The Black Middle Ages

Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages

Matthew X. Vernon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319910888
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319910895
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Contributes timely research to join the fields of medieval studies and African American studies

Assembles an archive of texts to expand understandings of black studies

Promotes a transhistorical and comparative theoretical framework

 

© The Author(s) 2018

Matthew X. VernonThe Black Middle AgesThe New Middle Ageshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91089-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Reading Out of Time—Genealogy, African-American Literature, and the Middle Ages

Matthew X. Vernon¹

(1)

University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA

Matthew X. Vernon

End Abstract

Anglo-Saxon Freedoms

This book, which is about narratives that have been subsumed under dominant discourses, will fittingly begin with a historical footnote. In the midst of the 2012 campaign for president of the United States, when each side was vying for the slightest advantage in the battle for headlines, the British paper, The Daily Telegraph, claimed that one of the advisors for the Republican candidate Mitt Romney made an unusual statement. He argued, according to the report, that Romney had a unique connection with the British prime minister because of the “Anglo-Saxon heritage” that the two countries shared in common, an inheritance that Obama “didn’t fully appreciate.”¹ The comments occasioned a minor tempest and the Romney campaign vehemently denied them. Journalists debated just what to make of this statement. Stephen Colbert, host of the satirical television show, The Colbert Report, even suggested that Romney was evoking Germanic tribal connections and that he would soon be quoting Beowulf in his stump speeches. While this gaffe was a small wrinkle in a much larger political contest, the sentiment evoked a long tradition within American society. A year earlier, Forbes Magazine had published an article calling for the return to Anglo-Saxon principles , the ones upon which the founding fathers sought to base the laws of the country.² A few years before that in a dissenting opinion, the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia expressed concern that America was in danger of undoing its “Anglo-Saxon system” of separated powers.³ At the start of the twenty-first century, the influential conservative political historian Samuel Huntington lamented the diminishing force of “Anglo-Saxonism” in American politics within a larger argument about the disintegration of a coherent American identity.⁴

The resurgence of these conservative ideas—in the political and ideological senses of the phrase—that tried to resist the demographic future of a diversifying country by reasserting America’s connection to the foundation of English political structures seemed to be upended by subsequent turns in American politics. Donald Trump was elected president. Political analysts began to reassess America’s historical trajectory to account for his unexpected victory. Moreover, the president himself was disinterested in history; a discussion of his connection to a pre-modern society would seem absurd.⁵ The terms of the debate about the future of the nation shifted away from its roots in the hoary past to the presidency’s modern antecedents. And yet, even in this campaign that seemed to defy all expectations, the dynamics that underpinned the Romney aide’s comments were replayed in one of the strangest but most telling scenes of the 2016 campaign. Trump enlisted the support of Nigel Farage, a British Member of Parliament who had championed the British exit from the European Union, to argue that America could regain its sovereignty and voters who were victims of “modern global corporatism” could regain their “self-respect.”⁶ This choice of political surrogate perplexed commentators who underestimated the pull of the latent urge to roll back the years and seek solidarities that presumed the clarity of racial origins and borders; that is, to inhabit the fantasy of a pre-modern past. Although the subject of this book will be about what is marginal and easy to overlook, the issue under investigation—the desire for and use of origins that are pre-modern, specifically medieval origins—is an abiding and powerful undercurrent in American political, educational, and cultural discourses.

The claims of an American “medieval heritage” have a curious genealogy. Each instance connects the United States and medieval Europe in ways that center on how American identity was conceived at the nation’s founding, particularly by Thomas Jefferson . There are many well-worn anecdotes about Jefferson’s antiquarian zeal for the Anglo-Saxon period and how he mobilized the history and language of the Anglo-Saxon period for contemporary purposes. Jefferson advocated that law students at the University of Virginia study Old English as a means to understand “our ancient common law, on which, as a stock, our whole system of law is engrafted.”⁷ Through this linguistic training students would have a closer understanding of the philosophy that he believed so deeply informed the framing of the nation’s laws. Jefferson was enthusiastic enough to muse about enshrining an image of Anglo-Saxons in one of the most significant American symbols; he proposed a plan for the Great Seal of the United States that would depict Hengest and Horsa, the mythical first Saxon settlers on Britain, taking their first steps ashore. Jefferson was deeply and personally invested in the Anglo-Saxon period; he describes his preoccupation as a “hobby which too often runs away with me where I meant not to give up the rein.”⁸

