White before whiteness in the late Middle Ages

By Wan-Chuan Kao

This groundbreaking book analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations. It argues that while whiteness participates in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote skin tone alone. The ‘before’ of whiteness, presupposing essence and teleology, is less a retro-futuristic temporisation – one that simultaneously looks backward and faces forward – than a discursive figuration of how white becomes whiteness. Fragility delineates the limits of ruling ideologies in performances of mourning as self-defence against perceived threats to subjectivity and desire; precarity registers the ruptures within normative values by foregrounding the unmarked vulnerability of the body politic and the violence of cultural aestheticisation; and racialicity attends to the politics of recognition and the technologies of enfleshment at the systemic edge of life and nonlife.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9781526145796

Book preview

White before whiteness in the late Middle Ages

MANCHESTER MEDIEVAL LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Series editors: Anke Bernau, David Matthews and James Paz

Series founded by: J. J. Anderson and Gail Ashton

Advisory board: Ruth Evans, Patricia C. Ingham, Andrew James Johnston, Chris Jones, Catherine Karkov, Nicola McDonald, Haruko Momma, Susan Phillips, Sarah Salih, Larry Scanlon, Stephanie Trigg and Matthew Vernon

Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture publishes monographs and essay collections comprising new research informed by current critical methodologies on the literary cultures of the global Middle Ages. We are interested in all periods, from the early Middle Ages through to the late, and we include post-medieval engagements with and representations of the medieval period (or ‘medievalism’). ‘Literature’ is taken in a broad sense, to include the many different medieval genres: imaginative, historical, political, scientific and religious.

Titles available in the series

39. The gift of narrative in medieval England

Nicholas Perkins

40. Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature: Emotions, ethics, dreams

Megan G. Leitch

41. Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe

Laura Kalas and Laura Varnam (eds)

42. The narrative grotesque in medieval Scottish poetry

Caitlin Flynn

43. Painful pleasures: Sadomasochism in medieval cultures

Christopher Vaccaro (ed.)

44. Bestsellers and masterpieces: The changing medieval canon

Heather Blurton and Dwight F. Reynolds (eds)

45. Medieval literary voices: Embodiment, materiality and performance

Louise D’Arcens and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir (eds)

46. The heat of Beowulf

Daniel C. Remein

47. Hybrid healing

Lori Ann Garner

48. Difficult pasts: Post-Reformation memory and the medieval romance

Mimi Ensley

49. The problem of literary value

Robert J. Meyer-Lee

50. Marian maternity in late-medieval England

Mary Beth Long

51. Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism

Helen Dell

White before whiteness in the

late Middle Ages

Wan-Chuan Kao

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Wan-Chuan Kao 2024

The right of Wan-Chuan Kao to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book was published with the generous assistance of a Book Subvention Award from the Medieval Academy of America, and a subvention from Washington and Lee University.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4580 2 hardback

First published 2024

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

David Batchelor, ‘Found Monochrome 430, Cinelândia, Rio de Janeiro, 07.09.10’, 2010. © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

For Glenn D. Burger, Steven F. Kruger and Sylvia Tomasch

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Operational whiteness

Part I Fragility

1Memorialisation in white

2Desiring white object

Part II Precarity

3Stretched white leather

4Flat white

Part III Racialicity

5White dorsality

6In the lap of whiteness

Conclusion: White environmentality

Bibliography

Index

Figures

0.1Marco Polo’s Travels. British Library, MS Royal 19 D.I., fol. 78v. (© British Library Board.)

0.2Marco Polo’s Travels. British Library, MS Royal 19 D.I., fol. 88r. (© British Library Board.)

1.1Isidore of Seville, De natura rerum. British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A. XII, fol. 64r. (© British Library Board.)

1.2Opicinus de Canistris. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Lat. 6435, fol. 84v–85r. (© Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.)

1.3Cover of G-Men Detective. March 1943. (Author’s private collection. Photo: Author.)

2.1The woman clothed with the sun. British Library, MS Harley 4972, fol. 21r. (© British Library Board.)

3.1‘Charter of human redemption’. British Library, MS Addit. 37049, fol. 23r. (© British Library Board.)

4.1Takashi Murakami, 727, 1996. (© 1996 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved. Courtesy of Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.)

4.2Takashi Murakami, DOB totem pole, 2000. (© 2000 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved. Courtesy of Galerie Perrotin.)

4.3Geoffrey Chaucer, The Prologue and Tale of Sir Thopas. San Marino, Huntington MS El 26.C.9 (Ellesmere), fol. 152r. (Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.)

4.4Kogepan. (Author’s private collection. Photo: Walter Naegle)

4.5Kara Walker, African Boy Attendant Curio with Molasses and Brown Sugar, from ‘A Subtelty, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby’ installation at the old Domino Sugar Factory Warehouse. (Bananas), 2014. Photo: Jason Wyche. Reproduced by permission of artist. (© Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.)

5.1Foetus. British Library, MS Sloane 249, fol. 197. (© British Library Board.)

5.2Detail from the Bible moralisée. British Library, MS Harley 1527, fol. 77r. (© British Library Board.)

5.3Detail from Fitzwilliam Museum, The Macclesfield Psalter, MS 1–2005, fol. 140r. (© The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.)

5.4Laura Aguilar, Grounded #111. (© Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016.)

5.5Fire rocks (lapides igniferi). Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 384/604, fol. 174r. (By permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.)

