🧵: 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".
Nicolette discovers she's the daughter of the Emir of Cartage, disguises herself as "noire" with herbs.
De Weever points out that every modern translator suddenly does not want to translate "noire" as "black" when applied to beautiful Nicolette.
De Weever brilliantly notes that, just as damningly, the translators render "oinst" [anoints] as "stain" or "smear," when the word actually is a religious word, a holy word, "a word of enhancement, not defacement."
But, to these translators, blackness can only be a stain.
Most gallingly, when the *exact same word* is used later for Nicolette removing her "noire" disguise, translators render the word as "anoints".
For these modern scholars, whiteness is an anointment, blackness a stain.
As De Weever notes, the assumption is that Nicolette's assumed blackness isn't "really" her and that she "recovers" her whiteness later.
Yet, De Weever argues we can read the moment differently. Nicolette is already in disguise as a male bard. She need not make herself "noire"
Nicolette only uses herbs to make herself black, De Weever points out, after she discovers she's the daughter of the Emir. De Weever argues that it's "a way of claiming her cultural inheritance for a brief period", something modern white translators cannot imagine.
De Weever notes that the medieval French poet's choice of this device--and choice to emphasize that Nicolette is "really" white--is one kind of problem.
The modern translators who refuse to render the actual situation in the medieval poem is another kind of problem.
De Weever smartly argues that the translators are imposing their own 20th-century values on the text with their side-stepping of Nicolette anointing herself with blackness.
De Weever also smartly notes that translations like "dark", "swarthy", and "brown" aren't alternate possibilities here.
They are words used to avoid saying "black," the literal translation of "noire."
We have a medieval French romance in which the heroine discovers she is the daughter of an Emir and then, for little practical purpose, anoints herself with blackness for a while.
Modern translators cannot handle that phrase.
What makes De Weever's article so striking is that it, like so much of her work, is about how modern scholars have imposed their own racial ideologies and assumptions on medieval texts..
Yet reviewers consistently claimed DE WEEVER imposed her ideology.
Why are we not talking about Sir William Neville & Sir John Clanvowe, the two gay English knights buried together in a tomb with marriage motifs???
Who were friends with Chaucer and possibly the inspiration for his The Knight's Tale?
And also maybe SPIES? #MedievalTwitter
So the above image is the tombstone of Sir William Neville & Sir John Clanvowe, who died in Galata (outside Constantinople) in 1391 within days of each other. Their shields are "impaled"; that is, their coats of arms are merged. This really only happens with married couples.
The article about their tombstone tries SO hard not to say gay.
I want to highlight an example of the whitewashing & erasure of the work of scholars of color--particularly Black & Indigenous ones--in the work of white medievalists. I came across it yesterday, & it's such a clear demonstration of how their work gets credited to white people.
This isn't a critique of the article's claim or its contribution to the field of race studies in Old English.
This is about how white medievalists who start publishing on medieval race draw on the work of scholars of color while obscuring them.
So this article came out recently in PMLA, a journal that has notably blocked work on race by premodernists of colors (medium.com/the-sundial-ac…)
That matters, since this article will be highly visible and cited in a way that the work of scholars of color won't.
🧵: So several scholars of color are pointing out the problems with racists mad about the new LoTR series. I did the same. My tweet got tepid responses, while the scholars of color faced vicious racism immediately *often from the same people*
[CW: racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia]
Most the people disagreeing with me didn't make it an issue of my identity & didn't insult me. These are among the meanest ones.
Easily a third of the responses to the scholars of color were hateful.
Dr. Ramírez got six comments on his main tweet and two of those were immediately vicious insults.
🧵The AHA president's "scholarship on race is ahistorical and presentist" blog isn't an outlier view or a brave take in the face of "the woke mob" or the "radical Left". It's been the party line among many senior scholars for decades.
Take medieval studies. (Really. Take it).
Look at basically any "state of the field" forum in medieval studies from the last few decades, especially in Old English studies. A lot of the big names--Allen Frantzen springs to mind--made careers out of slamming new approaches as presentist and ahistorical.
Here's Frantzen in 1990, complaining about "revisionists" (who he calls "Professors of Otherness") rewriting the teaching of history.