Black Africans in Renaissance Europe

Abstract

Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Edited by T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvii, 417; 67 illustrations. $110.00. The European dimension of the African diaspora has been much less well studied than its American one, just as later periods are better known than earlier periods. This lavishly illustrated volume promises to contribute to the better understanding of the position and role of Africans in Europe during the Renaissance, here defined as roughly 1400-1600 with the "Age of Discoveries" forming its end period rather than its beginning. The editors have brought together scholars whose work covers the entire period, and includes art historians, literary scholars, historians, and anthropologists. Needless to say, there is no clearly defined theme in the book, though perhaps a steady examination of the way in which Africans were perceived by their European hosts or masters recurs frequently throughout the volume. In general, writers who have taken this perspective elaborate the now familiar theme of demonization, marginalization, and disparagement that is increasingly revealed in most studies of this topic in the late medieval and early modern world. The book takes four broad themes to organize its chapters. In the first section, devoted to conceptualizing Black Africans, Kate Lowe reviews the formation of the image of Africans in Europe, expanding the argument long made for the English to other parts of the continent on the development of negative stereotypes. Jean Michel Massig studies without much comment on either the potential reality or the possible impact of the appearance of lip plugs in some of the African figures in a mid- sixteenth-century world map. Jeremy Lawrance focuses on several texts (published in an appendix) of insulting exchanges between Africans found in Spanish literature. Anu Korhonon discusses English attitudes toward skin coloring, finding that black or African skin was not well regarded. Jorge Fonseca compares the impressions of the humanist traveler Cleynaerts about the African presence in Portugal with the reality revealed in contemporary social history documents, suggesting that he and other literary figures tended to exaggerate their presence. The second section ostensibly examines Africans specifically at court, though the contributors do not always stick strictly to this theme. Paul Kaplan notes the presence of Africans in the artistic representations of various subjects in Italian court paintings. Annemarie Jordan examines court painting in Portugal to study the depictions of Africans, largely as servants and musicians. …