Medieval Miscegenation: Hybridity and the Anxiety of Inheritance

Abstract

Writing about medieval notions of motherhood, Clarissa Atkinson asserts that “medieval Europeans inherited a complex and diverse set of ideas that included widely different interpretations of basic processes.”¹ Because medical theorizing was limited in the Western medieval period, sources of medieval ideas on procreation often come from commentaries on selected philosophies from antiquity. Depictions of reproduction in literature show that medieval writers imagined the process in very different ways, at times following the basic tenets of recorded philosophy and in other instances using unique combinations and variations on known currents of thought. Although Greek and Roman philosophies teach much about ways that Western medieval people may have viewed parenthood and the biological construction of gender, the philosophical record is largely silent on the question of miscegenation or mixed-race offspring. Medical writings address miscegenation rarely or obliquely, but the literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries seems particularly preoccupied with intermarriage.