5.6Joseph Jastrow, ‘Rabbit and duck optical illusion’, from the 23 October 1892 issue of Fliegende Blätter. (Public domain.)

5.7The King of Tars. The National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS. 19.2.1 (The Auchinleck Manuscript), fol. 7r. (By permission.)

6.1Linh-Yen Hoang, Wrong Asian, 2019. (© Linh-Yen Hoang.)

6.2M. L. Kirk. Colour plate. The Story of the Canterbury Pilgrims. Retold from Chaucer and Others by F. J. Harvey Darton. (Public domain.)

6.3Dame Elisabeth Frink. The Squire’s Tale, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, 1972. (The Elisabeth Frink Estate. © 2021. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London. Photo © Tate.)

7.1Peter Cvjetanovic. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA on 11 August 2017. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images. By permission.)

7.2‘Action Report’, Identity Evropa. (Online. Accessed on 28 April 2018.)

7.3‘Southern California Beach Cleanup’, Identity Evropa, 4 December 2017. (Online. Accessed on 28 April 2018.)

7.4Title page and frontispiece, The Master of Game. (Public domain.)

Acknowledgements

Portions of the Introduction were published as ‘Race’, in Raluca Radulescu and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir (eds), The Routledge Companion to Medieval Literature (London: Routledge, 2023), pp. 394–403; an earlier version of Chapter 1 was published in postmedieval, 4:3 (2013), 352–63; an earlier version of Chapter 4 was published as ‘Cute Chaucer’ in Exemplaria, 32:2 (2018), 147–71; an earlier version of Chapter 5 was previously published in New Literary History, 52:3/4 (2021), 535–61; and portions of the Conclusion were published as ‘Identitarian Politics, Precarious Sovereignty’ in postmedieval, 11:4 (2020), 371–83; and as ‘The Fragile Giant’ in Arthuriana, 31:2 (2021), 9–39.

This book would not have been possible without the support of many people and institutions. I would like to thank Manchester University Press, especially David Matthews, Anke Bernau, James Paz, Meredith Carroll, Alun Richards, Laura Swift, the anonymous readers, Katie Evans and Rhian Davies. I am grateful for the professionalism of Dawn Preston and Erin Wiegand at Newgen Publishing, Anne Halliday, Robert Holden and Tanya Izzard. I would also like to thank David Batchelor for generously letting me use his photograph as the book cover; Kara Walker and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.; Carmen Yam, Takashi Murakami and the staff of Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.; Christopher Velasco and the Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016; the estate of Dame Elisabeth Frink; Linh-Yen Hoang; and Walter Naegle for image reproduction permissions.

I have benefited from the encouragement and advice of the following mentors: Glenn D. Burger, Steven F. Kruger, Sylvia Tomasch, Pamela Sheingorn, Valerie Allen, Michael Sargent, Peter W. Travis, Wayne Koestenbaum, Ruth Evans, Fiona Somerset, Nicole R. Rice, Seeta Chaganti, Holly Crocker, Bruce Holsinger, Kellie Robertson, Geraldine Heng, Jonathan Hsy, Susan Phillips, Jen Boyle, Myra Seaman, Patricia Clare Ingham, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Emily Steiner, Thomas Goodmann, Sif Ríkharðsdóttir and Raluca Radulescu. I am grateful for the insights of Arthur Bahr, Anna Kłosowska, Adin Lears, Ayanna Thompson, Urvashi Chakravarty, Susan Signe Morrison, Matthew X. Vernon, Richard Sévère, Mary Rambaran-Olm, M. Breann Leake, Micah James Goodrich, Richard H. Godden, Sarah Star, Hillary Cheramie, and colleagues in the Medievalists of Color collective.

This project has received generous support from the Folger Institute and the North American Conference on British Studies Fellowship; the Medieval Academy of America Inclusivity and Diversity Book Subvention Program; as well as numerous grants from Washington and Lee University: the Lenfest Sabbatical Fellowship, the Summer Lenfest Grants and the Class of 1956 Provost’s Faculty Development Endowment. I would like to thank Lisa Fagin Davis and the Committee for Professional Development at the Medieval Academy. At Washington and Lee University, I am grateful for the support of the Provost’s office, the Dean of the College, and the English Department. Past and current administrators include Suzanne Keen, Marc Conner, Lena Hill, Paul Youngman, Elizabeth G. Oliver, Chawne Kimber, Fred LaRiviere and Genelle Gertz. Other colleagues include Ed Craun, Deborah Miranda, Lesley Wheeler, Holly Pickett, Edward Adams and Chris Gavaler. I am grateful to the librarians, especially Elizabeth Teaff, Emily Cook, Laura Hewett and Jamie Di Risio.

Earlier versions of several chapters were presented and workshopped at several institutions, to whom I am grateful for their invitation and generous feedback: the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at George Washington University; the Medieval Studies Program at the University of Connecticut; the English Program and the Medieval Studies Certificate Program at the Graduate Center, CUNY; the New Chaucer Society; the Program in Medieval Studies at the University of Virginia; the Medieval-Renaissance Colloquium at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; RaceB4Race at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and at the Folger Institute; the Humanities Institute at the University of California, Davis and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and the Department of English and the Medieval Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

