🧵: Here are four Ethiopians from a late-tenth century Old English manuscript, depicted as blue men in accordance with a tradition of black-skinned people being described as blue.
We can see the Old English description of them above the portrait.
They're called "Silhearwana," the Old English word for "Ethiopians." That there was a specific Old English word for this is a little unusual, since they usually just adopted Latin terms. JRR Tolkien thought the word meant "sun-burned," like the word "Ethiopian" did.
I kind of wonder if Old English had its own term for Black people, rather than borrowing a Latin term, because of the presence of Black people in England at the time.
As @Archaeofiend points out in his excellent article on the subject, there were certainly Black people living in turn-of-the-millennium England.
But if Black people really lived there, why would white English authors call them "blue" and depict them like this?
(yes, "Black" and "white" are more modern categories, but I use them here as a shorthand)
Well, other ppl did. The ninth-century Annals of Ireland claimed that the Vikings brought a great host of "fir gorma" [blue men] back from Morocco, which seemingly meant Black people. The Annals claimed these blue men lived in Ireland for a long time.
There's also the very confusing situation of Old English color words, which didn't always seem to indicate hue as much as they did things like reflectivity or intensity (this is why you get things like "brown swords" in OE poetry; "brun"[brown] meant shiny).
AND OE manuscript art plays very loose with color, so what we would think of as realism isn't really the aim of these artists, precisely. Here's Adam and God from the same MS, for instance, with blue hair.
(f. 6r)
A lot of work remains to be done on how we think about skin color (and color generally) in OE lit and manuscripts. Even more work remains to be done on figuring out how to move past racist paradigms that dismiss the presence of African ppl in early England.
I think @Archaeofiend and @ISASaxonists are doing the most interesting and important work rn on these racist paradigms and the dismissal of the presence and contributions of Africans in early medieval England.
There's still so much work to be done rethinking early medieval England and its interactions with the larger world, and the presence in pre-Conquest England of people whose ancestors came from outside western Europe.
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A #MedievalTwitter thread on some early medieval interactions between the British Isles & Africa.
The British Isles were in constant contact with Africa throughout recorded history.
(BL, Cotton MS Tiberius B V/1, f. 56v)
There's been a fair amount of work done on Africans in the British Isles during the Roman period, so I won't repeat it here, but I recommend these major summaries of Africans in England.
Archeologists have shown that trade with the Mediterranean and Africa continued after the Romans left England, with olive oil and wine continuing to be imported to the British Isles into the early Middle Ages.
🧵: In my continuing quest to document medieval depictions of queer people, I am looking at depictions from Dante's Inferno of the sodomites, depictions that often seem to emphasize buttocks and temptation (and feature a lot of monks!).
Certainly, there are depictions where the sodomites clearly writhe in pain in the fiery rain, like this one, but a lot of the depictions don't show much suffering and present the sodomites as almost tempting Dante.
(BnF, Italien 2017 f.191)
There are a remarkable amount of men with monastic tonsures in this one, suggesting people saw priests as particularly prone to sodomy.
The lack of scale in this battle image makes the elephants looks like they are the size of small dogs, which is possibly the cutest thing I've ever seen.
[TW: sexual harassment & abuse, threats, homophobia, anti-Semitism, drinking culture.]
Please read & share this 2-year investigation of Andy Orchard, UOxford Prof and one of the most notorious sexual predators in medieval studies. #MedievalTwitter
The accompanying podcast episode features stories from incredibly brave women in the profession who've witnessed and been affected by his predatory behavior. I want to acknowledge their work and courage in coming forward.
Orchard remains a respected senior scholar and editor in the field, a member of medievalist organizations, and a presence at conferences.
He remains an editor of the journal Notes & Queries, and of the journal Anglo-Saxon England. I hope that will change.
🧵: Let me show you Jacqueline de Weever's pioneering 1994 study on how modern translators of medieval texts often reinforce ideas that Blackness cannot be beautiful, & how they claim, in their translations, that blackness is a "stain". #MedievalTwitter
De Weever analyzes translations of a major passage in the Old French romance 'Aucassin et Nicolette', when beautiful Nicolette discovers she's Arab and "anoints" her face black/noire.
Modern translators refuse to translate "noire" as "black" when applied to a beautiful woman.
De Weever notes that "noire" appears 2 times before it is applied to Nicolette. It is used to emphasize how white Nicolette is (so white daises appear "noire" by comparison) or to describe the blackness of a wild man. Translators translates these instances properly as "black".