Heritage and Rupture with the Tradition

Medieval Europe offers a diverse set of images of the peoples of the earth. These can be traced to classical sources, including fourth-century BCE Greek accounts of the figures of Indian art, which were apparently taken to be representations of actual people. Monstrous humanoid forms appear, for example, in the writings of Isidore of Seville (c.560–636), the tympanum of Vézelay Abbey (c.1100) which depicts differently formed peoples to be ministered to by the church, the Travels of John Mandeville (1357–1371), and the illustrations of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). These works do not necessarily equate physical with moral monstrosity.

In European consciousness, the Jews occupied a particular category. Over the late Middle Ages, aggressive anti-Semitism led to pogroms and expulsions. Jews were accused of magical powers; the “blood libel,” the accusation that Jews drank the blood of Christian children, dates from at least the twelfth century. Exclusion could foster a sense of exclusiveness. The Sephardic Jews wrote their own history, defining themselves as a separate race going back to the Jews of the Old Testament. From the eleventh century, crusades and pilgrimage heightened awareness of the Muslim Arabs, who were both demonized as enemies of the faith while at the same time their achievements were absorbed into the Western culture across scientific and artistic disciplines (Macdonald 1997).

Around these images of various people, questions arose, in particular the degree to which humans are fixed or self-fashioning. The intellectual community of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance did not unanimously hold racial identity to be an inherited absolute. Against types there is a countervailing concept of a human family: the Vézelay tympanum clearly expresses the idea that all corners of the earth are open to the Word of Christ. Biblical and patristic texts did not provide a coherent account of whether those of darker hue were or were not morally inferior, leaving room for a variety of views (Schwartz 1994).

Innovation and Original Aspects

One innovation was the body of ideas accompanying the encounter with American Indians and the increased trade in black African slaves. The plight of the Indians under the Spanish conquistadors was deplored in a series of polemics by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas (c.1484–1566). These fed the topic of Spanish cruelty, happily recycled by protestant countries like England, themselves culpable of atrocities. In the debates at Valladolid (1550–1551), de las Casas disputed with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573) over the status of colonized people, an important moment in the development of rights theory and international law: at issue was the question of whether the Indians were, or not, fully human and thus free men by the law of nature.

As a strategy for justifying the slave trade, white Europeans developed stereotypes of black Africans as naked, pierced, lazy, sexually promiscuous, unintelligent, and the like. Though black Africans performed a diverse range of tasks, both as slaves and freemen, they are typically depicted in a limited range of activities, capable of imitative but not creative behavior (Earle and Lowe).

Christian vilification of the Jews continued to be intense in the Renaissance. Myths such as the blood libel were quickly spread by the printing press. Preachers such as Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444) called on Jews to reside in special districts with special costumes and badges. In 1492 both Moors and Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. A range of tools was developed to test the sincerity of those who opted to convert; the Spanish Inquisition, in its demand for ethnically “pure” inquisitors, developed a sophisticated bureaucracy for enquiring into individuals’ lineage, an originating point for later notions of biological race. While the stereotype of the African tended to concentrate on external qualities, that of the Jew focused on a supposed ineradicable internal separateness from the Christian. Arabs were equally subject to stereotype, while at the same time the scholarly and artistic techniques they introduced to the West were appreciated by intellectuals and a vital source of cultural renewal.

As a highly flexible term, “race” was not only used of people outside Europe but also as an instrument in internal politics: thus, the English usually employed “race” to mean family lineage, excluding the socially inferior, and described the Irish as another race, exhibiting subhuman qualities (Hall 1995). Racial and national identities develop in parallel. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, besides the much-discussed depiction of the Jew Shylock, characters from other European countries are also open to satiric delineation. Against this, to a modern reader, some of the most original visions of race come from intellectuals apparently resistant to prevailing typologies, such as the passionate Hebraist scholar Isaac Casaubon, who refused to characterize individual Jews by group characteristics, or Montaigne who, witnessing a circumcision in Rome, observed in his Journal de voyage that Jewish babies cried like Christian children at baptism (Grafton 2009).

Impact and Legacy

Renaissance racial thinking underpins imperial expansion and the justification of slavery, land-grabbing, and other forms of exploitation. It served to concretize the notion of humans falling into distinct and fixed categories, subject to pseudoscientific measurement of intelligence and other qualities. Black people formed a counterpoint to the developing notion of “civilized” whites. In the cultural sphere, the notions of the noble savage and the earthly paradise were among discourses that flowed from the encounters of the fifteenth century onward, expressed in a variety of forms, from paintings to travelogues, essays, and drama. While the Renaissance notion of race is elusive, the stereotypes constructed in the period have proven very clearly to be destructive and persistent (The William and Mary Quarterly 1997).

Cross-References