My personal and professional journey has been a tortuous and complicated one, and I would not be in academia without the kind support of the following advisers: Michelle Abate, Cristina León Alfar, Jennifer N. Brown, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Helen Cooper, Lisa H. Cooper, Isabel Davis, Marilynn Desmond, Lara Farina, Simon Gaunt, Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy, Ethan Knapp, Shannon McSheffrey, Robert Mills, Alastair Minnis, J. Allan Mitchell, Michael O’Rourke, Tison Pugh, Lee Quinby, Sarah Salih, Eve Salisbury, Christabel Scaife, Stephen Sicari, Dana Stewart, Marion Turner, Kimberly Jew and Amy Wan. I am also grateful for the friendship of Zun Lee, Byron Scarlett, Ross Burningham, Walter Naegle, Eric Ramírez-Weaver, the late Ted DeLaney, Sarah Horowitz, Ellen Mayock, Diego Millan, Florinda Ruiz, Taylor Walle, David Bello, Jeanette Barbierie, Yanhong Zhu and Lynny Chin.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Chih-Hsiou Kao and Mei-Hui Kao-Hsueh; and Ronald D. Taylor, for everything.

Introduction: Operational whiteness

And so of white comeþ seuene colours and streccheþ fro þe white toward blak. Also fro blak to white streccheþ seuene.

– John Trevisa, translation of Robert Grosseteste¹

What we see as luminous we do not see as grey. But we can certainly see it as white.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein²

What is whiteness? Is it a colour or its absence? Does it mark biological facts or signify immaterial attributes? More crucially, was premodern whiteness strictly or necessarily linked to matters of race?

These are the metaphysical uncertainties about the attributes, tactics and functions of medieval whiteness with which the fourteenth-century Middle English romance the King of Tars wrestles. It is a story of two theocracies: the legendary Christian kingdom of Tars in the East, and the pseudo-historical Muslim Damascus in the Levant. The Sultan of Damascus, having heard of the beauty and virtues of the Christian princess of Tars, desires to wed her. When the King of Tars refuses the marriage proposal, the Sultan wages war against Tars and defeats the Christian army. To prevent further bloodshed, the Princess volunteers to marry the Sultan, feigns conversion to Islam and subsequently gives birth to a monstrous, formless lump of flesh. Out of grief, the Sultan blames the Princess for the aberrant birth, while she attributes the monstrosity to his Islamic faith. They agree to appeal to their respective gods to see which religion could bestow human form upon the lump. The Sultan’s prayers to Muslim deities – the medieval West misconstrued Islam as polytheistic and idolatrous – are ineffectual. The Princess then commands a Christian priest to baptise the lump, which transforms into a fair-faced baby boy. Moved by the sight of the miracle, the Sultan converts to Christianity, and his skin turns from black to white. A new convert, the Sultan demands that all his subjects convert or die. Buttressed by the Christian army of the King of Tars, the Sultan triumphs in his campaign of mass conversions and the genocide of his people.

The story of whiteness told here might appear a simple and familiar one: religious and biological discourses in the King of Tars both presuppose and proclaim the normalcy of whiteness, as guaranteed in the white racial body.³ At the centre of the romance is the miracle of the Sultan’s conversion and whitening: ‘His hide that blac and lothely was / Al white bicom thurth Godes gras / And clere withouten blame’ (922–4).⁴ The whitening of his hideous black skin visibly marks the Sultan’s new social identity as a Christian convert. And the metamorphosis of his material body further registers a shift in his affective potential: in the state of grace, the Sultan’s flesh no longer incites loathing but now inspires ‘joie’ (935). But even in this romance, whiteness is more than a simple dermal phenomenon. The narrative unhinges whiteness from its anchor in the body, sets it adrift and affixes it to nonsomatic surfaces. Earlier in the text, upon her arrival in Damascus, the Princess has a dream in which black hounds, ostensibly signifying Muslims, threaten her safety. Then one of the black hounds either transforms into, or is displaced by, a Christ figure in his ‘manhede, / In white clothes als a knight’ (447–8), who reassures her that God will help her in her times of need. As a visual and rhetorical display of identity, the medieval knight is marked not by the whiteness of his skin tone but by that of his garment. Whiteness ceases to be grounded in the body and instead becomes attached to inanimate objects. Whiteness may inaugurate and authorise a sense of identity; but as Susan Crane notes, ‘clothing, not skin, is the frontier of the self’.⁵ There is, in fact, a material loosening and a conceptual unmooring of whiteness from any stable essence or singular significance within the premodern milieu. If Aristotelian hylomorphism – a key concept in medieval scholastic philosophy – posits an inextricable joining of metaphysical form and physical matter, how do we read the slippage of whiteness from skin to armour?

We see this more clearly in another fourteenth-century text, Mandeville’s Travels, in which the image of a knight clad in white is pivotal to the West’s perception and representation of the Tartars. In a chapter on the history of Genghis Khan, Mandeville’s Travels depicts how as the Great Khan lay in bed one night, ‘he sawgh in a visioun þat þere cam before [him] a knyght Armed all in white and he satt vpon a white hors’, a knight who foretold of the Mongols’ global empire.⁶ The account is based on a French text by the Cilician Armenian Hetoum (Hayton of Corycus), itself allegedly drawn from a native source, the Secret History of Mongols. In the Eastern original, a shaman rode a horse into the skies to talk with the spirits and uttered the prophecy. Hetoum, in his rendition of the legend, displaces the shaman with ‘a knyght in armour vpon a white horse’ who appeared in a dream vision.⁷ By the time of Mandeville’s Travels, the knight is emphatically imaged as ‘Armed all in white’.⁸ More so than the case of the King of Tars, the process of whitening that occurs here takes place at the level of the social and the affective rather than the simply biological. Whiteness, as figured in the Mandeville-author’s account of Genghis Khan’s two dreams, is not primarily concerned with dermal pigmentation or signs of religious conversion. Rather, in the substitution of a tribal shaman with a white knight on a white horse, whiteness becomes a fetish of European chivalric masculinity, an ideal that presents itself as ostensibly normative and universal. In fact, whiteness enfolds the material fetish of the armoured male body on a horse within the broader socio-historical context of the encounter between East and West: a seemingly imminent conquest of Christendom by the Tartars.

