{"id":61546,"date":"2026-01-20T10:00:02","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T16:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=61546"},"modified":"2026-01-22T12:04:04","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T18:04:04","slug":"extracting-blackness-from-the-middle-ages-to-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/extracting-blackness-from-the-middle-ages-to-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Extracting Blackness, from the Middle Ages to Today"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the Middle Ages, the lives of saints were the closest thing to bestsellers: stories copied, read aloud, and performed across Europe. They offered the faithful models of virtuous suffering, miraculous healing, and divine intervention. One such story tells of a Roman verger<\/em>\u2014a church caretaker\u2014whose leg had been consumed by cancer. In a dream, the twin physician-saints Cosmas and Damian appear to him with a startling cure: They exhume a recently buried Ethiopian from the cemetery of Saint Peter in Chains, sever his healthy leg, graft it onto the sleeping man, and affix the diseased limb to the corpse. When the verger wakes, he finds himself healed\u2014no pain, no scar, no trace of the violence that made his cure possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All this is depicted in The Miracle of the Black Leg<\/em>, painted in 1370 by the Master of the Rinuccini Chapel in Florence. For the medieval viewer (almost certainly imagined as white and European), the wonder lies in the successful transplant: the miracle of the divine made evident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But for me, the image\u2019s logic lands elsewhere. The painting stages the Ethiopian body as already available\u2014pre-sanctioned\u2014for dismemberment, asking the viewer to accept the extraction and reassignment of his limb without pause. The miracle depends on an erasure: the quiet normalization of a Black corpse\u2019s violated integrity. And it is that visual conditioning\u2014its invitation to overlook the Ethiopian man\u2019s personhood\u2014that feels most unsettling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so, I came to this image agitated by what felt like an evasion: a refusal to dwell in the violence itself. As a Black woman raised in the American South\u2014where the afterlives of slavery announce themselves in the landscape, in monuments, in flags\u2014I could not look at the dismembered Ethiopian leg without feeling the weight of a racial history that has never quite let up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My first encounter with The Miracle of the Black Leg<\/em> was through a scholarly interpretation that, like many in our field, sought to reassure the reader: reminding us that \u201crace\u201d had not yet assumed its modern biological form, that medieval viewers understood difference differently, that there are uplifting depictions of Black figures too. But that scholarly reassurance sat uneasily with me. I recognized the familiar shape of a move art historians often make: offsetting the discomfort of violent imagery with historical caveats, or counterbalancing negative representations with positive ones, as if the latter could absolve or neutralize the former. That gesture, well-intentioned though it may be, felt like a kind of intellectual balm applied too quickly, smoothing over the visceral shock of a Black body rendered disposable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so I turned back to the image, not to castigate any one scholar, but to question the larger disciplinary habit that treats medieval racial formations as either too embryonic or too foreign to bear the weight of our contemporary reactions. What if, instead of cautioning against presentism, we allowed our discomfort to guide our inquiry? What if the unease itself were a historically meaningful response\u2014evidence of the long, recursive life of visual scripts. Following Geraldine Heng, I use the term \u201crace-making\u201d to describe the selective essentialization of human difference\u2014the transformation of certain traits into fixed, hierarchical qualities. This aligns with Karen and Barbara Fields\u2019s concept of \u201cracecraft,\u201d the ongoing social labor through which imagined differences acquire the weight of natural law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To read medieval images of Blackness as solely symbolic\u2014merely allegorical\u2014is to refuse the fact that these visual formulas laid the groundwork for the very racial scripts we are living with today. We are living, after all, in a moment when tech billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel openly romanticize a fictionalized Middle Ages to justify their own visions of hierarchy and rule. The medieval past is once again being dangerously mobilized to tell dangerous stories about who belongs, who leads, and who matters. This essay asks what becomes visible when we stop treating medieval images as immune to race-making and, instead, take seriously the violence they stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Related readings<\/div>\n\n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
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\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n When Black Humanity Is Denied<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Edna Bonhomme <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n\n\n

The Master of the Rinuccini Chapel\u2019s depiction of The<\/em> Miracle of the Black Leg<\/em> (ca. 1370) is the oldest extant representation in the West. In it, a clear hierarchy is established, one that positions white life as sacred and Black bodies as profanely accessible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stark visual contrast between the Ethiopian corpse and the white verger reveals a deliberate imbalance in how dignity and bodily autonomy are represented. While the Black corpse lies naked with only his hands covering his genitalia, the white verger is afforded a blanket to preserve his modesty. The nakedness functions as more than mere exposure; it reinforces the idea of the body being available to the viewer, to the faithful\u2014positioned for consumption, dissection, and dismemberment in ways the white body never is. Even though both figures have been dismembered, the white verger\u2019s body remains visually inaccessible; we cannot see the contours of his body where the leg is affixed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This