In the late Middle Ages, Christian conversion could wash a black
person's skin white--or at least that is what happens when a black
sultan converts to Christianity in the English romance King of Tars.
In Black Metaphors, Cord J. Whitaker examines the rhetorical and
theological moves through which blackness and whiteness became metaphors
for sin and purity in the English and European Middle Ages--metaphors
that guided the development of notions of race in the centuries that
followed. From a modern perspective, moments like the sultan's
transformation present blackness and whiteness as opposites in which
each condition is forever marked as a negative or positive attribute;
medieval readers were instead encouraged to remember that things that
are ostensibly and strikingly different are not so separate after all,
but mutually construct one another. Indeed, Whitaker observes, for
medieval scholars and writers, blackness and whiteness, and the sin and
salvation they represent, were held in tension, forming a unified whole.
Whitaker asks not so much whether race mattered to the Middle Ages as
how the Middle Ages matters to the study of race in our fraught times.
Looking to the treatment of color and difference in works of rhetoric
such as John of Garland's Synonyma, as well as in a range of
vernacular theological and imaginative texts, including Robert Manning's
Handlyng Synne, and such lesser known romances as The Turke and Sir
Gawain, he illuminates the process by which one interpretation among
many became established as the truth, and demonstrates how modern
movements--from Black Lives Matter to the alt-right--are animated by the
medieval origins of the black-white divide.