Contemporary critical whiteness studies often construct whiteness as ‘a distinct and relatively recent historical fiction’.⁹ Because whiteness studies grew out of critical race theory, it remains heavily invested in whiteness as a dermal phenomenon and as a racial marker. For instance, Theodore W. Allen argues that the ‘white race’ was invented in the seventeenth century as a social control to maintain an economic system of bonded servitude.¹⁰ But in linking the emergence of whiteness to modernity, Allen constructs a historical teleology in which the Middle Ages implicitly functions as the precursor to some real birth of modern whiteness. Anthologies, such as Critical Whiteness Studies, The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness and Whiteness: A Critical Reader, as well as individual studies, such as Richard Dyer’s White and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, have limited whiteness studies temporally to (post-)modernity and spatially to the West.¹¹ Premodern whiteness, whether addressed or not in these works, is denied the conceptual space to exist.

Since the 1990s, medieval studies, through the intervention of postcolonial theory, has actively examined medieval constructions of the Other vis-à-vis Western Christendom. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s The Postcolonial Middle Ages and the special ‘race’ issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies in 2001, for example, have exposed the processes of differentiation and identity formation that engage with overtly locatable and visible others such as Jews, Muslims or imaginary monstrous races on the edge of the world.¹² Yet scholarship has continued to revolve around critical deployments of terms like ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’. Disciplinary divides – primarily those between historians and literary scholars – have informed the critical conversation in medieval studies over designations of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’, as well as their (mis)alignments with biology and culture.¹³ Whereas William Chester Jordan eschews ‘race’ in favour of ‘ethnicity’ in medieval studies, Thomas Hahn, taking a different view, suggests that medieval representations of colours are never innocent or neutral but constitutive of ‘racial’ differences that seek to universalise Western values.¹⁴ Robert Bartlett, in The Making of Europe, points to the classification system of the ninth-century Benedictine canonist Regino of Prüm as the basis for medieval racial ideology, one that categorises humans according to descent, customs, language and law.¹⁵ Bartlett contends that descent resembles modern forms of biological racism, which was insignificant in the Middle Ages. In contrast, customs, language and law are malleable cultural phenomena that function as ‘the primary badges of ethnicity’ rather than of race.¹⁶ For Bartlett, a culturally based concept of ethnicity is a more appropriate critical lens for the Middle Ages. But, as Ania Loomba argues, culture and biology are mutually constitutive.¹⁷

Other scholars have made further important interventions by arguing for the interpellations of medieval ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ through other categorical differences such as medieval ‘nationalism’, religion, body, sexuality, gender, class and other cross-cultural and cross-spatial encounters.¹⁸ Here, I cite three early twenty-first-century approaches in the humanities that recognise race as a crucial area of critical engagement for medieval studies: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Geraldine Heng and Cord Whitaker.¹⁹ All three reject the assumption that ethnicity denotes malleable culture, and race, intractable biology. Cohen, extending his work on medieval identity constructions and the postcolonial Middle Ages, approaches medieval race with Deleuzian lyricism and rigour. Race is a cultural fantasy, a sorting system, and an embodied performance; racialised bodies are always becoming ‘something else, something unexpected’.²⁰ Heng’s magnum opus, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, is a wide-ranging comparativist cultural history. Resisting modernity’s teleological violence, Heng proposes a Foucauldian analytics of race as ‘a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences’ that exists in multiple and ‘varied locations and concretions’.²¹ And Whitaker’s Black Metaphors deploys a methodology grounded in literary studies, visual culture, linguistics and Black Studies. For Whitaker, ‘race is a matter of language and literature at least as much as, if not more than, it is a matter of the visual’; racism, he poignantly notes, is an ‘interpretive process’ with real-world consequences.²²

Such studies, though crucial to medieval studies of race, have treated whiteness primarily as a monolithic sameness defined against the Other and as a strictly corporeal signifier – whether indicative of spiritual, sexual or economic status. The dearth of whiteness critique in medieval studies that engages both somatic and nonsomatic figurations of whiteness leaves unchallenged the assumed clarity and knowledge of what whiteness is and means. And the risks of not critically engaging whiteness, as Ruth Frankenberg contends, include ‘a continued failure to displace the unmarked marker status of whiteness’ and a perpetuation of ‘a kind of asymmetry that has marred even many critical analyses’.²³ More importantly, medieval studies’ engagements with whiteness, thus far, have largely replicated and left intact contemporary whiteness studies’ emphases on whiteness as primarily a phenomenon of skin colour and racialisation.²⁴

While there was no single, unequivocal system of medieval colour theory, Aristotelian philosophy was foundational in colour treatises in the Middle Ages. Colour, for Aristotle, is an inherent property of the elemental material world as manifest in humours and revealed by light. In De proprietatibus rerum, for instance, the thirteenth-century scholastic Bartholomaeus Anglicus defines whiteness as ‘the ground of all colours’, a product of the brightness of light and the pureness of clear matter.²⁵ White appears in things either cold and moist or hot and dry. He further uses bodily complexions to explain both the causation of dreams and the formation of skin tones in humans; phlegm brings dreams of white snow and rain, and the colder climate of the north engenders white skin. Bartholomaeus suggests, in John Trevisa’s fourteenth-century translation:

[T]‌he sonne abideth longe over the Affers, men of Affrica, and brennen and wasten humours and maken ham short of body, black of face, with crispe here. And for her spirites passe oute atte pores that ben open, so they be more cowardes of herte.

