Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages
Lynn T. Ramey
Abstract
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. As early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, society was already preoccupied with skin color. Using historical, literary, and artistic sources, the book explores the multitude of ways the coding of black as “evil” and white as “good” existed in medieval European societies.
Keywords: Middle Ages, race, skin color, black, white, good, evil, medieval Europe
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 | Print ISBN-13: 9780813060071 |
| Published to Florida Scholarship Online: January 2015 | DOI:10.5744/florida/9780813060071.001.0001 |