The focus on Thomas Jefferson allows scholars and public figures alike to locate the Middle Ages within a critical point of American history and suggests the continued significance of medieval texts, language, and philosophy in the modern period.⁹ Dangers lurk in the desire for origins, this mapping between the foundational moment of the nation and the medieval period. Implicated within Jefferson’s discussions of medieval literature is his ability to disarticulate the language of liberty he found to be so attractive within Anglo-Saxon literature from the realities of slave ownership. Jefferson looked to the Anglo-Saxon period as the historical and hereditary basis for a theory of liberty that could then be conferred upon future generations of Americans. In making an argument about the American right to rebel against the king, he refers to the allodial title of the Anglo-Saxons which was conveyed to American settlers.¹⁰ This historical argument reads America as never having been defeated by William the Conqueror, thus subject only to Anglo-Saxon law, not the king’s law. In a letter to a friend and Justice for the Virginia Supreme Court, Edmund Pendleton, Jefferson would further clarify this position:

Has it not been the practice of all other nations to hold their lands as their personal estate in absolute dominion? Are we not the better for what we have hitherto abolished of the feudal system? Has not every restitution of the antient [sic] Saxon laws had happy effects? Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest & most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the 8th century.¹¹

He concludes the letter by noting that it was “the season for driving” the Cherokee native Americans off their lands. Jefferson, of course, leaves unwritten that the laws of the nation derived from England would only convey to those “of Anglo-Saxon descent.” By locating the source of this human potential within a mythical Anglo-Saxon people who “had always been freedom-loving, and who had always exhibited an outstanding capacity for good government,” Jefferson circumscribed the space within which “the rights of man” might be understood.¹² The freedoms Jefferson theorized would bear a racial charge that has not yet been fully expended. The perhaps more pernicious bequeathal of Jefferson, which becomes amplified throughout the nineteenth century and can be dimly viewed from the examples that begin this chapter, is that he evokes a Middle Ages that never existed. His strategic reading makes the past conform to the exigencies of political circumstances in his present. The Anglo-Saxons, who factor prominently in his accounting of British history, always rule in the name of “moral rights.” Of the Normans, he merely condemns them for their regime “built on conquest and physical force.”¹³ And about medieval moments of cultural encounter or synthesis, he is largely silent.

The mythologizing of Anglo-Saxons certainly did not begin with Jefferson. The poetry, collections of folklore, and antiquarian research that kindled the fires of the Romantic movement in the eighteenth century often looked to the Anglo-Saxon period as the source of pure cultural identity, “of unmixt blood.”¹⁴ Those flames would continue to burn in nineteenth-century literature seeking to celebrate American expansionist policies by linking them to British imperialist history. Jack London, in a 1901 essay contemplating Rudyard Kipling’s legacy, imagines an Anglo-Saxon spirit that unifies the United States and Great Britain:

What the Anglo-Saxon has done, [Kipling] has memorialized. And by Anglo-Saxon is not meant merely the people of that tight little island on the edge of the Western Ocean. Anglo-Saxon stands for the English- speaking people of all the world, who, in forms and institutions and traditions, are more peculiarly and definitely English than anything else. This people Kipling has sung. Their sweat and blood and toil have been the motives of his songs; but underlying all the motives of his songs is the motive of motives, the sum of them all and something more, which is one with what underlies all the Anglo-Saxon sweat and blood and toil; namely, the genius of the race. […]

The Anglo-Saxon is a pirate, a land robber and a sea robber. Underneath his thin coating of culture, he is what he was in Morgan’s time, in Drake’s time, in William’s time, in Alfred’s time. The blood and the tradition of Hengist and Horsa are in his veins. In battle he is subject to the blood lusts of the Berserkers of old. Plunder and booty fascinate him immeasurably.¹⁵

London nimbly skips through timeframes and across continents to advance his argument about the role of “the Anglo-Saxon” in shaping the nineteenth century. London’s reading of history is determinative of cultural products that he believed “Anglo-Saxons” created. This perspective astounds in its ability to reconcile apparent contradictions in historical fact and sentiment for the goal of constructing the past in the vision of himself. How else could “the Anglo-Saxon” both be the Viking berserker and the British king repelling those same Viking attacks; how else could he celebrate “the Anglo-Saxon” who “loves freedom, but is dictatorial to others”?¹⁶ London reveals the critical duality of Anglo-Saxon identity. It is capacious—the word he uses is “cosmic” in the sense that it endures unchanged over time—yet it is narrowly confined to “the race.” Anglo-Saxon identity depends on the politics of exclusion and the claim of a connection to a past unique unto itself...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Reading Out of Time—Genealogy, African-American Literature, and the Middle Ages
• 2. Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages in African-American Scholarship and Curricula
• 3. Failed Knights and Broken Narratives: Mark Twain and Charles Chesnutt’s Black Romance
• 4. History, Genealogy, and Gerald of Wales: Medieval Theories of Ethnicity and Their Afterlives
• 5. Other Families: Dryden’s Theory of Congeniality in Dante, Chaucer, and Naylor
• 6. Coda: True and Imaginary History in Django Unchained
• Back Matter