An the cuntrarye is of men of the northe londe: for coldenes that is withuote stoppeth the pores and breedeth humours of the bodye maketh men more ful and huge; and coolde that is modir of whitnesse maketh hem more white in face and in skynne, and vapoures and spirites ben ysmyten inwarde and maken hatter withinne and so the more bolde and hardy. An the men of Asia ben meneliche disposed in that, and here firste londe is by eeste.²⁶

The linkage between colour and medieval race is complex and volatile. Dark skin, for instance, is associated with the lower classes. In the Old French Roman de Silence, the cross-dressing Silence darkens her skin in order to pass as a male labourer.²⁷ Epidermal blackness also marks religious difference. In the Middle English romance the King of Tars, Muslims are depicted as ‘blo and blac’ (1220). However, there is no consistent, immutable correlation between colour and premodern race. Positive portrayals of blackness did exist in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, largely made possible by the dark-skinned individuals’ possession of Christian virtues and/or chivalric prowess. The statue of a black St. Maurice with African features at Magdeburg Cathedral in Germany was erected c. 1220–50.²⁸ In the Middle Dutch Arthurian romance Moriaen, the eponymous hero is a black Christian knight. The poem asks rhetorically of the significance of Moriaen’s skin tone: ‘Though he was black, what harm was it?’²⁹ Yet despite the variations in colour symbolism, there was a trajectory towards a hardening of the black–white binary. Medieval humoural and colour theories dovetailed with a chromatic shift in European visual traditions that can be traced to the Crusades and the increased contacts among European Christians, Muslims and sub-Saharan Africans. As art historian Madeline Caviness (2008) argues, the high and late Middle Ages witnessed the emergence of a historically contingent ‘white identity’ in visual representations of Europeans, whose flesh tone shifted from a pinkish-brown to pasty white.³⁰ The lighter complexion used to portray European women, developed at the end of the twelfth century, was extended to signify all Europeans by the 1350s. By the fourteenth century, devils were coloured whereas Christ and the saints had bodies of pure white that glowed like the Eucharistic wafer. But if humoural theory presumes a direct correspondence between external physical attributes and internal humoural conditions, the precise meanings of bodily colours are anything but stable. Whereas Bartholomaeus sees white skin as a sign of a ‘bold and hardy’ temperament, the medieval Arab scholar Al-Mas’udi associates it with a dull wit and gross nature. Colour may reveal the essence of a person or thing, yet true difficulty lies in proper interpretation.

This book contends that there is, in fact, a definitional slipperiness to whiteness as it is manifest within the complexity of the medieval social world and literary imagination: in the Great Khan’s dreams of the white knight, whiteness points to an objectified fetish; in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, ‘White’ functions as both the proper name of a lady and a descriptor of her courtly body; in Pearl, whiteness marks a precious jewel and the divine Lamb of God; in Chaucer’s Sir Thopas, whiteness operates as an aesthetic deformational force that inflicts violence on whiteness; in Langland’s Piers Plowman and late medieval Passion drama, whiteness names a theatrical leather skin-suit that signifies the suffering body of Christ; in the King of Tars, whiteness is a technology of racial recognition that paradoxically resists the absolute cleavage of life and nonlife; and in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, whiteness operates as a magical hold that racialises the body and periodises history via empathy. Across a diverse range of texts, whiteness navigates the divide between the immaterial and the material, the abstract and the concrete, the spiritual and the bodily. Premodern whiteness therefore functions as a ‘systemic edge’, a term I borrow from Saskia Sassen, who argues that late twentieth-century global political economy is dominated by the logic of expulsion. For Sassen, ‘the systemic edge is the site where general conditions take extreme forms precisely because it is the site for expulsion or incorporation’.³¹ What the extreme forms bring into relief is the presence of deeply embedded structural trends within the system that would otherwise remain undetectable. I contend that premodern whiteness brings into relief the extreme forms of ideologies and discursive praxes. For example, in the King of Tars, when the lump of flesh transforms into a fair-skinned boy after baptism, or when the Sultan’s skin whitens after his conversion, whiteness appears to function as incontrovertible somatic proof of racial and religious identity that grants entry into medieval Latin Christendom. The transitions between acute forms of flesh and body determine the expulsion from or incorporation into the body politic. In this instance, the systemic edge is the site of the technologisation of flesh and body, operating through the confluence of race and religion.

Socio-cultural categories and praxes, such as whiteness, defy easy systemisation; there is a complex range of attitudes in representations of whiteness in medieval texts. In my study, I adapt A. J. Greimas’ understanding of cultural values as modalities rather than absolutes.³² If culture is best understood as a symbol-system, cultural modalities require the semiotic power of symbols in order to operate. Whiteness is precisely a figuration that attempts to facilitate the cohesion and function of various medieval modalities. In other words, whiteness is a set of strategies and power formations – though not the only one – that pervades the grounds of late medieval socio-cultural life. As discourse, premodern whiteness makes possible multiple ideological regimes along the spectrum of the material and the immaterial. Whiteness as a representational trope makes tangible cultural ideals such as courtly beauty, Christian salvation, chivalric prowess, social ethics or European identity. At the same time, it marks the limits of ruling ideologies by registering specific tension and breakage within the values it signifies.

