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

Matthew X. Vernon
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T H E N E W M I D D L E A G E S
The Black
Middle Ages
RACE and the
CONSTRUCTION
of the MIDDLE AGES
Matthew X. Ver non

The New Middle Ages
Series Editor
Bonnie Wheeler
English & Medieval Studies
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, TX, USA
The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of
medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s his-
tory and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series
includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14239
Matthew X. Vernon
The Black Middle

Ages
Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages
Matthew X. Vernon
University of California, Davis
Davis, CA, USA
The New Middle Ages

ISBN 978-3-319-91088-8 ISBN 978-3-319-91089-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91089-5
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To my family who lives the vernacular.
And to my family who gave me a light in the dark places, when all other
lights went out.
Preface
About the Nature and Structure of This Study

Even at the level of lexicon there are clear difficulties with this project.
This subject is literally hard to talk about. To paraphrase Twain, medieval
and African-American studies can seem like two fields separated by a com-
mon language. What do we mean when we say “vernacular”? Are we dis-
cussing the vernaculars of thirteenth-century England or the multiplicity
of registers in American English, including dialect and regional vocabular-
ies? When we say “feudalism,” do we mean the baggy category meant to
capture the economic and social relations of medieval peoples or is it
meant as the equally fraught category for slave labor in a capitalist American
context? Is “Anglo-Saxon” a cultural designation for a person who has not
existed for nearly a thousand years or shorthand for a white American?
Even deceptively straightforward terms like the lyric, race, and the literary
tradition are revealed to be peculiar within each field and incommensurate
with itself when scaffolded by a different scholarly apparatus. In construct-
ing this book across two fields, I attempt to respect the intellectual context
that allows each of these terms to be legible to scholars in their respective
fields. While I do mean the unusual intersection of discourses in this book
to provoke a broader conversation between the medieval and African-
American studies, the reason for this intervention is practical. Many of the
people under consideration in this book were trained before these disci-
plinary boundaries had solidified. As will be discussed in Chap. 2, several
significant African-American writers read medieval texts or Sir Walter Scott
and a few studied medieval languages. When they deployed terms like
vii
viii PREFACE
“feudalism” or “romance” they did so with a deep understanding of the

implications for putting African-American experiences into paradigms that
were constructed to describe a wholly different historical period. Writers
who did not have this training found explanatory power in the space cre-
ated by the distance in-between applications of these terms in different
contexts. For example, Gloria Naylor invites a discussion of the relation-
ship between Chaucer’s “greet multitude of folk” and the boisterous lan-
guage of the neighborhoods she imagines. Part of this book’s project is to
begin to supplement the ways in which scholars of the Middle Ages and of
African-American literature permit themselves to deploy terms that are
fundamental to their fields so that they can imagine different boundaries
for their inquiries. To bridge these fields, I will occasionally have to tread
territory that is familiar to specialists in either medieval or nineteenth-
century studies.
The breakdown between fields and time periods has prompted me to
construct this book in a way that is different from most of contemporary
scholarship. Although a significant amount of this book examines the ori-
gins of medieval studies within African-American scholarship and litera-
ture, it also looks outside of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Chapter 5 and the Coda look at the afterlife of African-American
perspectives on the Middle Ages. Although it is unusual to find work on
the Middle Ages alongside that of far-flung periods, it is necessary to
include it within the pages of this book. Part of the reason for this is the
performative function these chapters serve. This book insists that what
early African-American scholars and writers undertook when studying the
Middle Ages or making use of medievalisms was not a mere curiosity to be
studied at a remove. The invocation of the medieval or the desire to do
philological work often had a component that transcended the object of
study. As I argue throughout Chap. 2, the relevance of the Middle Ages
redounded to fundamental questions about the construction of race, the
production of social space within the nation, and the possibilities of a
humanistic education.
I hope to use the shape of the book itself to advance a different set of
logics than those of periodization and specialization. The danger inherent
within studying the origin of medieval studies is to reify the social distinc-
tions that African-American scholars sought to complicate by entering
into areas of study that were simultaneously socially constructed as alien to
them and essential to narratives of the nation. Much of the book will
examine hybridity in the sense that Homi Bhabha uses the term to discuss
PREFACE
ix
race, that is, as “cultures caught in the transitional and disjunctive tempo-
ralities of modernity.”1 However, I will expand the assumed dynamics
Bhabha proposes between modern and pre-modern temporalities by add-
ing a temporal site that is negotiated by these African-American scholars as
a means of claiming agency within temporal frames, rather than being
“caught” within them.
Davis, CA Matthew X. Vernon
1
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 360.
Acknowledgements
First, I must thank Bonnie Wheeler, who has overseen a series rich with
ambitious scholarship on medieval subjects. I am honored to have the
opportunity to be included among the roster of scholars whose work has
inspired me throughout my academic career. Without her, this book
would surely be adrift.
Over the course of constructing this book I feared sharing the fate of
Nick Carraway, that is, being a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none.
Although I have made many missteps along the way, I have been fortunate
enough to have many patient teachers who have tried to usher me ever
upwards. Any mistakes in this book are my own.
I have the privilege of being a member of a department that is both
intellectually stimulating and generous in its support. There is no depart-
ment I would rather be part of. I would like to particularly thank John
Marx, Desirée Martin, Scott Simmon, and Seeta Chaganti for their critical
roles in welcoming me into the department and keeping me afloat. Above
all, I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Claire Waters whose bril-
liance and grace suffused the million acts of kindness she showed me while
I was figuring out my place in academia. To properly thank her would take
longer than the whole book. It suffices to say that I wish to one day be half
the superhero she is.
I would like to single out Mark Jerng, Katherine Steele Brokaw, and
Justin LeRoy for reading my manuscript at a critical point in its develop-
ment and for encouraging me subsequently. Kristen Aldebol-Hazle and
Margaret Miller were also instrumental in helping me edit my
manuscript.
xi
xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Alastair Minnis, Stephen Yale-Loehr, Susanne Wofford, Robert Stepto,

and Robert Frank were pivotal in my intellectual development. They heard
me out even though I had not yet figured out a vocabulary. Thank you for
taking a chance on me.
Tom Hill deserves special thanks. Without him, none of this would
have ever gotten started.
I would like to thank Grace Lo, Dan Gustafson, and Serena Klempin
for reminding me where my treasure is. Thanks also to Quinn Javers,
Matthew Stratton, Asa Mittman, Ann Zatsman, Britney Dann, Sophia
Ioannou, Katie Peterson, Francis Vernon, Laura D’Amato-Contreras,
Rosslyn D’Amato-Contreras, Lucia D’Amato-Contreras, and Cristina
Biasetto. The next one is on me. And also Teddy.
Contents
1 Introduction: Reading Out of Time—Genealogy,

African-American Literature, and the Middle Ages 1
2 Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages in African-

American Scholarship and Curricula 45
3 Failed Knights and Broken Narratives: Mark Twain

and Charles Chesnutt’s Black Romance 103
4 History, Genealogy, and Gerald of Wales: Medieval

Theories of Ethnicity and Their Afterlives 159
5 Other Families: Dryden’s Theory of Congeniality

in Dante, Chaucer, and Naylor 203
6 Coda: True and Imaginary History in Django Unchained 247
Index 263
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Reading Out of

Time—Genealogy, African-American
Literature, and the Middle Ages
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
1
Jon Swain, “Mitt Romney Would Restore ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Relations between Britain and
America.” The Daily Telegraph, July 24, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world-
news/mitt-romney/9424524/Mitt-Romney-would-restore-Anglo-Saxon-relations-
between-Britain-and-America.html (Accessed July 7, 2015).
© The Author(s) 2018 1

M. X. Vernon, The Black Middle Ages, The New Middle Ages,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91089-5_1
2 M. X. VERNON
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 ideo-
logical senses of the phrase—that tried to resist the demographic future of
a diversifying country by reasserting America’s connection to the founda-
tion 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 expec-
tations, 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
2
Bill Flax, “Forget Multiculturalism: Restore the Anglo-Saxon Philosophy Of Liberty.”
Forbes Magazine, 9 September 2011, Online.
3
Here Scalia is ultimately borrowing from famed jurist Sir William Blackstone’s theories
about the derivation of eighteenth-century British law from Anglo-Saxon law, particularly
the law of King Alfred. Scalia reads Blackstone through Alexander Hamilton’s writings on
the structure of American law. This is, of course, apocryphal, but is a telling misreading of
history given Scalia’s position and legal expertise. See: Hamdi V. Rumsfeld (03-6696) 542
U.S. 507 (2004); Eric Gerald Stanley, Imagining the Anglo-Saxon Past (Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 2000).
4
Samuel Huntington, Who We Are: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 55, 131.
5
James Hohmann, “Trump Doesn’t Know Much about History. It’s Making His On-The-
Job Training Harder,” The Washington Post, April 14, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.
com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/04/14/daily-202-trump-doesn-t-know-
much-about-history-it-s-making-his-on-the-job-training-harder/58f06ba2e9b69b3a72331
e84/?utm_term=.605c91f3b64d.
INTRODUCTION: READING OUT OF TIME—GENEALOGY… 3
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, spe-
cifically 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 geneal-
ogy. 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 sig-
nificant 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
6
John Cassidy, “Trump Embraces Nigel Farage, His British Alter Ego” The New Yorker,
August 25, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/trump-embraces-nigel-
farage-his-british-alter-ego.
7
Thomas Jefferson, The Essential Jefferson, edited by Jean Yarbrough (Cambridge:
Hackett, 2006), 72.
8
Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson Concerning Philology and the Classics,
ed.Thomas Fitzhugh (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1919), 7.
4 M. X. VERNON
hilosophy in the modern period.9 Dangers lurk in the desire for origins,
p
this mapping between the foundational moment of the nation and the
medieval period. Implicated within Jefferson’s discussions of medieval lit-
erature is his ability to disarticulate the language of liberty he found to be
so attractive within Anglo-Saxon literature from the realities of slave own-
ership. 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 histori-
cal 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 anti-
ent [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
9
For example, Nicholas Howe’s extraordinary study Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-
Saxon England uses the story about the Great Seal as an introduction to the persistence of
certain migration narratives, but the text quickly moves on to lengthy considerations of
medieval texts. Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (South Bend: University
of Notre Dame Press, 2001).
10
Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (Williamsburg:
Clementina Rind, 1774), 17.
11
Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Edmund Pendleton” Philadelphia, August 13, 1776.
12
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-
Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 14.
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
13
Thomas Jefferson “Letter to George W. Lewis,” Monticello, October 25, 1825.
14
Horsman, 31.
15
Jack London, Jack London on Writers and Writing, Dale L. Walker and Heanne Campbell
Reesman, eds. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), 68.
6 M. X. VERNON
London nimbly skips through timeframes and across continents to advance

