Introduction Barbarous African, Barbarous English, and the Transactions of Race

Abstract

A careful study of race in the Renaissance, the title of this book implies, requires a return to a body of classical texts, concepts, and values to focus on language in defining cultural identity.¹ Humanists devoted to the ancient literatures of Greece and Rome spearheaded the Renaissance revolution, effectively elevating and establishing the studia humtmitatis, the program of liberal arts, firmly in the university curriculum by the fifteenth century. “They were men,” writes E.H. Gombrich, “who emphasized the importance of language” (25–26). Within such a pervasive intellectual and cultural program, debased, incompetent or vulgar speech—barbarism—had an inverse relationship to rhetoric that was elevated as the central canon in the humanist curriculum to emphasize the evolving role of linguistic eloquence in English self-definition.²