The critical question driving this study is not necessarily ‘What is premodern whiteness?’ but ‘What things are recognised or misrecognised as white in late medieval sociality and thought?’ A key to understanding the ideological lability of premodern whiteness, I contend, is the lively critical conversation in trans* studies today. As Jack Halberstam points out, ‘trans*’ with the asterisk underscores both the non-hegemonic condition and a complex set of identities that cannot be rendered adequately by the delimiting use of ‘trans’ meaning strictly a complete transition from one essentialised sex to another, a symptom of the insufficiency of the binary classificatory system of gender. The asterisk is a diacritical mark that ‘poses a question to its prefix and stands in for what exceeds the politics of naming and recognition’.³³ Along with Avery Tompkins and Reese Simpkins, Halberstam affirms the inclusive, liberatory potential of the asterisk, which opens the term ‘trans’ up to a broad set of conditions of signification and possibilities of embodiment in flux.³⁴ The asterisk signals the wildcard function in data research, draws attention to the term in front of it and pushes beyond the prefix.³⁵ On the theoretical capaciousness of the asterisk in trans* studies, Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein speculate that ‘[T]‌rans* foregrounds and intensifies the prehensile, prefixial nature of trans- and implies a suffixial space of attachment that is simultaneously generalizable and abstract yet its function can be enacted only when taken up by particular objects (though never any one object in particular)’.³⁶ The asterisk functions as a splitter and a joiner, an amplifier and a placeholder, revealing both the polyvalence of signification and the work of attachment. Like the fingery starfish, it is haptic and indexical, touching and pointing.³⁷

What if we conceived of whiteness as possessing an equally powerful yet invisible asterisk? That is, ‘white–’ stands before ‘–ness’, shifting from the secure position of a root to a sort of prehensile, prefixial space. Therefore, the before of white*ness signals not only the temporal antecedence of premodernity but also the complex signifying power of ‘white*’ that is distinct yet inseparable from the work of ideological attachment to it. However, white* is not quite analogous to trans*. Whereas ‘trans*’ with the asterisk underscores the non/anti-hegemonic condition and the wide-ranging spectrum of gender corporealisations in transness, ‘white’ without the asterisk already starts out from a hegemonic position that ‘trans’ or ‘trans*’ can never occupy. As a result, ‘white*’ with the asterisk signals an originary hegemonic privilege more actively than ‘trans*’ could ever do. But despite the differences between trans* and white*, the operations of the asterisk have similar effects on both. Halberstam observes that the asterisk in trans* demands us ‘to think in new and different ways about what it means to claim a body’.³⁸ Likewise, I contend that ‘white*’ asks us to reconsider what it means to claim whiteness and the ramifications of that possession. The asterisk resists the delimiting deployment of white* in premodernity and renders whiteness in both non-racialising and racialising ways without defaulting to the human, the somatic or the animate. White* indexes the noncoincidence of ‘white’ with any singular formation of power and, like trans*, registers the broad sense and the capacious constellation of subjectivities enfolded within premodern whiteness.

In the rest of the Introduction and the book, my typographical renderings of ‘white*’ and ‘white*ness’ will be sparse and tactful. This is not to re-erase and re-repress the asterisk, or to re-inscribe the default hegemony of whiteness. But since white* does not yet have actual usage like trans*, I have opted not to make visible the asterisk in most instances in order to ease the process of reading and to avoid becoming heavy-handed, self-indulgent or over-stylised. White* appears strategically, when it is crucial to foreground the effects of the asterisk in the workings of premodern whiteness. Throughout, we must continue to be cognisant of the diacritical mark, which is invisible but not absent. While ‘white’ without the asterisk may function as a dermal signifier, white* is inclusive of the somatic but also reaches beyond the biological or the racial. This is especially important in premodern contexts, where white*ness more aptly describes the capacious, heterogenous and multiple operations of white*, in contrast to the delimiting, homogenising and singularising sense of whiteness in modernity. Mike Hill, assessing the workings of contemporary white supremacist movements, argues that their racial logic is ‘a sort of psycho-temporal fantasy … part nostalgia and part prophecy’.³⁹ The complex temporal manoeuvres involve simultaneously an imagined move into the past of white purity and an equally fantastical move into the future of post-whiteness racial extinction, both subtended by a self-fashioned perception of whiteness’s ‘thoroughly agitated status in the present’.⁴⁰ In this analysis, the logic of the hidden asterisk of white*ness may appear to make possible the ideological attachments of modern racism to all sorts of imagined temporalities and worlds, thereby converting white* into whiteness. But the opposite takes place. By reasserting the presumed hegemonic position of whiteness and restricting whiteness to signifying race alone, white supremacists, along with their vision of the medieval past, eradicate the asterisk and its anti-hegemonic, liberatory capacity. In effect, ‘white*’ reverts to ‘white’. The racist medievalism of white supremacist fantasy remains stuck in modernity.

