🧵: 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.
🧵: 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.
Attending @ISASaxonists' talk for the Early Medieval Identities series. I have officially been given permission to livetweet the talk. #MedievalTwitter
Lol, and my internet just dropped the talk. Reconnecting!
I'm seemingly back. Fingers crossed. Thank goodness the talk is being recorded.