his argument about the role of “the Anglo-Saxon” in shaping the nine-
teenth 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 cele-
brate “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 con-
nection to a past unique unto itself.
Tracing the thread of Anglo-Saxonism from its origins may be useful
insofar as it identifies a fault within the American conception of civil liber-
ties and rights that would persist into the twenty-first century. Arguments
about Anglo-Saxon heritage allow Jefferson to neglect the voice of those
outside of the historical lineage he charts. Significantly, this meant African-
Americans. Romney’s campaign and the Forbes article react along similar
lines to the presence of an African-American who successfully articulated
his quintessentially American life. President Barack Obama achieved this
with such felicity and at such long odds that his opponents, including his
successor, tried to undermine this strength by repeatedly suggesting that
the president harbored “foreign” ideas. Embedded within this strategy of
alienation and the call for a return to “Anglo-Saxon” values is this old idea
that has its base in Jefferson’s thinking: Americans were enacting the
“adventus Saxonum” in the United States; the path of conquest and subju-
gation of others was justified by historical precedent.17 Not coincidentally,
the purpose of Romney’s trip to England was to demonstrate his aggressive
foreign policy stance in contradistinction to that of Obama. Romney used
this rhetoric of “foreignness” as a means of creating a competing vision of
national identity, one that would simultaneously undermine Obama’s
narrative as “weak” and assert his own version of American identity.
Ibid.
16
María José Mora and María José Gómez-Calderón, “The Study of Old English in
17
America (1776–1850): National Uses of the Saxon Past,” The Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 97.3 (July 1998), 322–336.
The quest to conserve “Anglo-Saxon” virtues on the part of political

actors, from Jefferson to the Romney aide, requires a seemingly contradic-
tory set of perspectives on how one reads the development of American
history in relationship to theories about race. That politicians and writers
would look backwards to the Middle Ages to frame their vision of the
nation’s future seems counter-intuitive, but that distance from their con-
temporary context makes the Middle Ages, particularly medieval England,
available for being imaginatively constructed as an era of racial purity and
military subjugation of “foreign” peoples. This fantasy could then be
mapped onto projects of “development”—construed as widely as the
growth of factories in the northeast to westward expansion. The geneal-
ogy of medievalism runs through the Civil War, the critical point for the
construction of race and, just as importantly, the genesis for the techno-
logical, economic, and cultural networks that continue to inform the
shape of the nation.18 The archive under investigation radiates outwards
from this point, composing one possible configuration of the long nine-
teenth century: a period that encompasses the critical precedents and
legacies of the war.
The conversation between the Middle Ages and the long nineteenth
century was structured around the politics of recovery: finding in the past
meaning that was prophetic for established structures of power. This
strategy ignored the recent history of England, rather it shaped medieval
history to the American concept of exceptionalism. While the medieval
past was constructed as the source of unity and celebrated for its spirit of
innovation, “blackness” of necessity was read as an impediment to that
progress, or at least antithetical to the positive valence of “whiteness.”
John H. Van Evrie, whose writing popularized “scientific” approaches to
understanding white superiority over African-Americans, employs the
curious logic this brand of medievalism followed to distinguish those with
“Anglo-Saxon” heritage from those with African ancestry in his 1868
study, White Supremacy and Negro Subordination. He reads the conserva-
tion of culture as a primary virtue for white Americans, and one that
African-Americans lack:
18
It is important to emphasize that race and innovation—technical and economic—are not
at all exclusive. Indeed, they are interdependent categories that developed in response to one
another. See the discussion of slavery and capitalism in Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (New
York: Vintage, 2014), 83–136.
8 M. X. VERNON
All the other races have a character to overcome first or to be understood

and properly harmonized, but the negro is a blank, a wilderness, a barren
waste, waiting for the husbandman or the Caucasian teacher to develop his
real worth, and gifted with his wonderful imitative powers, he not only
never resists, but reaching forth his hands for guidance and protection, at
once accepts his teacher, and submits himself to his control. Of the now four
millions in our midst, a considerable proportion are the children of native
Africans, indeed, there are not a few natives still among us and yet every-
thing connected with Africa—their traditions, language, religion even their
names have wholly disappeared. The Normans conquered the Saxons eight
centuries ago, but the Saxon names and even their language, are now as
entirely Saxon as if a Norman had never landed on the shores of England.19
Van Evrie’s reasoning demonstrates the topsy-turvy reasoning that was

employed to distinguish “Anglo-Saxon” heritage from that of African-
Americans. Most notable from this extract is the way he relates heritage to
landscape, that of the Africans is mutable and evanescent as opposed to
that of the Anglo-Saxon, which is ever-present and indomitable. This met-
aphor, like Jefferson’s vision of “the march of civilization from the sea
coast” to the Rocky Mountains, sees people of Anglo-Saxon heritage as
shapers of the landscape, seemingly because they were able to resist geo-
political change in the eleventh century.20 Ironies and inaccuracies abound
in such a reading of history, but the underlying argument must be taken
seriously. Such extrapolations of the Middle Ages racialized bodies and
then fixed a horizon of expectations for what a race could achieve. As
elaborate fantasies of a “pure” medieval history were popularized, they
served as foundational arguments about real political action.
For example, Walt Whitman, whose celebrated voice sought to encom-
pass the nation, had a vexed relationship to the altered political realities
created by the Civil War.21 His understanding of the Middle Ages’ legacy
was central to his critique of post-War America. The poet preferred to call
the Civil War a “secessionist war,” reasoning that the real problem to be
solved was not slavery, but the South’s decision to destroy the unity of the
19
John H. Van Evrie, White Supremacy and Negro Subordination, or Negroes: A Subordinate
Race (New York: Van Evrie, Horton & Co., 1868), 219.
20
Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to William Ludlow” September 6, 1824 in Jefferson: Political
Writings, eds. Joyce Appleby and Terrence Ball (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1999), 590.
21
This argument borrows from David Blight, Race and Reconciliation (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 22.
nation. In fact, he seemed to believe abolitionist projects were overzealous

and could potentially unbalance the country after the war:
[…] the black domination, but little above the beasts—viewed as a tempo-
rary, deserv’d punishment for Southern whites’ slavery and secession sins,
may perhaps be admissible; but as a permanency of course is not to be con-
sidered for a moment.22
Whitman subverts the expected formulation of “Saxon domination” with

“black domination” and, in this way, he plays with the incompatibility of
these ideas. Any amount of African-American enfranchisement here is read
as a subversion of “Anglo-Saxon dominance” and is thus unsupportable.
Frederick Douglass, writing to Robert Adams in 1888, described this “cry
about negro supremacy” as “humbug,” akin to widespread fears of slave
insurrections before the Civil War.23 Douglass’ dismissal of the idea, coming
decades after the Civil War, both underscores the folly of “black domina-
tion” as a bogeyman and indicates how widely disseminated such fears were.
Scholars interested in Whitman’s views on race often quote this pas-
sage from his wartime memoranda, but it is rarely accompanied by his
further musings about the potential for some good to come out of the
war’s destructiveness. To extract the quotation this way decontextual-
izes the meaning Whitman’s language about “domination” evoked for a
nineteenth-century reader. In the subsequent lines of his memorandum,
Whitman likens the Civil War to “the conquest of England eight centu-
ries ago, by the Franco-Normans” and he directly links the results of that
political change to the creation of the United States:
[…] Time has proved plain enough that, bitter as they were, all these
[Norman acts of war] were the most salutary series of revolutions that could
possibly have happen’d. Out of them, and by them mainly, have come, out
of Albic, Roman and Saxon England—and without them could not have
come—not only the England of the 500 years down to the present, and of
the present—but These States. Nor, except for the terrible dislocation and
overturn, would these States, as they are, exist to-day.24
22
Walt Whitman, “Results South—Now And Hence” (1875) Memoranda During the
War, ed. Peter Coviello (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 126.
23
Frederick Douglass to Robert Adams, December 4, 1888. (Gilder Lehrman Collection,
GLC04997).
24
Ibid., 127.
10 M. X. VERNON
The reference to the Middle Ages does more than simply create an anal-
ogy between that period and the post-Civil War era; Whitman forges an
imaginative genealogy for the nation that presents the historical alliances
undergirding the nation’s identity to be far deeper than the divisions
exposed by the war. He imagines the Norman Conquest in a way that
echoes previous arguments about the adventus Saxonum, that is, he turns
to the Norman Conquest to discover a unitary, proto-national identity.
Whitman’s “salutary series of revolutions” among the “Albic, Roman and
Saxon England” proleptically composes an ethnic heritage of whiteness
that would offer none of the challenges of race and political enfranchise-
ment that were at the root of the Civil War. This construction of the
Middle Ages allows Whitman to elide those questions and instead imagine
the possibility of recapturing a pure ethnic identity.
“Song of the Exposition” (1871), Whitman’s most exuberant celebra-
tion of technological progress, evokes the Middle Ages as a crucial subtext
for the possibility of the nation attaining “rehabilitated prosperity” that
would restore its imagined coherence.25 Here the period is used as a met-
onym for the ancient, what has been largely left behind, which he treats
elegiacally:
The Crusaders’ streams of shadowy, midnight troops, sped with the

sunrise;
Amadis, Tancred, utterly gone—Charlemagne, Roland, Oliver gone,
Palmerin, ogre, departed—vanish’d the turrets that Usk reflected,
Arthur vanish’d with all his knights—Merlin and Lancelot and Galahad—all
gone—
dissolv’d utterly, like an exhalation;
Pass’d! pass’d! for us, for ever pass’d! that once so mighty World—now void,
inanimate, phantom World!26
“Song of the Exposition” puts several timeframes in parallel: the mythical