Whiteness is not a thing but an operation. Resisting a reductive, technical understanding of the operation strictly in terms of its causal or effectual attributes, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson emphasise instead the operation’s processual nature and dynamics. Neither work nor labour, the operation is an interval ‘that separates the operation’s trigger from its outcome. Within this interval, the operation acquires an uneven and broken patterning of opening and closure that is constitutive of its unfolding’.⁴¹ What the interval offers is a freeze-frame, a cross-sectional view of the types of ‘social activities, technical codes, and devices that make an operation possible’.⁴² Another crucial feature of the operation is the fact that while an operation is oriented towards an outcome, the end goal is not necessarily the production of ‘a work, a material thing’.⁴³ Rather, an operation, such as the operation of capital, is concerned primarily with the production of ‘connections, chains and networks’, or, in Mezzadra and Neilson’s terms, with the ‘fabrication of the world’.⁴⁴ Operations create linkages, and these social relations shape the world. The asterisk marks the systemic edge within ‘white*ness’, but it is also an operation linking the colour white to discursive apparatuses that fabricate ideological regimes. Mezzadra and Neilson’s notion of the operation as the fabrication of relationality and world systems resonates with the Middle English term operacioun, which denotes not only ‘work’ but also ‘something made or created’, ‘structure’, ‘the function of an element’ and ‘that which it does or is designed to do’.⁴⁵ Whiteness is an operation precisely in the sense of its capacity to generate structures and connections that shape bodies and lives.

In De colore, Robert Grosseteste conceives of the scale of colours as composed of whiteness and blackness, two extreme colours, situated at opposing ‘corners’ out of which seven colours descend from whiteness, and seven colours ascend from blackness: ‘Similiter septem erunt proximi nigredini, quibus a nigredine uersus albedinem ascenditur, donec fiat occursus aliorum colorum septem, quibus ab albedine descenditur’.⁴⁶ Trevisa, in his translation of De colore as found in Bartholomaeus’s De proprietatibus rerum, replaces the vector-like Latin terms ascenditur and descenditur with the scalar-like Middle English verb strecchen: ‘And so of white comeþ seuene colours and streccheþ fro þe white towards blak. Also fro blak to white streccheþ seuene’.⁴⁷ Trevisa’s word choice deemphasises the hierarchical conception of colours and shifts the understanding of the colour scale towards one that emphasises its continuity, range and compass.⁴⁸ In other words, stretching is an operation of colour either towards or away from whiteness or blackness. The stretching of whiteness is intervallic and cross-sectional. The Middle English strecchen activates the affective and sensorial in ways that the Latin terms do not. And the move away from directional hierarchy (almost Cartesian before Descartes) reimagines a different conception of the physical world and humanity’s relationship to it – one that is supported by a nonvertical grounding and is more agential and more affective. Importantly, whiteness as an operative strecchen shifts analyses of whiteness away from reductive opposition to operational difference. The critical task is not to sort cultural artefacts and praxes into restrictive bins of white-versus-black binarism but to track and examine the operations that generate differences in relation to whiteness.

Consider the earlier example of the Great Khan’s dreams of a white knight on a white horse in Mandeville’s Travels. For medieval Mongols, whiteness symbolised both good fortune (e.g. the White Festival that Marco Polo (1254–1324) observes) and political charisma (e.g. Genghis Khan’s white standard banners).⁴⁹ Nor is the whiteness of the shaman and his horse absent in the original Eastern legend. The episode might have a parallel or origin in Uighur mythology. Thomas Allsen cites a medieval Uighur legend in which a ruler, Buqu Khan, ‘had a dream in which he saw an elderly man dressed in a white robe and carrying a white staff who informs him of his forthcoming political success. Later, his chief adviser has the same dream and Buqu Khan, confident of his good fortune, launches his campaigns of conquest’.⁵⁰ When Genghis Khan addresses the shaman Teb Tenggri’s successor, he proclaims that the new beki (chief) ‘shall wear a white dress / And ride a white gelding. / He shall sit on a high seat / And be waited upon’.⁵¹ Teb Tenggri might have worn a white robe when he spoke to the heavenly spirits.⁵² But for medieval Europeans, more is at work here than political fortune and charisma. The operational difference between East and West lies not only in the cultural significance and customs attached to the colour white but also in what whiteness operationalises within each tradition. As the legend migrated west, the tribal shaman riding on a horse was transformed into a knight dressed in white riding a white horse, an image linked to the iconography and legends of Saint George.⁵³ In the westward transmission of the Mongols’ origin story, what whiteness operationalises is the shaping of the West’s reception of the Mongols by medieval Christianity, chivalry and praxes of historiography. For the West, it is whiteness, not Mongol shamanism or political prowess, that authorises Mongol imperialism. Note that, in this instance, whiteness stops at the horse and armour; they are the thresholds of whiteness. Neither the Great Khan nor the knight has white skin. If, as Richard H. Godden argues, technologies of chivalry can be understood as prostheses that both complete the chivalric body and expose its vulnerability, then the white armour and the white horse constitute the prostheses of premodern racialisation.⁵⁴ Nonhuman animals and things, not skin tone or religious conversion per se, are equally important animating figures of whiteness and therefore of race. The face of the shaman-knight in the Great Khan’s dreams is a blank space of negative whiteness. The logic of metonymy (armour and horse) aligns with allegory and invites modes of reading that are fundamentally symbolic. Whiteness, or white*, becomes the systemic edge between the West and Mongol imperium.

