On the Shimmer of the Black Madonna

ABSTRACT This article argues that the ambiguity and scarcity of the evidence for the existence of the Black Madonna before the year 1500 need not prevent medievalists practicing premodern critical race studies from pursuing further study of her early history. Applying the work of Cord Whitaker on the “shimmer of blackness” in the medieval archive and of Karin Vélez on the mutability of the coloration of the Madonna across time and space, I make the case that the textual record on either side of 1500, before and after, bears witness to the Black Madonna according to discernible, coherent, and continuous rhetorical patterns, although in ways that are shimmeringly ambiguous. This record describes the Black Madonna by means of a consistent grammar of euphemism, circumlocution, negation, insinuation, and paradox that associates her darkness with materiality, mystery, and miraculous power. I trace these patterns across commentary on the Black Madonna ranging from the thirteenth to the twenty-first century, focusing in particular on the histories of Our Lady of Walsingham and Our Lady of Willesden.