past of romance and chivalric action, the proximal history of war, and a
vision of the country’s future devoid of intestine rancor. These temporal
frames are overlaid and inform one another. The poem expresses the wish
to move beyond the war and “in its stead speed Industry’s campaigns,”
the yields of which would be marvels worthy of the great mythical
Ibid., 127.
25
Walt Whitman, “Song of the Exposition,” Leaves of Grass (New York: Modern Library,
26
1950), 160.
undertakings that have preceded them. While much of the poem’s argu-
ment about progress is forward looking, the subtext of the poem is indeed
about the memory of the Civil War, of “blacken’d mutilated corpses.”27
The Middle Ages in the poem are a placeholder for a shifting idea of the
past that was noble and unrecoverable. A few lines later, the poem pro-
claims, “Away with themes of war! Away with war itself…Away with old
romance.”28 This declaration seems to sweep away both chivalric fiction
and the intrusion of the subject of the Civil War in favor of Whitman’s
gleaming vision of “the Union,” a nation joined in productive enterprises
from California to Boston. Despite its elegiac farewell to the Middle Ages,
the turn to industrial progress does not signify a complete departure from
the set of quests he associates with the Middle Ages. Rather, the same
spirit that animated medieval conquests and shaped the “mighty World,”
Whitman suggests, energized post-war technical innovation.
Whitman’s “Song of the Exposition” demonstrates a strategy of recali-
brating the terms by which the Civil War and the ensuing Reconstruction
might be understood. In his efforts to narrate reconciliation within the
country, Whitman evades the root question of race. Herein is the clear
hazard in Whitman’s approach and the problem that runs through each
of the preceding examples of medievalism mobilized to argue for “Anglo-
Saxon domination.” The medieval past creates a map for contemporary
society that simply leaves the challenges of conflict or the complexity of
medieval intercultural contact uncharted. Whitman’s poem disarticulates
the “spirit” of divisive events, such as the Crusades, from the meaning
that constitutes these events. Whitman laments the end of the crusad-
ing spirit without evoking the difficult questions about why these cam-
paigns were prosecuted. He then proceeds to make a historical analogy
to the Civil War while again avoiding any mention of what the bloodshed
was meant to adjudicate. This allows the writer to silence the “embar-
rassments and darkness” of the war while trumpeting the steady march
towards the future.
This lacuna is present in a significant amount of popular nineteenth-
century writing that discusses the Civil War in conjunction with the Middle
Ages. Harvard educated professor and Civil War veteran James K. Hosmer
read the future successes of the nation as not just inspired by a medieval
past, but as a future foretold without the provocations of slavery:
27
Ibid., 163.
28
Ibid., 163–164.
12 M. X. VERNON
As Sir Francis Palgrave says: ‘The new building has been raised upon the old
groundwork; the institutions of one age have always been modeled and
formed from those of the preceding and the lineal descent has never been
interrupted or disturbed.’ Anglo-Saxon freedom is most simply and com-
prehensively stated in the phrase of Abraham Lincoln, ‘government of the
people by the people and for the people.’ In its long history there have been
periods of temporary submergence, adaptation to the needs of ever vaster
multitudes and higher civilizations, manifold development and elaboration:
one spirit however has survived through all apparent in the deliberations of
a modern Congress or Parliament as also it was apparent in the ancient folk
moots where the free ceorls chose their army leaders and regulated the life
in their marks.29
His willingness to read the structures of the United States government

and even the political argumentation of Abraham Lincoln as incrustations
of Anglo-Saxon practices demonstrates a desire to excise the Civil War as
a meaningful moment of political change. For Hosmer, slavery was an
echo of feudal serfdom and its abolition subsumed under the eventual
progress of “Anglo-Saxon freedom.”30 The irony of referring to emanci-
pation with a phrase that so clearly evokes Thomas Jefferson’s own reasons
for maintaining his hold on slaves reveals the flaws inherent in reading
history under the cloak of desire for medieval origins.
The New York Times enthusiastically praised Hosmer’s work and reiter-
ated the writer’s basic thesis about the resilience of Anglo-Saxon works
and traditions to change.31 More careful scholars than Hosmer conceded
that while this historical framework was wholly erroneous, it possessed
allure for a wide audience desirous of a coherent theory of nation:
This book sets forth in somewhat pretentious form a theory of English and
American history now very much in vogue. The theory is popular because it
is democratic, not necessarily because it is based on facts. It gratifies the
pride of the masses to be told that the current dogmas about popular sover-
eignty are primordial truths, to which we have returned after a deflection of
the path of history from its natural course. This may be called the democratic
29
James K. Hosmer, A Short History of Anglo-Saxon Freedom: The Polity Of The English-
Speaking Race Outlined In Its Inception, Development, Diffusion, And Present Condition
(New-York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890), v.
30
Hosmer, 123; 296.
31
[Review] The New York Times (New York, NY) 22 February 1891: 19.
philosophy of history. Among English writers it may be traced at least as far

back as the seventeenth century.32
H.L. Osgood, an American historian and contemporary of Hosmer, makes

this withering critique of the notion that the war could be read as simply
a digression from a narrative of progress. His reference to “popular sover-
eignty” cuts straight to arguments about rights for African-Americans
decided by states, and the sense that to enfranchise African-Americans
would mean a further deflection from the “natural course” of history.
Moreover, Osgood’s reading exposes the intersection between history and
fiction that is evident in Whitman’s references to King Arthur, but is
cloaked under the guise of factual inquiry in Hosmer’s research. The
imbrication of these separate historical frames and evidentiary modes—the
mythical golden age of “Anglo-Saxon freedom” and a future of ever-
advancing American progress, filtered through the language of desire—
creates narratives premised on the possibility of returning to a state of
ideological and cultural purity: before the sin of slave-holding.
The fantasy of a reunion with the past that might disarticulate the his-
tories of white Americans from those of African-Americans puts into con-
test some of the fundamental principles of the nation, which continue to
be adjudicated. Historian Greg Grandin argues in his 2014 study of
Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, that the nineteenth century provided
contradictory but mutually constitutive philosophical frameworks for
understanding the nation’s development after the revolution: the “Age of
Liberty” and the “Age of Slavery.”33 The novella, as Grandin presents it, is
a reading of those seemingly opposing significations of the era; it depicts
Benito Cereno, a weakened Spanish captain of a slave ship, who seems
entirely dependent upon one of the slaves, Babo, to assist him with every
task. An American sea captain, Delano, boards the ship and spends a day
observing this. He naively believes that what is apparent is actually what is
occurring, only to be horrified upon discovering that the whole scenario
was a ruse concocted by the slaves to fool him. In fact, there had been a
mutiny onboard the ship before he arrived and the subservience of the
former slaves was an act to conceal their liberation. He realizes that what
he had read as the “natural” black subservience to whites was, in fact, a
32
H.L. Osgood “Review: A Short History of Anglo-Saxon Freedom, by James K. Hosmer”
Political Science Quarterly, 6.1 (March 1891), 162–164.
33
Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 8.
14 M. X. VERNON
sophisticated interrelation of black and white characters that confuses the

master-servant relationship, showing each of those positions to be depen-
dent upon and distorted by the other. Cereno is undone as much by the
mutiny as by how slavery economically and morally compromises him.
Grandin chose Benito Cereno in part because the reciprocal relationship
between Babo and Cereno so well demonstrates the evident problem with
thinking in terms of racial purity or liberty as separate from the institution
of slavery: to do so misses the deep interconnections between races and
the interpenetration of depictions of whiteness and blackness in American
literature. Grandin argues that the present world remains deeply informed
by the conflicts initiated by the slave trade and incompletely resolved by
the Civil War. In response to Grandin’s argument, Toni Morrison goes
further in judging the reach of “The Age of Liberty” and its dependence
on a construction of African-Americans as outside of time:
From illogical claims that the Negro is both a “natural valet” and an untamed
animal, the language of denial has now moved to the assumption of endemic
unworthiness of the poor (generally assumed to be black in spite of census
data saying otherwise), the always and already criminalized who receive food
stamps, unemployment checks, Medicaid, etc., and who seem outrageously
and fraudulently eager to vote. [Grandin makes] this clear in The Empire of
Necessity, exposing the self-satisfaction, the willed deception in the construc-
tion of racism to sustain slavery in a nation committed to the freedom of its
people.34
Morrison, a writer deeply invested in critiquing literary origins, is acutely

aware that it is dangerous to think that the divisions caused by the Civil
War and the underlying arguments about slavery have been erased. To do
so ignores the heritage of slavery: how the “peculiar institution” has
informed and shaped other types of institutions and, more importantly,
ways of making meaning within the nation. The underlying concerns
about race have only intensified since Jefferson’s reflections on Anglo-
Saxon law, Melville’s writing about a slave revolt, and even since the indis-
creet comments by the Romney aide. Articles proliferate about “The End
of White America,” articulating fears surrounding demographic change
and expected shifts in power structures that have made writers revisit ques-
tions of origins and whether or not a majority-minority future means a
34
Toni Morrison, “Melville and the Language of Denial” The Nation, January 27, 2014.
diminution of white liberty.35 In the late years of Barack Obama’s presi-

dency the nation’s political system was stalled by a political party that
sought a return to original principles, to “take the country back,” a phrase
that haunts in its desire to see progress as moving backwards in time. This
era of American history is troubled by the same shadows Benito Cereno
feels haunting him by the end of Melville’s novella: a fear of impending
change, a fear of a movement beyond the “clarity” of the past, a fear of
blackness.
Owning Time
Could he have meant—hell, he must have meant the principle, that we were
to affirm, the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or
at least not the men who did the violence. Did he mean to say “yes” because
he knew that the principle was greater than the men, greater than the num-
bers and the vicious power and all the methods used to corrupt its name?
Did he mean to affirm the principle, which they themselves had dreamed
into being out of the chaos and darkness of the feudal past, and which they
had violated and compromised to the point of absurdity even in their own
corrupt minds?36
The eponymous character of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)