We see a similar operation of whiteness within representation traditions of medieval Mongols in the visual arts. On folio 78v of British Library, MS Royal 19 D.I., which contains Marco Polo’s Le Devisement dou monde [Travels], the Mongols are portrayed as barefooted, dark-skinned and turbaned Muslim idolaters. But on folio 88 of the same manuscript is an image of the Great Khan and three other Tartars all depicted as white Europeans with blonde hair, in Western attire and engaged in a pleasant dinner conversation at a table covered in food, drink and utensils. Medieval Mongols, of course, do not look or dress like dark-skinned Muslims or pale-skinned Europeans. But the Great Khan’s political prowess, imperial wealth and receptivity to Christianity align him with European courtly ideals, which in turn operationalise whiteness as the defining figuration of his court in the visual programme. Whiteness here slips out of its traditional secure location within Europe and becomes a labile and wandering signifier. The operational difference hinges not on somatic markers of race but on religious practices, political powers and court etiquettes.⁵⁵

A commitment to investigating the operational differences of premodern whiteness guides this study, which aims to put pressure on whiteness in the late Middle Ages. I consider three operations of whiteness through the theoretical frames of fragility, precarity and racialicity. Decoupling the prefix-like ‘white*’ from the suffix ‘-ness’, this book argues firstly that while whiteness participates crucially in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote or connote skin tone alone; secondly, that the ‘before’ of whiteness, presupposing both an originary essence and a logical teleology, is less a retro-futuristic temporisation – one that simultaneously looks backward and faces forward – than a discursive figuration of how white* becomes whiteness; and thirdly, that premodern whiteness is fragile, precarious and racialistic. Fragility delineates the limits of ruling ideologies in performances of mourning as self-defence against perceived threats to subjectivity and desire; precarity registers the ruptures within normative values by foregrounding the unmarked vulnerability of the body politic and the violence of cultural aestheticisation; and racialicity attends to the politics of recognition and the technologies of enfleshment at the systemic edge of life and nonlife, of periodisation and of racial embodiment.

Figure 0.1 Marco Polo’s Travels. British Library, MS Royal 19 D.I., fol. 78v. (© British Library Board. By permission. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

Fragility

Part I of the book enfolds two studies under the operation of ‘fragility’ and asks what white fragility looks like in the late Middle Ages. As a concept, white fragility originates in contemporary antiracist discourse. According to Robin DiAngelo, white fragility is ‘a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves’.⁵⁶ Some of the defensive counter-moves include confusion, indignation, refusal to continue engagement, penalisation, retaliation, isolation and ostracisation. DiAngelo’s theory of white fragility is productive in my thinking through the volatile complexities of late medieval identity formation as a response to affective, cognitive and social triggers that are not exclusively racial in nature. Identity is a reactive collective- and/or self-fashioning, fragilely formed under the duress of loss and grief, and under the polarised pulls of the universalising and particularising impulses of whiteness.

Figure 0.2 Marco Polo’s Travels. British Library, MS Royal 19 D.I., fol. 88r. (© British Library Board. By permission. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

The specific affects of white fragility that I examine here are the interrelated emotional states of mourning and desiring. Mourning and desire, as forms of affective labour, are also a labour of memory. In ancient and medieval theories of memory, ‘white’ (albus) is an exemplary image within the Aristotelian chain of mnemonic association. Aristotle states that, in the act of recollection, ‘people go quickly from one thing to another, for example, from milk to white, from white to air, and from this to fluid’.⁵⁷ This associational nature of whiteness, as conceived by ancient and medieval thinkers, is useful in analysing whiteness as a trope that sets in motion, provides the nexuses for and actualises modes of cultural values. In addition to its function as a signifying image in theories of memory, albus is also a term used by ancient and medieval philosophers to discuss the nature of language and of signification. Peter Travis has noted the prevalence of the trope of ‘white’ in late medieval philosophy and its connections to vernacular literature. Anselm of Canterbury, for instance, speculates about the nature of signification in the following dialogue between a master and his student:

M. Si est in domo aliqua albus equus te nesciente inclusus, et aliquis tibi dicit: in hac domo est album sive albus, an scis per hoc ibi esse equum?

D. Non. Sive enim dicat album albedinem, sive in quo est albedo, nullius certae rei mente concipio essentiam nisi huius coloris.⁵⁸

[Master: Suppose that, unknown to you, a white horse were enclosed in some building or other, and someone told you, ‘A white is in this building’ – would that inform you that the horse was inside?

Student: No; for whether he speaks of a white, or of whiteness, or of that within which the whiteness is enclosed, no definite circumstance is brought to my mind apart from the essence of this colour.]⁵⁹

As a paronym and not a proper name, albus (white) is not necessary a predication of any ‘thing’ in particular; that is, it ‘fail[s]‌ to name the being, or essence, of any subject’.⁶⁰ Anselm points out that the statement, ‘A white is in this building [in hac domo est album]’ is insufficient in itself to identify precisely what the ‘white thing [album]’ is.⁶¹ White*ness, as conceived in one medieval philosophical tradition, marks the equivocal and unfixed distance between the signifier and the signified, or, in Derrida’s term, différance. Whiteness is an unreliable trigger of desire and memory; as such, its fashioning of identity is tenuous and fragile.

Like identity, memory too is suspect and fraught. Though white functions as an affective catalyst or an imagistic link within the mnemonic chain, the memory produced by whiteness is at best partially fictive and always incomplete. Consider the following scenario: a man, having lost his beloved lady, is urged by another man to describe the deceased’s beauty. The mourner obliges and enumerates the ravishing whiteness of the beloved’s body, one body part at a time. Or consider a slightly different scenario: a man, having lost a precious object (a person? a thing?), endlessly recalls to himself its/her dazzling white lustre. But when he is