The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages

by Matthew X. Vernon

The Black Middle Ages examines the influence of medieval studies on African-American thought. Matthew X. Vernon focuses on nineteenth century uses of medieval texts to structure racial identity, but also considers the flexibility of medieval narratives more broadly in the medieval period, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book engages disparate discourses to reassess African-American positionalities in time and space. Utilizing a transhistorical framework, Vernon reflects on medieval studies as a discipline built upon a contended set of ideologies and acts of imaginative appropriation visible within source texts and their later mobilizations.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medieval, Race, Medieval History

266 pages, Hardcover

Published August 23, 2018

Reviews

[Jacob Stephan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Black Middle Ages is a heady piece of scholarship that examines a fascinating intersection between African-American cultural history, medievalism, and medieval studies of race. A difficult book to utilize if one lacks a background in African-American studies, but the thesis is illuminating nonetheless. Matthew Vernon argues that African-American writers, intellectuals, scholars, etc., utilized the Middle Ages (in image, idea, literature, and history) to challenge and reconfigure notions of African-American identity and situation during a time when African-American enfranchisement was still a matter of recent memory.

[nora · Rating 3 out of 5]

Such an interesting critical intervention, but this one just never really came together for me as a whole project—a couple of the chapters feel like they would work better in a different book, and the amount of relation to the Middle Ages specifically varies drastically, from pure primary source interpretation to extensive description of contemporary novels with somewhat tenuous connections to earlier works.