muses about the meaning of his grandfather’s dying words. The grandfa-
ther, a freed slave, charges the Invisible Man to “keep up the good fight”
and “overcome ’em with yeses”—cryptic advice that the narrator puzzles
over throughout the text. These words only begin to gain definition in the
novel’s epilogue wherein the narrator traces out possible lines of meaning.
To do so, he makes a complex argument about the nature of history and
the place of the American project within it. His reference to principles
“dreamed into being out of the chaos and darkness of the feudal past” in
part evokes the historical teleology of Marx, its charting of progress from
feudal economic relationships to modern capitalist ones. Simultaneously,
the narrator engages in the conversation begun by Jefferson suggested by
35
For example, Hua Hsu, “The End of White America?,” The Atlantic, January 1, 2009;
Carol Morello and Ted Mellnik, “Census: Minority Babies Now Majority in the United
States,” The Washington Post, May 16, 2012; John Blake, “Are Whites Racially Oppressed,”
CNN March 4, 2011; Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2010), 8.
36
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 574.
16 M. X. VERNON
his reference to “the principle…dreamed into being out of the chaos and
darkness”—about the break from the feudal power structure that ordered
English society into the eighteenth century. American liberty, both
Jefferson and Ellison argue, would instead be constituted by the promise
that individual potential would translate into social advancement, a step
into the future.
The relationship between Jefferson and Ellison’s theories of America’s
relationship to a feudal past is instructive for detailing competing notions
of subjugation and liberty as co-extant with the construction of racial
myth. Reading Jefferson’s theories about the Middle Ages’ significance
alongside those of Ellison brings into focus a larger project that “maneu-
vered ancient English history so as to produce a discursive crisis within
contemporaneous U.S. discourses of racial stature and purity.”37 Jefferson
likened a westward journey across the United States to “the progress of
man” towards technological and cultural advancement. Consequently, he
read the push of American force across the country as a means of moving
the nation through stages of development:
And where this progress will stop no one can say. Barbarism has, in the
meantime been receding before the steady step of amelioration, and will in
time, I trust disappear from the earth.38
Jefferson used temporality to distinguish the American project as a revolu-

tionary one in the sense that American independence constituted an
abrupt shift in temporal progress, something that would not have been
possible under a “feudal” British regime. Instead, by linking progress in
time with progress over land, Jefferson recalls his arguments about Anglo-
Saxon freedom as premised upon what he believed to be the “allodial”
Anglo-Saxon system of law discussed above, one that emphasized an indi-
vidual’s ownership over the land and his or her potential to improve it. To
conceive time in this way is to have a unique sense of ownership over it.
The rupture the revolution constitutes is not simply a break with the past,
but an opportunity to excise part of history, that is, the revolution and its
37
Christopher Hanlon, America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic
Sectionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 45.
38
Thomas Jefferson to William Ludlow, September 6, 1824, The Writings of Thomas
Jefferson, Albert Ellery Bergh and Robert Holland Johnson eds. (Washington, DC: Thomas
Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1904) 74–75. See the discussion of this passage in Horsman,
84.
subsequent legal reforms would not just allow for freedom in space but
freedom in time. Jefferson simply rejects a portion of British history, feu-
dalism, as unsuitable to his conception of the nation.
While Jefferson ostensibly sought to free himself from “feudalism” as
represented by English power, he defended slavery and fashioned himself
in the image of a feudal lord—a man with absolute and arbitrary authority
over those on his land. The great rupture in world history that the
American Revolution represented would be darkly echoed by the great
historical rupture of American slavery, which cast African-Americans as
alien and without a past.39 For Jefferson, the liberties of the nation were
predicated upon the primacy of Anglo-Saxon heritage. This reasoning pre-
cluded the participation of African-Americans, as they were outside of the
genealogy he proposed. Ellison, on the other hand, places a unique bur-
den upon African-Americans; slavery and the subsequent programs of
racial discrimination functioned to keep African-Americans outside of the
narrative of historical progress:
Historically, American Negroes are caught in a vast process of change that

has swept them from slavery to the condition of industrial man in a space of
time so telescoped (a bare eighty-five years) that it is possible literally for
them to step from feudalism into the vortex of industrialism simply by
moving across the Mason-Dixon line.40
Slavery and southern discrimination as read by Ellison reconstitutes feu-

dalism, or to use Jefferson’s words “an engine of immense oppression.”41
In this way, African-Americans were uniquely positioned to understand
and critique the idea of moving towards modernity from feudalism, as
they were acutely subject to the harsh transition between the two.
While Jefferson and Ellison create arguments reminiscent of one anoth-
er’s in terms of how they read the feudal past to understand the nation
within a longer historical trajectory, they crucially disagree on the question
of where one locates the moments of historical progress and who the par-
ticipants in that development were. This friction between these two ways
of reading American history, particularly the discrepancy between inter-
pretations of when the United States departs from a medieval point of
39
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1985), 38.
40
Ralph Ellison, “Harlem is Nowhere,” Harper’s Magazine (August 1964), 53.
41
Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Edmund Pendleton,” Philadelphia, August 13, 1776.
18 M. X. VERNON
origin, reveals the potency of the Middle Ages as a metaphor used to

understand American mythologies of race and competing visions of social
progress. Frederick Douglass anticipates the disjunction Ellison identifies
between past and present, plantation and free, in his My Bondage and My
Freedom (1855):
In its isolation, seclusion, and self-reliant independence, Col. Lloyd’s plan-

tation resembles what the baronial domains were during the middle ages
[sic] in Europe. Grim, cold, and unapproachable by all genial influences
from communities without, there it stands; full three hundred years behind
the age, in all that relates to humanity and morals.42
To be implicated within the system of slavery and the subsequent patterns

of racial oppression is to be denied control over the promises of forward
momentum in time; “the order of civilization is reversed.”43 Instead, one
is subject to what should be an archaic and foreign political system, and
yet is outrageous in its vitality and its dictates on human life.
The previous section of this introduction demonstrates that the Middle
Ages offered an important conceptual framework for white writers and
politicians to articulate the shape of the nation while simultaneously silenc-
ing those parts of the American population and history that threatened the
logic of programs which consolidated white power and racial identity.
While this is a powerful conduit for the mobilization of the Middle Ages,
it is by no means the sole one. African-Americans throughout the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries have utilized the critical matrix of
meaning bound up within the Middle Ages—its association with individ-
ual nobility, the cultural reconciliation and hybridization implied by the
Anglo-Norman period, theories of feudal land attachments, the sociolin-
guistic implications of speaking and writing in English, even the notion of
Anglo-Saxon slavery—to expose the fantasy that underpinned discourses
of citizenship and to suggest alternative terms of belonging within the
nation. This too is a project of recovery, one that runs counter to the
mythologization of whiteness, but it has largely been forgotten beneath
arguments that are premised on the consolidation of racial identity in the
nineteenth century. The friction between the legal promise of full enfran-
42
Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Penguin Books, 2003),
50.
43
Ibid., 41.
chisement and the subjective experience of being marginalized by the

nation’s narratives revealed lines of contestation that African-American
writers and intellectuals sought to challenge through critical re-examinations
of those defining myths.
This strategy of reappropriation’s contours may be traced in the writing
of W.E.B. Du Bois. He first encountered serious discussions of the Middle
Ages in a Harvard course taught by William James.44 Du Bois took this
course in 1888 and wrote his final paper on the major shift in the relation-
ship between faith and philosophy after the decline of medieval scholasti-
cism. Not only would his search for a “Christian pragmatism” inform
much of his writing, he would continue to meditate on the meaning of the
changes between the Middle Ages and the early modern period through-
out his career. Decades after the class, Du Bois took a tour of cities in the
Midwest to find out the condition of “the race problems.”45 He, like
Ellison, read his progress across the nation and the patchwork of laws and
unofficial rules regulating the lives of African-Americans as akin to a jar-
ring transition between archaic and modern structures of existence; that is,
he likened the trip to traveling back and forth through time. He associates
Toledo with antiquated segregation and Cleveland with “the present,” the
result of years of hard-won rights. In between these two he identifies
Oberlin, Ohio as “the mystic city of the future,” on the basis of its thriving
community of color and Oberlin College’s stance on integration. As the
conflation of space and time suggests, the temporal meaning he assigns to
each place is unstable. Du Bois ends his meditation on his Midwest tour
with a concern that those promising African-American students and resi-
dents in Oberlin were worked to keep at bay “the bonds of medievalism.”46
The “past” was not simply something one could move beyond, but a con-
tinual threat to the modern rights assured to citizens. Nearly a decade after
writing this, Du Bois noted that over ten percent of African-Americans
still lived with “the hateful badge of slavery and medievalism” because
they were reduced to the “anachronism” of menial labor no one else
would deign to do.47
44
DuBois said of James: “[He] guided me out of the sterilities of scholastic philosophy to
realist pragmatism.” Quoted in: Robert Richardson William James: In the Maelstrom of
American Modernism (New York: Mariner Books, 2007), 316.
45
W.E.B. Du Bois, “A Winter Pilgrimage,” The Crisis Magazine 1.3 (1911), 15.
46
Ibid.
47
W.E.B. DuBois, Darkwater in The Oxford DuBois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 540–541.
20 M. X. VERNON
The potential scope of Du Bois’s mode of reading is astonishing. In his

wide-ranging, multi-genre work, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil,
published in 1920, Dubois uses the Middle Ages not just to analyse the
problems of racism in the United States but to unify the diverse sorts of
oppression visited upon people of color across the globe. Writing in the
shadow of WWI (World War I), Du Bois reads global warfare as “the jeal-
ous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting darker
races.”48 Du Bois engages the mythology that the West had constructed
around its own past and breaks apart assumptions that received the aura of
truth conferred by their supposed antiquity. In their engagement with pre-
colonized countries, European powers strayed far from “rules of fairness—
equal armament, equal notice, equal conditions” established in the Middle
Ages.49 He singles out Belgium’s ruthless rule over Congo as a particularly
egregious example of how the West had betrayed the ancestral values it
claims to hold dear:
Down the dark forest of inmost Africa sailed this modern Sir Galahad, in the
name of “the noble-minded men of several nations,” to introduce com-
merce and civilization. What came of it? ‘Rubber and murder, slavery in its
worst form,’ wrote Glave in 1895.50
This is a particularly sharp critique, as Du Bois chooses the questing knight

who achieves the Holy Grail to heighten the sense of a European fall from
grace in the desire to exploit rather than ennoble. Du Bois directly
responds to the arguments outlined in the first section of this introduction
that sought to unify disparate countries that embarked upon campaigns of
conquest and colonization through appeals to the Middle Ages. Du Bois’
observations fittingly come in an essay entitled “The Souls of White Folk,”
as he reveals “whiteness” to be a fiction separate and apart from medieval
source material. DuBois argues that medieval foundational fictions helped
create the imagined community of whiteness out of separate European
and North American states. The reference to Galahad ironizes nostalgia
for a chivalric past that implied the inherent virtue of those who con-
48
W.E.B. DuBois “The Souls of White Folk,” in Darkwater in The Oxford W.E.B. DuBois
Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 507.
49
Ibid., 501.
50
Ibid., 502. Here Dubois refers to Edward J. Glave, the writer of In Savage Africa: or Six
Years of Adventure in Congo-Land, which recounts Belgian cruelty in the Congo published
in 1892.
ducted campaigns of conquest. As has been argued elsewhere, these

