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Slavery can exist without racism, which certainly appears and endures in societies without slavery. Slavery and racism become entangled in color symbolism and color prejudice across the planet, and no natural rules determine how hierarchies evolve privileging some people over others. Nevertheless, looking at attitudes toward blackness in medieval Europe shows how one region’s societies evolving attitudes about color and the human family preordained how Europeans treated people who appeared different.Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and pagan antiquity bequeathed to medieval Europe systems of slavery as well as ideas on a hierarchy of “races” privileging some groups and colors over others. The premodern science of physiognomy legitimized constructs of race and color symbolism, to which commentators on the Bible contributed. The apparently stark contrasts among black, brown, red, and white people became proxies for good and evil and other traits. In Europe blackness normally defined Satan, bad things like death and melancholy, and eventually a prevalent type of slave. Color (and gender) of slaves in the late medieval Mediterranean markets affected their prices and revealed buyers’ preferences. Fifteenth-century encounters with sub-Sahara Africa illuminate how Europeans imposed their values of color prejudice on peoples who did not share them.
Edited by
Lara J. Farrell, Griffith University, Queensland,Thomas H. Ollendick, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,Peter Muris, Universiteit Maastricht, Netherlands
This book examines the relationship between humans and nature that evolved in medieval Europe over the course of a millennium. From the beginning, people lived in nature and discovered things about it. Ancient societies bequeathed to the Middle Ages both the Bible and a pagan conception of natural history. These conflicting legacies shaped medieval European ideas about the natural order and what economic, moral and biological lessons it might teach. This book analyzes five themes found in medieval views of nature – grafting, breeding mules, original sin, property rights and disaster – to understand what some medieval people found in nature and what their assumptions and beliefs kept them from seeing.