-32.
27. See Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. 54-96.
28. George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 157.
29. This type of division is exemplified in the special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on "race and ethnicity in the Middle Ages" (see n. 1), in which discussion of Jews and anti-Jewish sentiment is virtually nonexistent. See comments by Jordan, 166.
30. See also the important discussion on anti-Semitism and race in early modern contexts in James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
31. Etienne Balibar, "Is There a 'Neo-Racism'?" in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1991), 17-28.
32. For two excellent discussions of "neo-racism" in relation to early literary texts see Julia Reinhard Lupton, "Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations," Representations 57 (1997): 73-89;
33. and Robert L. A. Clark and Claire Sponsler, "Queer Play: The Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval Drama," New Literary History 28 (1997): 19-44.
34. My reading of Balibar is indebted to a formal response by Ania Loomba to an earlier version of this essay as well as to much informal subsequent discussion and exchange.
35. R. W. Southern, Western Vinos of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 3
36. quoted in Jeremy Cohen, The Muslim Connection; or, On the Changing Role of the Jew in High Medieval Theology," in From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought, ed. Jeremy Cohen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996), 145.
37. Other useful studies of medieval Western European Christian views of Muslims, Arabs, and Islam are Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oneworld, 1993);
38. David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto, eds., Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other (New York: St. Martin's, 1999);
39. and John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
40. For analysis from a literary perspective see Suzanne Conklin Akbari, "Imagining Islam: The Role of Images in Medieval Depictions of Muslims," Scripta Mediterranea 19-20 (1998-99): 9-27;
41. and Akbari, "The Rhetoric of Antichrist in Western Lives of Muhammad," Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 8 (1997): 297-307.
42. Bruce Holsinger, "The Color of Salvation: Desire, Death, and the Second Crusade in Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs," in The Tongue of the Fathers: Gender and Ideology in Twelfth-Century Latin, ed. David Townsend and Andrew Taylor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 156-86. Holsinger's excellent postcolonial examination of the dynamics of black and white in relation to Bernard's spirituality and the violence of the Crusades complements my understanding of Parzival, which Holsinger mentions briefly.
43. The reading of the three narrative strands is a fundamental premise of Arthur Groos, Romancing the Grail: Genre, Science, and Quest in Wolfram's "Parzival" (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
44. "If there was anything brighter than daylight-the queen in no way resembled it. A woman's manner she did have, and was on other counts worthy of a knight, but she was unlike a dewy rose: her complexion was black of hue" (ist iht liehters demie der tac, / dem glîchet niht diu künegin. / si hete wîplîchen sin, / und was abr anders rîterlîch, / der touwegen rôsen ungelîch, / nâch swarzer varwe was ir schîn) (24.6-11).
45. The Middle High German excerpts from Parzival are from Wolfram von Eschenbach, ed. Karl Lachmann, 6th ed., newly edited by Eduard Hartl (1926; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1961).
46. References are to stanza and line. The English translations are all from Parzival, trans. Helen M. Mustard and Charles E. Passage (New-York: Vintage, 1961).
47. "In the city of Senile was born the man whom, some time later, he [Gahmuret] asked to take him away. He had already guided him many a mile; he had brought him here; he was not like a Moor in color. And this ship captain replied, 'You must quietly conceal this from those whose skins are black; my boats are so swift that they can never overtake us, and we shall get away'" (Von Sibilje ûzer stat / was geborn den er dâ bat / dan kêrens zeiner wîle. / der het in manege mîle / dâ vor gefuort: er brâhte in dar. / er was niht als ein Môr gevar. / der marnaere wise / sprach "ir sultz helen lîse / vor den die tragent daz swarze vel. / mîne kocken sint sô snel, / sine mugen uns niht genâhen / wir sullen von hitmen gâhen") (54.37-30 to 55.1-8).
48. For a reading in relation to Cistercian mysticism see H. B. Willson, "The Symbolism of Belakâne and Feirefiz in Wolfram's Parzival," German Life and Letters, n.s., 2 (1960): 94-105.
49. Alfred Ebenbauer, "'Es gibt ain môrynne vil click susse mynne': Belakanes Landsleutc in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters," Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 113 (1984): 21.
50. Jerold C. Frakes argues that fictional Muslims in Wolfram's work must undergo "forced metamorphosis" to achieve the tolerance that critics often praise in Wolfram's treatment of "heathens" ("Race, Representation, and Metamorphosis in Middle High German Literature," Nowele 31-32 [1997]: 119-33).