mythologies were profoundly misused as they justified atrocities in the
name of nobility and self-sacrifice.51 From the perspective of Du Bois, the
war did not as much expose the fractures between European nations as it
reified the fraudulent claims of control over “darker races.”
The problems of racial identity as presented in “The Souls of White
Folk” work along both the axes of history and mythology. Du Bois looks
for the historical roots of racism and finds them to be quite shallow:
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very

modern thing,—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The
ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Age
regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth
century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, Universal
Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth.
Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional con-
version has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!52
For Du Bois, whiteness itself had become its own mythology that then was
joined with other cultural products to cloak it in the mantle of virtue. This
investigation into the interrelationship of history and mythology allows
Du Bois to intervene into the question of temporal situatedness raised by
Jefferson and then advanced by subsequent writers who used the language
of the Middle Ages to construct a narrative of progress for the United
States. Jefferson used temporality to both distinguish the American project
and to lend venerability to it through a connection to the Anglo-Saxon
period. This impressive reach backwards in time contrasts with the “com-
pression” in time that Du Bois and Ellison argue inflects African-American
participation in the nation. The “Anglo-Saxon” system of Jefferson
depended upon the “feudal” one to which Du Bois and Ellison objected.
While one symbolized freedom within time, the other meant becoming not
just subject to feudalism but having to continually evade its shadow as late
as the mid-twentieth century. The critiques of Du Bois and Ellison pre-
sciently diagnose a problem of lingering “pre-modern” sentiments that
much later historians of global politics and revolutions, such as Arno Mayer
51
See Allen J. Frantzen’s excellent study on the place of chivalric imagery and the idea of
Christian self-sacrifice in the propaganda of WWI: Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice and the
Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
52
Darkwater, 497–498.
22 M. X. VERNON
and Greg Grandin, similarly identify.53 Those scholars alternately use and
question the language of Marx and capital to calibrate how they analyse the
“persistence of the old order” and indeed, Du Bois and Ellison construct
readings inflected by Marx.54 But the language of feudal order and “medi-
evalism” carries a different valence within African-American discourse as it
must be read within the longer tradition of Anglo-Saxonism, the revival of
chivalric literature during the Civil War, and the adoption of medieval
tropes to understand American social and technological progress.
The Middle Ages, understood through myth, history, and metaphor,
demonstrate a range of ways that “the medieval” could be reinterpreted by
African-American writers and intellectuals to conceive of alternative pos-
sibilities for how the society around themselves might be constructed. Du
Bois would even darkly propose as a direct response to the “progress” that
WWI represented the “impossible dream” in which nations might be
comprised entirely of “serfs.”55 Du Bois and Ellison question the bases of
foundational fictions and read African-Americans as uniquely positioned
to take ownership over those narratives because of their peculiar situation
without the prevailing timeframes that define the national project. More
simply, one could put it in the way Ellison’s Invisible Man ultimately puz-
zles out the charge incumbent upon himself and other African-Americans
conferred by founders who never imagined his being: “to affirm the prin-
ciple, which they themselves had dreamed into being out of the chaos and
darkness of the feudal past.”56
A Desire for (Medieval) Origins

Despite the clear political and cultural importance of medievalism in
American history, the task of considering the significance of medievalisms
has largely been read as an academic luxury at best or at worst the catalyst
for policing of racial lines. One need only consider the Ku Klux Klan’s
53
See Greg Grandin, “Living in Revolutionary time: Coming to Terms with Violence of
Latin America’s Long Cold War,” in A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent
Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds.
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 12–14.
54
Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe and the Great War (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1981), 5.
55
W.E.B. DuBois “The Hands of Ethiopia,” in The Oxford W.E.B. DuBois Reader (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 517.
56
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 574.
language of knighthood or Thomas Dixon’s language of crusades to see

the latter point.57 To put it bluntly, the questions of medievalism and the
Middle Ages have been read as the province of whiteness, only dealing with
race and African-American identity as subjects external to or defined against
the products and interpretation of the Middle Ages. However, to conduct
research without considering this critical racial history risks replicating the
implicit assumptions and blindness found in the nineteenth-century texts
discussed in previous sections. The deployment of medievalisms in the
nineteenth and early twentieth century should be read within the context
of the work done to cultivate racial identity as tied to a set of political and
technological narratives. More importantly, African- American literature
and political writing should be read as a source for medievalisms that can
be read against the narratives advanced by white authors.
Concurrent to discussions by writers like Whitman about their literary
and genealogical inheritance (framed within their mythologization of the
past), African-American intellectuals engaged in conversations about ori-
gins and intellectual identity. Several of these lines of inquiry have been
traced in recent academic studies. One prominent vein has run through
the discipline of classics. Scholars in that field have uncovered the prob-
lems that colonial education’s reliance on training in the classics posed for
American and Caribbean authors in the nineteenth century.58 This type of
learning created bitterly ironic scenes of racial injustice as well as a stan-
dard discourse for responding to such affronts. George Washington had a
slave named Hercules; Southern Senator John C. Calhoun defied anyone
to find a slave that could conjugate a Greek verb, a sarcastic taunt to allege
57
In fact, Thomas Dixon called his work a “historical romance,” which underscores the
blurring of lines between fact and fiction discussed throughout this introduction. Dixon
heavily interlards the language of chivalry and knighthood into his book, most notably in his
description of the clansmen riding on horseback:
At the signal of a whistle, the men and horses arrayed in white and scarlet swung into
double-file cavalry formation and stood awaiting orders. The moon was now shining
brightly, and its light shimmering on the silent horses and men with their tall spiked
caps made a picture such as the world had not seen since the Knights of the Middle
Ages rode on their Holy Crusades.
Thomas Dixon, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (New
York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1905), 316.
58
Emily Greenwood, Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature
and Classics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
24 M. X. VERNON
the superiority of the white mind.59 The mother of African-American let-

ters, Phyllis Wheatley, a slave, learned both Greek and Latin. Moreover,
some of the most important figures in nineteenth-century African-
American political and intellectual life were deeply informed by the clas-
sics. William Sanders Scarborough was both a classical scholar and the
president of Wilberforce University in Ohio. Charles Chesnutt used
Ovidian tropes to inform the writing of his popular collection of short
stories, The Conjure Woman.60 The power of the classical education con-
tinues to resound in the work of the Nobel Prize winning poet, Derek
Walcott, who adapted the Odyssey in his Omeros. The interaction between
African-Americans and classical education has been discussed in studies
such as Emily Greenwood’s Afro-Greeks as well as William Cook and James
Tatum’s African American Writers and the Classical Tradition.61
Scholars have similarly turned to the early modern period as a point of
origin for understanding African-American literature. The writings of
Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Shakespeare, and Spenser provide
the language of encounter that would be so important for theorizing race
in ways that would continue to inform the subject of race through the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More importantly, this period fuses
the language of difference with that of economic conquest, a conjunction
that would have obvious and long-lasting implications for the way that
colonists read the New World. The human body obtains its valence as a
commodity on a large scale with the economic and technological changes
that signal the end of the medieval period. These avenues of inquiry have
led critics to trace out the vocabulary and imaginative channels used
throughout the period to define what makes a human. There has been rich
research done by scholars including Ania Loomba, Jonathan Burton, and
Stephen Greenblatt about race in the early modern period.62 This work
59
The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture,
1892–1938. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2007), 240.
60
Karen Magee Myers, “Mythic Patterns in Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s the Conjure
Woman and Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Black American Literature Forum 13.1 (Spring 1979),
13–17.
61
William Cook and James Tatum, African American Writers and the Classical Tradition
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010).
62
Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002); Jonathan Burton and Aina Loomba, eds. Race in Early Modern England: A
Documentary Companion (New York: Palgrave, 2007); Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous
Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
has been productive not just for understanding the evolving meanings of
race across the period, but also for setting the groundwork for reading
later responses of African-Americans to early modern texts, such as the all-
black cast of Orson Welles’s Macbeth, or retellings of Caliban’s story, like
Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest.
Little attention, however, has been spared for reading how the legacy
of medieval literature and the study of the Middle Ages—from the tools
of philology honed by medieval studies, the historical analogy of racial
integration suggested by Anglo-Norman history, the construction of her-
oism and virtue as filtered through readings of chivalry—have inflected
the development of African-American identity in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. This silence is striking given the crucial point of ori-
gin the Middle Ages represents for American identity notable through
the explosion of interest in the Middle Ages during the nineteenth cen-
tury, sparked by the pre-Raphaelite movement and sustained by broad
educational shifts from classical to English literature by the turn of the
twentieth century as well as the common allegorization of the defeated
South as the subjugated Anglo-Saxons.63 This is not an insubstantial
realm of inquiry, although the importance of the Middle Ages to American
identity has perhaps been too narrowly construed; whiteness is too often
the assumed context that informs medievalism.
Comprehensive studies of medieval themes in American literature and
political life are rare. The first major literary study undertaken on this sub-
ject was Allen J. Frantzen’s Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English,
and Teaching the Tradition which laid much of the groundwork for subse-
quent studies of medievalism and its legacy.64 Franzten contrasts the
Jeffersonian history of Anglo-Saxon studies, one that had major political
gravity, with the current, disinterested style of research conducted by
Anglo-Saxonists to demonstrate the problematic position Old English
occupies within the academy. In terms of historical analysis, Frantzen was
preceded by Reginald Horsman’s study: Race and Manifest Destiny: The
63
See the discussion of Old and Middle English’s significant role in early philology in:
Andrew Elfenbein, Romanticism and the Rise of English (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2009), 1–4; See also: Ritchie Devon Watson Jr’s study of how southerners mobilized medi-
eval history to glorify the Civil War defeat in: Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology
and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2008).
64
Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the
Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
26 M. X. VERNON
Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, which delves deeply into the