51. See also the comprehensive guide to Wolfram's work by Joachim Bumke, Wolfram von Eschenbach, 6th ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), esp. 52-54, 249-50.
52. David Blamires also argues that Feirefiz's body "pictographically expresses" the moral ambiguities that Parzival must overcome to become Grail king and that are discussed in the poem's opening lines (Characterization and Individuality in Wolfram's "Parzival" [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965], 438-41).
53. On Feirefiz as black hero see Fredrickson, 28.
54. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 131.
55. Other critics have noted these comic elements. See, e.g., Blamires, 452;
56. and Siegfried Richard Christoph, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Couples (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1981), 222-27.
57. On this trope in the early Christian tradition see Frank M. Snowden Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 196-207.
58. See Siobhain Montserrat Bly, "Stereotypical Saracens, the Auchinleck Manuscript, and the Problems of Imagining Englishncss in the Early Fourteenth Century" (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2001), 150-57;
59. and Dorothée Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 136-41.
60. See also the introduction to the modern edition, The King of Tars, ed. Judith Perryman (Heidelberg: Winter, 1980), 42-50. Subsequent citations refer to this edition.
61. Siobhain Montserrat Bly, "Religion and Biology: Saracens, The Problems of Categorization, and The King of Tars," Journal of English and Germanic Philology (forthcoming). I thank Bly for sharing this work with me and for her comments on this essay.
62. Related recent discussions are Geraldine Heng, "The Romance of England: Richard Coer de Lyon, Saracens, Jews, and the Politics of Race and Nation," in Cohen, The Postcolonial Middle Ages, 135-72;
63. Steven F. Kruger, "Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religions, and Racial Categories," in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 158-79;
64. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 113-46;
65. and Thomas Hahn, The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 1-37.
66. Elizabeth Robertson briefly discusses Parzival in relation to Chaucer's "Man of Law's Talc," which has many themes in common with The King of Tars, and argues that Parzival is "typical of the kind of work Chaucer might have drawn on to develop his own ideas about the interaction of Christian and Islam." Robertson takes care not to make further connections between Wolfram's work and Chaucer's ("The 'Elvyssh' Power of Constance: Christian Feminism in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Man of Law's Tale," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 [2001]: 151).
67. To my knowledge, there is no evidence for more than a general thematic connection between the two works. Carolyn Dinshaw also discusses the question of race and the "Man of Law's Tale" in the same issue as Robertson ("Pale Faces: Race, Religion, and Affect in Chaucer's Texts and Their Readers," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 [2001]: 19-41).
68. Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 47-48.
69. For links between color and cultural difference, specifically religious difference, in another medieval text see Sharon Kinoshita, "'Pagans Are Wrong and Christians Arc Right': Altcrity, Gender, and Nation in the Chanson de Roland," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 79-111.
70. Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
71. "AAA Statement on Race," American Anthropologist 100 (1998): 712 - 13.
72. "Census, Race, and Science," Nature Genetics 24 (2000): 97-98.
73. "Racial Profiling in Medical Research," New England Journal of Medicine 344 (2001): 1392-93.
74. Neil Risch et al., "Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research: Genes, Race, and Disease," Genome Biology 3 (2002): 2007.1 - 2007.12, genomebiology.com/ 2002/3/7/comment/2007.
75. See Nicholas Wade, "Race Is Seen as Real Guide to Track Roots of Disease," New York Times, July 30, 2002, late edition.
76. For an overview of the debate within the field of genetics see Morris W. Foster and Richard R. Sharp, "Race, Ethnicity, and Genomics: Social Classifications as Proxies of Biological Heterogeneity," Genome Research 12 (2002): 844-50.
77. Rebecca Trounson and Nancy Vogel, "The Recall Election; Propositions 53 and 54;
78. Both Ballot Measures Go Down in Defeat," Los Angeles Times, October 8, 2003;
79. Miguel Bustillo, "Ban on Gathering Racial Data on 2004 Ballot," Los Angeles Times, July 16, 2002, California Metro edition.
80. Patrick J. Geary, The Myths of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
81. Steven Erlanger, "Italy's Premier Calls Western Civilization Superior to Islamic World," New York Times, September 27, 2001.
82. See "Bush Gets More International Support for U.S. 'Crusade' against Terrorism," Washington Post, September 17, 2001, final edition;
83. and John F. Harris and Todd S. Purdum, "After the Attacks: The White House; Bush Warns of a Wrathful, Shadowy, and Inventive War," New York Times, September 17, 2001, late edition.