European sources for American Anglo-Saxonism as well as the body of
“scientific” research that supported popular mythologies of white racial
supremacy. Several literary studies have built upon the initial research of
Frantzen and Horsman, notably: Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of
Social Identity and The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature: Twain,
Adams, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway.65 The former is an edited volume
that addresses both how cultural identity was generated within the Anglo-
Saxon period and modern reassessments of the mobilization of Anglo-
Saxon texts. The latter studies the entrenchment of medieval themes in
the work of prominent American authors to demonstrate how available
and intelligible medieval material was for writers and their audiences
through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. None of these
works address the role the Middle Ages and medieval themes played in the
lives of African-American authors.
My work will explore the critical connections between the fields of
medieval studies, medievalism, and African-American studies. Although
these fields have long engaged similar questions and have influenced each
other, little comprehensive work has been done to put them in conversa-
tion. Only two books address the subject of African-Americans and
medievalism: Christopher Hanlon’s America’s England: Antebellum

Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism and Dennis Looney’s Freedom
Readers.66 Hanlon traces the ways in which American identity was informed
by narratives borrowed from British history, such as how the conflict
between Saxons and Normans was mapped onto the American Civil War.
While the subject of analysis is pertinent for understanding African-
American history, it largely deals with the issue obliquely. Perhaps the clos-
est study in terms of scope and archive to The Black Middle Ages is Dennis
Looney’s Freedom Readers, which engages the use of Dante in African-
American literature, film, and music from the early nineteenth to the early
twentieth century. There is a loud silence on the part of nineteenth and
65
Kim Moreland, The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature: Twain, Adams,
Fitzgerald, and Hemingway (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1996); Allen
J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, eds., Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity
(Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997).
66
Christopher Hanlon, America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic
Sectionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Dennis Looney Freedom Readers
(South Bend: Notre Dame University Press, 2011).
early twentieth-century scholars about this subject and medievalists have

done little to break it.67
Medievalists do many things well, but we have been similarly complicit
in constructing a Middle Ages that presages later nationalist narratives.
This is in no small part because of the field’s origins within the nineteenth
century, which organized the fundamental modes and avenues of research
around a critical posture that belies the ideological implications of our
studies.68 It is not at all unusual to begin a medieval studies argument with
a discussion of Thomas Jefferson, as this book does, but a turn to Frederick
Douglass would seem foreign to medieval inquiries. The tenor of medieval
studies is slowly changing with magisterial and polemical work like
Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s Idols in the East, and Geraldine Heng’s Empire
of Magic and The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages.69 What is
significant about these works is that they so well delineate the challenge of
reading from east to west that undergirds the language and imaginary
used to understand difference. To motivate their studies, Akbari and Heng
in Empire reach for the tragedy of 9/11, which gave new urgency for
medievalists to reckon with “medieval encounters of Christianity, Islam
and Judaism in the crucible of violent historical transformation.”70 This is
vital work, but not the sole touchstone for thinking about the intervention
that medieval studies might make in profiling the deep context for political
struggles. At the time of the writing of this book, the nation is in the midst
of sesquicentennial remembrances of the Civil War, through films, news-
paper articles, popular texts, and scholarly books. Simultaneously, as noted
above, the United States is experiencing spasms of political stagnation and
violent acts by individual actors as well as political parties that seek a return
to the “original values” of the country. The tactics of politically extreme
organizations—such as the Tea Party, which insists on the sovereignty of
states—differ wildly from those of radical individuals, who call for armed
67
There is a rich vein of criticism that is interested in transnational blackness from The
Black Atlantic to Black Cosmopolitanism. However, it is important to underscore that this is
not an international project. This book is interested in how what should be the base of
European identity morphs into the language that informs national citizenship.
68
This is the primary contention of Desire for Origins.
69
Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the
Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Geraldine Heng, Empire of
Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003); The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018). Because of their pulblication dates, this book is not able
to fully engage with the arguments of Heng’s latest study.
70
Heng, 13.
28 M. X. VERNON
rebellion or who use racially divisive language to incite violence.

Nonetheless, both recall the language mobilized before the Civil War and
through the Reconstruction period that imagined a world before the
meeting of races. Those questions of sovereignty and the fantasy of pure
blood derive from a romance with the Middle Ages, a desire for origins.
Given the medieval period’s justly earned reputation for its curiosity
about the human form and the relationship between the external and the
internal, the reluctance on the part of medievalists to approach the ques-
tions raised by race and ethnicity in channels that scholars of the classical
and early modern periods have so comfortably occupied is curious.
Medieval studies is the ideal venue for directly undoing some of the distor-
tions visited upon medieval texts by later hands. At the very least, it might
be an opportunity to question why medieval material has been so given to
certain types of misinterpretation. There are a multitude of sites in which
medievalists can intervene that constructively resonate with ongoing
research in African-American studies: Ethiopia as a metaphor for a source
of human knowledge and as the site of incredible blackness; the mixture of
cultural identity and the plasticity of skin tone (such that a Saracen woman
who converts can change from dark to light); the theorization of the ver-
nacular; the language of migration and persistence of diasporic mythology;
the questions about the form of humans and the interrogation of faith in
the face of a catastrophic loss of life.71
A Story to Pass On: Reading Against the Discourse

of Time
As this book will argue, the earliest African-American scholars also read
the texts of the Middle Ages but they approached the study of the Middle
Ages as a strange sort of inheritance, one in which they could dimly see the
outlines of their own struggles and envision alternative means of reading
their existence within the United States. The study of the Middle Ages
became a surrogate tie to a deeper past. But the surrogacy reveals an
absence, a convex image of the void, the “bloodstained gate” at the center
71
See, for example: Jacqueline de Weever, Sheba’s Daughters: Whitening and Demonizing
the Saracen Woman in the Medieval French Epic (New York: Routledge, 1998); Nicholas
Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1989); Christopher Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
of African-American history.72 The present study seeks to create a geneal-

ogy of sorts, or perhaps better stated, it is an anti-genealogy; one that
charts how the Middle Ages were used among African-American writers in
conversation with white writers. In doing so, I seek to undermine the
unstated primacy of blood within research on medievalism that tacitly
reaffirms problematic significations of the Middle Ages. My work depends
on the theories of “surrogated kinship” in opposition to the seemingly
literal kinship that undergirds many discussions of the Middle Ages and
whiteness. In doing so, this study nuances literary theory that reads sur-
rogacy as a way of recreating and reproducing culture.73 African-American
scholars and writers who examine the Middle Ages as a point of origin or
a creative point of departure resist the language that would write them out
of history. Rather than adopting medieval tropes as a way of reiterating the
notions of power and conquest that are latent within how the Middle Ages
have often been mobilized, these African-Americans intervened within the
language surrounding the Middle Ages to articulate their own visions for
participation within the nation.
One might consider this to be an anti-genealogy in part because it
resists thinking in terms of purity that so often traps scholars thinking
about medievalism. This research reads against the grain of the predomi-
nant narrative of medievalism—as a uniform and clearly-defined means of
consolidating white identity—to find ways to see the desire for origins
broadly. The Black Middle Ages argues that the question of what consti-
tutes the Middle Ages is asked and reassumed across generations of writers
with no direct racial claims to the period. In the hands of African-American
writers, the adoption of medieval texts can be read as an example of sur-
rogated kinship: the convergence point where metaphorical relationships
subsume literal ones. Surrogated kinship allows these writers and intellec-
tuals to forge links of identity that would not be possible under the
demands of documentary knowledge.
Jamaica Kincaid, through a series of essays about gardening, offers a
reading of the stakes and necessity of enacting literary surrogacy within
African-American/Afro-Caribbean letters that is illuminating about this
72
This is Frederick Douglass’s term, remobilized to think about the broad problems of
contending with the silences of the African-American historical archive in: Saidiya Hartman,
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 20.
73
See Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996), 2.
30 M. X. VERNON
subject. She meditates on literal and metaphorical planting and transplant-

ing to discuss her relationship with Wordsworth. At the center of this are
her reflections on being a young girl and having to memorize Wordsworth’s
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” The strangeness of daffodils, to a little
girl raised in the Caribbean, awoke within her a sense of displacement
from the literature she was forced to learn:
Let me show you a picture of the little black-skinned girl, with hair strands
curlier than wool, an imagination too vivid for the world into which I was
born, my mind (whatever that meant or means) shining new and good,
certainly good enough to know that there were things it was not allowed to
know. The daffodil, for one: What was a daffodil, I wanted to know, since
such a thing did not grow in the tropics.74
Kincaid recounts how she filled her garden with those flowers, as though
to pluck the lofty vision of daffodils and plant them into the earth: five
thousand of them to Wordsworth’s ten thousand. Kincaid frames the
planting, not as a competition between herself and Wordsworth to match
one another, daffodil for daffodil, but as a way to detach the poem from
the context it once held for her as an inscrutable, but oppressive artifact
from a colonial education. The memory of the poem and the significance
of the daffodil linger for Kincaid.75 They grew in the soil of her young
mind and came to signify “literature’s political role in the work of
empire.”76 Wordsworth wakens within Kincaid the strangeness of the col-
onized subject in the Caribbean: the unspoken narrative of the slave trade,
the evidence of forced diaspora made evident by the transplanting of
Wordsworth into the tropics.
Kincaid’s reflections on education chart a complex matrix of significa-
tions behind what it means to learn within a tradition that deeply informs
one’s life, but at the same time is foreign to one’s lived experiences. For
the writer, the dawning knowledge of a genealogical break finds its com-
plement in the surrogation of learning; that is, she seeks out a heritage in
the written word and maps what she finds there onto her own experience.
The revelations of Wordsworth’s poem and the act of memorizing it open
her mind to questions of origin and historical trauma she would continue
74
Jamaica Kincaid, “Dances with Daffodils,” Architectural Digest 64.4 (2007), 78–82.
75
Jamaica Kincaid, “Alien Soil,” The New Yorker, June 21, 1993, 47.
76
Ian Smith, “Misusing Canonical Intertexts: Jamaica Kincaid, Wordsworth and
Colonialism’s ‘Absent Things,’” Callaloo, 25.3 (Summer 2002), 801–820.
to work through for decades within her writing. Digging here is the work
of literary excavation; she finds unsuspected materials within a substrate
that would seem foreign to it. Wordsworth’s daffodils sprout in Kincaid’s
imagination. His words, subjected to Kincaid’s interpretation, reveal
unlikely connections and points of contact that reward the attempt. The
young Kincaid sees herself as estranged from the poetry of Wordsworth
but also aware of her body as a “little black-skinned girl” for whom this
poetry was not meant:
Somewhere I read that Wordsworth worried about misreadings of his poem.