84. See "Bush Steps Back from Word 'Crusade,'" St. Petersburg Times, September 19, 2001;
85. "Bush's Rhetoric Fuels Violence, Critics Charge," Toronto Star, September 19, 2001, Ontario edition;
86. and Philip Wilan, "On the Brink of War: Berlusconi: Words That Led to Uproar Had Been 'Twisted': Italian PM Says Sorry for Attack on Islam," Guardian (London), September 29, 2001.
87. See Stephen J. Kobrin, "Back to the Future: Neomedievalism and the Postmodern Digital World Economy," Journal of International Affairs 51 (1998): 361-86.
88. See Ronald J. Deibert, "Neo-medievalism," in Routledge Encyclopedia of International Political Economy (New York: Routledge, 2001), 1114.
89. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 59-86.
90. Richard Falk, "A 'New Medievalism'?" in Contending Images of World Politics, ed. Greg Fry and Jacinta O'Hagan (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), 111.
91. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, and ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 245-55.
92. Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy," Atlantic, February 1994, 44-76.
93. As Simon Dalby points out in a biting critique, Kaplan's world could also be divided between "the rich, who read magazines like Atlantic, and the rest, who don't" ("Reading Robert Kaplan's 'Coming Anarchy,'" Ecumene 34 [1996]
94. rpt. in The Geopolitics Header, ed. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Simon Dalby, and Paul Routledge [New York: Routledge, 1998], 197).
95. Kathleen Davis argues that in both academic and popular discussions the Middle Ages can come to figure as a "future perfect" for modern times ("Time behind the Veil: The Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now," in Cohen, The Postcolonial Middle Ages, 105-22).
96. Kathleen Biddick argues that important theories of the ideologies of modernity, such as Benedict Anderson's concept of "the nation," rely on a vision of the Middle Ages that can be seen as "supersessionist," reminiscent of the imagined relationship between the Old Testament and the New ("Coming out of Exile: Dante on the Orient[alism] Express," American Historical Review 105 [2000]: 1236; see also Davis, 105-7).
97. Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72 (1993): 22-49;
98. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
99. Huntington's thesis has since moved from foreign policy journals into more mainstream forums. During the CBS Evening News on September 16, 2002, for example, Dan Rather asked Afghan president Hamid Karzai if he saw "a war between civilizations, a religious war if you will, Islam against Christianity and Judaism." Karzai replied, "Absolutely not" (see www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/16/eveningnews/main522171.shtml).
100. For more detailed critical responses to Huntington's thesis see Edward W. Said, "The Clash of Ignorance," Nation, October 22, 2001;
101. and Jacinta O'Hagan, "A 'Clash of Civilizations'?" in Fry and O'Hagan, 135-49.
102. Gearóid Ó Tuathail comments on the same map in "Samuel Huntington and the 'Civilizing' of Global Space," in Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
103. rpt. in The Geopolitics Reader, 172.
104. Huntington's book-length treatment of the "clash" thesis does deal with other clashes, but the conflict between the West and Islam remains the central one for him, as Said also observes in The Clash of Ignorance."
105. Bernard Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," Atlantic, September 1990, 60
106. and Time, June 15, 1992, 24-28, quoted in Huntington, 32.
107. W.E. B. DuBois, "Worlds of Color," Foreign Affairs 3 (1925): 423-44.
108. See, e.g., the May 2003 issue, which contains passionate letters to the editor about race in America, including debate over "Jewishness" as a racial category, in the wake of the most recent census ("Mongrel America," 18-22)
109. and also features Bernard Lewis, "'I'm Right, You're Wrong, Go to Hell': Religions and the Meeting of Civilizations" (36-42).
110. See, e.g., Mark Lilla's contribution to the May 2003 YIVO/Center for Jewish History conference on contemporary anti-Semitism, The End of Politics: Europe, the Nation-State, and the Jews," New Republic, June 23, 2003, 29-34, which makes provocative reference to both medieval and Enlightenment thought but also, I think, underestimates their significance to current problems.
111. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 49.
112. On the question of Christianity in another type of "making of Europe," the wording of the Constitution to be adopted by the European Union member states, see Richard Bernstein, "Continent Wrings Its Hands over Proclaiming Its Faith," New York Times, November 12, 2003;
113. and Thomas Fuller, "Europe Debates Whether to Admit God to Union," New York Times, February 5, 2003.