It can’t be that he worried about the uses to which his countrymen would
employ the product of his genius (they were busy trading slaves, not educat-
ing them). I believe it possible, though, that with his sensibility, so finely
tuned to the unknown in the human realm, so finely tuned to our universal
confusions and misunderstandings, he was, when worrying about misread-
ings, thinking of someone like me.77
Perhaps what is most striking about this passage is the closeness Kincaid
assumes to Wordsworth, to the point that she imputes a generosity of soul
that could imagine the writer herself.
At its root, the subject of this book is the power of misreading, of the
sort which Edward Said argues “plays havoc with the stability of texts
and authors, indeed with the whole order of culture. The past becomes
an active intervention in the present; the future is preposterously made
just a figure of the past in the present.”78 These sorts of strategic misread-
ings, as we see with Kincaid, function as a way to forge kinship across
the boundaries of time and the constructions of race. While contem-
plating the English literary tradition forces African-American writers to
confront a history of excluded voices, misreading—how Kincaid assumes
Wordsworth’s thoughts to reread “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”—
creates nodes of connection and spaces to reform meaning through unex-
pected conjunctions. This is the working of both allegory and kinship.
Unlike Gordon Teskey’s theories that relate allegory to violence, here
the connections are vital for remediating the psychic trauma of being on
alien soil.79 This work of reading against chronology or, etymologically
77
“Dances with Daffodils,” 82.
78
Edward Said, “The Poet as Oedipus,” The New York Times Book Review, 13 April 1975,
24.
79
Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 5–6.
32 M. X. VERNON
speaking, the “discourse of time” is at the heart of The Black Middle

Ages. It identifies a counter-narrative that African-American authors have
offered as a response to dominant narratives of history’s progress and the
implied roster of its participants.
Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks describes her writing as an “incubator for
the creation of historical events—and, as in the case of artificial insemina-
tion, the baby is no less human.”80 This philosophy encapsulates the pos-
sibilities of productive misreading, what a writer must do in the absence of
documentation, or worse, the willful silencing of the past. For example,
Morrison ends her novel Beloved with the paradoxical injunction: “This is
not a story to pass on.” The sentence demands that the reader take two
competing stances on the preceding work, both that the novel and the
underlying historical circumstances should be left behind, and that this
story cannot be circumvented.81 Saidiya Hartman amplifies this ambivalence
in her personal and scholarly study, Lose Your Mother. She explores the
frustrating gaps in both historical and familial records of a slave past. In
her search to learn about the history of slavery in her family’s past, she
would continually come up against both an unwillingness to speak on the
part of her family and lacunae in the records of southern slavery. These
absences in records were set against her own desire to know and to
uncover:
Would I never know? Were gaps and silences and empty rooms the sub-
stance of history? If ruin was my sole inheritance and the only certainty the
impossibility of recovering the stories of the enslaved, did this make my his-
tory tantamount to mourning? Or worse, was it a melancholia I would never
be able to overcome? […] Alongside the terrible things one had survived
was also the shame of having survived it. Remembering warred with the will
to forget.82
80
Suzan-Lori Parks, “Possession,” The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 1997), 4.
81
The story the novel recounts is based on scraps of information, what little is known
about the life of the escaped slave Margaret Garner, who murdered her children rather than
have them become enslaved. The story is horrific and as such, the novel argues, it is some-
thing to be remembered and to be left behind.
82
Saidiya Hartman Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 16.
Her work necessarily had to create a novel form of analysis that located
origins where it could, to merge fictive and speculative connections with
what the historical record supplied. The line between the historical and
the fictional, the biological and the literary, in the case of African-American
literature and literary studies is not at all clear.
The Black Middle Ages is structured in a way that breaks from more
traditional readings of the subject that linger on one period or one set of
texts so that it can track connections as they come: historical or elective,
linear or elusive. I begin with two readings of late-nineteenth and early
twentieth-century uses of the Middle Ages. In Chap. 2, I follow how the
political purchase of the Middle Ages could be marshaled to renegotiate
the terms of belonging in the nation in ways that planted intercultural
contact and fusion within the core of American identity. While white
Americans often read the Anglo-Saxon period as an era of purity inter-
rupted by the Norman invasion, these African-American scholars read the
hyphen; they focused on the Middle Ages as a period of racial mixing and
political possibility between Angles, Saxons, and Normans. The chapter
then offers a historical reading of archival materials charting the earliest
writing about and teaching of the Middle Ages among African-American
intellectuals. This work reveals how the philological approach that was
important to early medieval research could be wielded to the political ends
of African-American education, in particular as a set of tools for under-
standing African-American history through linguistic study.
Chapter 3 resumes the set of questions provoked in Chap. 2 about
using the past as a political tool to intervene into the construction of race
and ethnicity. The chapter expands the study’s inquiry to look at the place
of the novel within the depiction of the Middle Ages, particularly the ways
in which it disrupts the tropes of romance. I put into conversation Mark
Twain and Charles Chesnutt, who use the novels A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court and The House Behind the Cedars to escape and cri-
tique the authorial shadow of Walter Scott. Ostensibly, both novels parody
the work of Scott, particularly Ivanhoe, for its “sham grandeurs, and sham
chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.”83 Chesnutt
and Twain take pains to show how flimsy the mythology underpinning
Scott’s work is. (They do this quite literally at points; Chesnutt, for exam-
ple, dresses up his “knights” in cardboard and gilt paper.) But, as this
chapter argues, both authors recognize the power of Scott’s myth-making
83
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904), 347.
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Title: The art of music, Vol. 07 (of 14), Pianoforte and chamber
music
Editor: Leland Hall

Edward Burlingame Hill
Daniel Gregory Mason
César Saerchinger
Release date: December 9, 2023 [eBook #72303]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: National Society of Music, 1915
Credits: Andrés V. Galia, Jude Eylander and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ART OF

MUSIC, VOL. 07 (OF 14), PIANOFORTE AND CHAMBER MUSIC
***
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Transcriber and is included in the public domain.
THE ART OF MUSIC
The Art of Music
A Comprehensive Library of Information
for Music Lovers and Musicians
Editor-in-Chief
DANIEL GREGORY MASON

Columbia University
Associate Editors
EDWARD B. HILL LELAND HALL

Harvard University Past Professor, Univ. of
Wisconsin
Managing Editor
CÉSAR SAERCHINGER
Modern Music Society of New York
In Fourteen Volumes
Profusely Illustrated
NEW YORK
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC
Home Concert
Painting by Fritz von Uhde

THE ART OF MUSIC: VOLUME SEVEN
Pianoforte and Chamber Music
Department Editor:
LELAND HALL, M.A.

Past Professor of Musical History, University of
Wisconsin
Introduction by
HAROLD BAUER
NEW YORK
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC
Copyright, 1915, by
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC, Inc.
[All Rights Reserved]
PREFATORY NOTE
The editor has not attempted to give within the limits of this single
volume a detailed history of the development of both pianoforte and
chamber music. He has emphasized but very little the historical
development of either branch of music, and he has not pretended to
discuss exhaustively all the music which might be comprehended
under the two broad titles.
The chapters on pianoforte music are intended to show how the

great masters adapted themselves to the exigencies of the
instrument, and in what manner they furthered the development of
the difficult technique of writing for it. Also, because the piano may
be successfully treated in various ways, and because it lends itself to
the expression of widely diverse moods, there is in these chapters
some discussion of the great masterpieces of pianoforte literature in
detail.
The arrangement of material is perhaps not usual. What little has

been said about the development of the piano, for example, has
been said in connection with Beethoven, who was the first to avail
himself fully of the advantages the piano offered over the
harpsichord. A discussion, or rather an analysis, of the pianoforte
style has been put in the chapter on Chopin, who is even today the
one outstanding master of it.
In the part of the book dealing with chamber music the material has
been somewhat arbitrarily arranged according to combinations of
instruments. The string quartets, the pianoforte trios, quartets, and
quintets, the sonatas for violin and piano, and other combinations
have been treated separately. The selection of some works for a
more or less detailed discussion, and the omission of even the
mention of others, will undoubtedly seem unjustifiable to some; but
the editor trusts at least that those he has chosen for discussion may
illumine somewhat the general progress of chamber music from the
time of Haydn to the present day.
For the chapters on violin music before Corelli and the beginnings of
chamber music we are indebted to Mr. Edward Kilenyi, whose initials
appear at the end of these chapters.
Leland Hall
INTRODUCTION
The term Chamber Music, in its modern sense, cannot perhaps be
strictly defined. In general it is music which is fine rather than broad,
or in which, at any rate, there is a wealth of detail which can be
followed and appreciated only in a relatively small room. It is not, on
the whole, brilliantly colored like orchestral music. The string quartet,
for example, is conspicuously monochrome. Nor is chamber music
associated with the drama, with ritual, pageantry, or display, as are
the opera and the mass. It is—to use a well worn term—very nearly
always absolute music, and, as such, must be not only perfect in
detail, but beautiful in proportion and line, if it is to be effective.
As far as externals are concerned, chamber music is made up of

music for a solo instrument, with or without accompaniment
(excluding, of course, concertos and other like forms, which require
the orchestra, and music for the organ, which can hardly be
dissociated from cathedrals and other large places), and music for
small groups of instruments, such as the string trio and the string
quartet, and combinations of diverse instruments with the piano.
Many songs, too, sound best in intimate surroundings; but one thinks
of them as in a class by themselves, not as a part of the literature of
chamber music.
With very few exceptions, all the great composers have sought
expression in chamber music at one time or another; and their
compositions in this branch seem often to be the finest and the most
intimate presentation of their genius. Haydn is commonly supposed
to have found himself first in his string quartets. Mozart’s great
quartets are almost unique among his compositions as an
expression of his genius absolutely uninfluenced by external
circumstances and occasion. None of Beethoven’s music is more
profound nor more personal than his last quartets. Even among the
works of the later composers, who might well have been seduced
altogether away from these fine and exacting forms by the
intoxicating glory of the orchestra, one finds chamber music of a rich
and special value.
This special value consists in part in the refined and unfailing

musical skill with which the composers have handled their slender
material; but more in the quality of the music itself. The great works
of chamber music, no matter how profound, speak in the language of
intimacy. They show no signs of the need to impress or overwhelm
an audience. Perhaps no truly great music does. But operas and
even symphonies must be written with more or less consideration for
external circumstances, whereas in the smaller forms, composers
seem to be concerned only with the musical inspiration which they
feel the desire to express. They speak to an audience of
understanding friends, as it were, before whom they may reveal
themselves without thought of the effectiveness of their speech.
They seem in them to have consulted only their ideals. They have
taken for granted the sympathetic attention of their audience.
The piano has always played a commanding rôle in the history of

chamber music. From the early days when the harpsichord with its
figured bass was the foundation for almost all music, both vocal and
instrumental, few forms in chamber music have developed
independently of it, or of the piano, its successor. The string quartet
and a few combinations of wind instruments offer the only
conspicuous exceptions. The mass of chamber music is made up of
pianoforte trios, quartets, and quintets, of sonatas for pianoforte and
various other instruments; and, indeed, the great part of pianoforte
music is essentially chamber music.
It may perhaps seem strange to characterize as remarkably fine and

intimate the music which has been written for an instrument often
stigmatized as essentially unmusical. But the piano has attracted
nearly all the great composers, many of whom were excellent
pianists; and the music which they have written for it is indisputably
of the highest and most lasting worth. There are many pianoforte
sonatas which are all but symphonies, not only in breadth of form,
but in depth of meaning. Some composers, notably Beethoven and
Liszt, demanded of the piano the power of the orchestra. Yet on the
whole the mass of pianoforte music remains chamber music.
The pianoforte style is an intricate style, and to be effective must be

perfectly finished. The instrument sounds at its best in a small hall. In
a large one its worst characteristics are likely to come all too clearly
to the surface. And though it is in many ways the most powerful of all
the instruments, truly beautiful playing does not call upon its limits of
sound, but makes it a medium of fine and delicately shaded musical
thought. To regard it as an instrument suited primarily to big and
grandiose effects is grievously to misunderstand it, and is likely,
furthermore, to make one overlook the possibilities of tone color
which, though often denied it, it none the less possesses.
In order to study intelligently the mechanics, or, if you will, the art of
touch upon the piano, and in order to comprehend the variety of
tone-color which can be produced from it, one must recognize at the
outset the fact that the piano is an instrument of percussion. Its
sounds result from the blows of hammers upon taut metal strings.
With the musical sound given out by these vibrating strings must
inevitably be mixed the dull and unmusical sound of the blow that set
them vibrating. The trained ear will detect not only the thud of the
hammer against the string, but that of the finger against the key, and
that of the key itself upon its base. The study of touch and tone upon
the piano is the study of the combination and the control of these two
elements of sound, the one musical, the other unmusical.
The pianist can acquire but relatively little control over the musical
sounds of his instrument. He can make them soft and loud, but he
cannot, as the violinist can, make a single tone grow from soft to
loud and die away to soft again. The violinist or the singer both
makes and controls tone, the one by his bow, the other by his breath;
the pianist, in comparison with them, but makes tone. Having caused
a string to vibrate by striking it through a key, he cannot even sustain
these vibrations. They begin at once to weaken; the sound at once
grows fainter. Therefore he has to make his effects with a volume of
sounds which has been aptly said to be ever vanishing.
On the other hand, these sounds have more endurance than those
of the xylophone, for example; and in their brief span of failing life the
skillful pianist may work somewhat upon them according to his will.
He may cut them exceedingly short by allowing the dampers to fall
instantaneously upon the strings, thus stopping all vibrations. He
may even prolong a few sounds, a chord let us say, by using the
sustaining pedal. This lifts the dampers from all the strings, so that
all vibrate in sympathy with the tones of the chord and reënforce
them, so to speak. This may be done either at the moment the notes
of the chord are struck, or considerably later, after they have begun
appreciably to weaken. In the latter case the ear can detect the
actual reënforcement of the failing sounds.
Moreover, the use of the pedal serves to affect somewhat the color
of the sounds of the instrument. All differences in timbre depend on
overtones; and if the pianist lifts all dampers from the strings by the
pedals, he will hear the natural overtones of his chord brought into
prominence by means of the sympathetic vibrations of other strings
he has not struck. He can easily produce a mass of sound which
strongly suggests the organ, in the tone color of which the shades of
overtones are markably evident.
The study of such effects will lead him beyond the use of the pedal
into some of the niceties of pianoforte touch. He will find himself able
to suppress some overtones and bring out others by emphasizing a
note here and there in a chord of many notes, especially in an
arpeggio, and by slighting others. Such an emphasis, it is true, may
give to a series of chords an internal polyphonic significance; but if
not made too prominent, will tend rather to color the general sound
than to make an effect of distinct drawing.
It will be observed that in the matter of so handling the volume of
musical sound, prolonging it and slightly coloring it by the use of the
pedal or by skillful emphasis of touch, the pianist’s attention is
directed ever to the after-sounds, so to speak, of his instrument. He
is interested, not in the sharp, clear beginning of the sound, but in
what follows it. He finds in the very deficiencies of the instrument
possibilities of great musical beauty. It is hardly too much to say,
then, that the secret of a beautiful or sympathetic touch, which has
long been considered to be hidden in the method of striking the keys,
may be found quite as much in the treatment of sounds after the
keys have been struck. It is a mystery which can by no means be
wholly solved by a muscular training of the hands; for a great part of
such training is concerned only with the actual striking of the keys.
We have already said that striking the keys must produce more or
less unmusical sounds. These sounds are not without great value.
They emphasize rhythm, for example, and by virtue of them the
piano is second to no instrument in effects of pronounced,
stimulating rhythm. The pianist wields in this regard almost the
power of the drummer to stir men to frenzy, a power which is by no
means to be despised. In martial music and in other kinds of
vigorous music the piano is almost without shortcomings. But
inasmuch as a great part of pianoforte music is not in this vigorous
vein, but rather in a vein of softer, more imaginative beauty, the
pianist must constantly study how to subject these unmusical sounds
to the after-sounds which follow them. In this study he will come
upon the secret of the legato style of playing.
If the violinist wishes to play a phrase in a smooth legato style, he

does not use a new stroke of his bow for each note. If he did so, he
would virtually be attacking the separate notes, consequently
emphasizing them, and punctuating each from the other. Fortunately
for him, he need not do so; but the pianist cannot do otherwise. Each
note he plays must be struck from the strings of his instrument by a
hammer. He can only approximate a legato style—by concealing, in
one way or another, the sounds which accompany this blow.

The Black Middle Ages Race and The Construction of The Middle Ages Matthew X Vernon Full Chapter

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The Black Middle Ages: Race and the

Construction of the Middle Ages

Matthew X. Ver non

More information about this series at

The Black Middle

The New Middle Ages

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018942752

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover credit: Zoonar GmbH / Alamy Stock

Printed on acid-free paper

About the Nature and Structure of This Study

“feudalism” or “romance” they did so with a deep understanding of the

Davis, CA Matthew X. Vernon

Alastair Minnis, Stephen Yale-Loehr, Susanne Wofford, Robert Stepto,

1 Introduction: Reading Out of Time—Genealogy,

2 Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages in African-­

3 Failed Knights and Broken Narratives: Mark Twain

4 History, Genealogy, and Gerald of Wales: Medieval

5 Other Families: Dryden’s Theory of Congeniality

6 Coda: True and Imaginary History in Django Unchained 247

Introduction: Reading Out of

© The Author(s) 2018 1

were victims of “modern global corporatism” could regain their “self-­

What the Anglo-Saxon has done, [Kipling] has memorialized. And by

London nimbly skips through timeframes and across continents to advance

The quest to conserve “Anglo-Saxon” virtues on the part of political

All the other races have a character to overcome first or to be understood

Van Evrie’s reasoning demonstrates the topsy-turvy reasoning that was

nation. In fact, he seemed to believe abolitionist projects were overzealous

Whitman subverts the expected formulation of “Saxon domination” with

The Crusaders’ streams of shadowy, midnight troops, sped with the

“Song of the Exposition” puts several timeframes in parallel: the mythical

His willingness to read the structures of the United States government

philosophy of history. Among English writers it may be traced at least as far

H.L. Osgood, an American historian and contemporary of Hosmer, makes

sophisticated interrelation of black and white characters that confuses the

Morrison, a writer deeply invested in critiquing literary origins, is acutely

diminution of white liberty.35 In the late years of Barack Obama’s presi-

The eponymous character of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)

Jefferson used temporality to distinguish the American project as a revolu-

Historically, American Negroes are caught in a vast process of change that

Slavery and southern discrimination as read by Ellison reconstitutes feu-

origin, reveals the potency of the Middle Ages as a metaphor used to

In its isolation, seclusion, and self-reliant independence, Col. Lloyd’s plan-

To be implicated within the system of slavery and the subsequent patterns

chisement and the subjective experience of being marginalized by the

The potential scope of Du Bois’s mode of reading is astonishing. In his

This is a particularly sharp critique, as Du Bois chooses the questing knight

ducted campaigns of conquest. As has been argued elsewhere, these

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very

A Desire for (Medieval) Origins

language of knighthood or Thomas Dixon’s language of crusades to see

the superiority of the white mind.59 The mother of African-American let-

Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, which delves deeply into the

early twentieth-­century scholars about this subject and medievalists have

rebellion or who use racially divisive language to incite violence.

A Story to Pass On: Reading Against the Discourse

of African-American history.72 The present study seeks to create a geneal-

subject. She meditates on literal and metaphorical planting and transplant-

Somewhere I read that Wordsworth worried about misreadings of his poem.

speaking, the “discourse of time” is at the heart of The Black Middle

Editor: Leland Hall

Release date: December 9, 2023 [eBook #72303]

Davis, CA Matthew X. Vernon

1 Introduction: Reading Out of Time—Genealogy,

2 Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages in African-

3 Failed Knights and Broken Narratives: Mark Twain

4 History, Genealogy, and Gerald of Wales: Medieval

5 Other Families: Dryden’s Theory of Congeniality

6 Coda: True and Imaginary History in Django Unchained 247

were victims of “modern global corporatism” could regain their “self-

early twentieth-century scholars about this subject and medievalists have