differential treatment operates as both symbolic and literal violence. The painting thus renders the Black body accessible and vulnerable, while the white body maintains protective boundaries that preserve its fundamental human dignity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This unequal distribution of dignity is compounded by the Black skin of the corpse, which prevents a clear reading of the body. Rendered in very dark paint, it is difficult to distinguish the contours of his body, the way he is joined together. This visual obscurity speaks to a deliberate anonymity, a refusal to distinguish his features or acknowledge his personhood. In its darkness, the Ethiopian corpse has no identity, no name\u2014the means of fully identifying with him as a fellow human is obscured by his Black skin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not accidental but strategic, creating a psychological distance that allows viewers to see this body as something less than fully human. When features are rendered indistinct, when the individual dissolves into shadow, the act of mutilation does not register the same way it would with a clearly defined human form. The darkness becomes a dehumanizing veil that reduces the corpse to mere material\u2014a body without personhood, without the specificity that would demand moral recognition or empathetic witness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This visual vulnerability reinforces the Black body\u2019s primary function in the exchange: not as a person deserving protection, but as a resource to be utilized. In this exchange, then, the Black body functions bidirectionally: It is simultaneously giver and receptacle, antidote and host. Not only does the corpse provide the healthy limb that restores the parishioner\u2019s mobility; it also receives<\/em> his diseased, cancerous leg in return. This dual utility reveals how the Black body is valued not for its own wholeness or integrity, but for its capacity to serve white bodily needs in multiple ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With its homogenous black color, the Ethiopian corpse recedes into the background, while the white cancerous leg moves to the foreground. The verger\u2019s limb is the only anatomical part of the corpse that is clearly legible. Through a play of light and shadow, the bloody white limb advances visually, claiming prominence in a body otherwise rendered invisible. This emphasis is significant: In the Italian tradition, very few representations show the cancerous leg of the verger affixed to the Black corpse. The Master of the Rinuccini Chapel\u2019s deliberate choice to foreground the grafting\u2014to make the contaminated white flesh the most visible element of the Black body\u2014transforms the corpse into something more than a passive donor. Instead, the Black body becomes legible only where it has been burdened with white disease, visible only as a repository for what white flesh rejects. The decision to illuminate this exchange reveals the corpse\u2019s assigned role within this economy of miracles: valued not for its own integrity, but for its capacity to absorb what threatens white wholeness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To read medieval images of Blackness as solely symbolic\u2014merely allegorical\u2014is to refuse the fact that these visual formulas laid the groundwork for the very racial scripts we are living with today.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Master of Rinuccini Chapel\u2019s Miracle of the Black Leg<\/em> exposes how structural difference could be seeded through seemingly \u201charmless\u201d miracle stories. The Black body, positioned as material, stands in contrast to a white body that retains full agency at its expense. To acknowledge this inequity is to see how medieval images participated in race-making, even before \u201crace\u201d assumed its modern biological form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In medieval contexts, somatic difference was only one part of this process; religious and ethnic distinctions also contributed to the production of racial meaning. What makes these processes racial is not biology, but power: who is essentialized, who is dehumanized, and who is granted the full status of personhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harriet A. Washington\u2019s Medical Apartheid<\/em> meticulously chronicles the long, devastating history of violence enacted on Black bodies in the name of medicine. The path from medieval miracle story to modern medical exploitation is not linear, nor should it be imagined as such. Still, a deep historical pattern is illuminated by the Miracle of the Black Leg<\/em>: its quiet acceptance of Black suffering, its normalization of Black bodily disposability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The image participates in a visual logic in which Black bodies appear available, extractable, and structurally necessary to secure white well-being. That logic has endured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The violence of The Miracle of the Black Leg<\/em> does not end with its medieval reception; it reverberates. This is made clear by how the narrative has been engaged with by both the legal scholar and journalist Patricia J. Williams and former poet laureate Natasha Trethewey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Williams recounts being haunted by an image of the miracle, after shown to her by a student, in her 2024 book The Miracle of the Black Leg: Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law<\/em>. She eventually locates her visceral disturbance in Frederick Douglass\u2019s own language of amputation: the severing of personhood under slavery. Trethewey, in Thrall<\/em>, confronts the story\u2019s recursiveness, observing how in each depiction the Black leg becomes both \u201cgrafted narrative\u201d and \u201credacted text.\u201d Across centuries, the image retains its power to unsettle because it stages a violence that has never fully receded. It is, as Trethewey writes, \u201ca story that\u2019s still being written.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To look directly at this image is to refuse the comforts of historical distance. Acknowledging the Ethiopian corpse\u2019s erasure does not negate the existence of positive medieval representations of Blackness. Rather, it reveals the full complexity of a period that has long been sanitized. Naming the violence\u2014its logic, its scripts, its quiet normalization\u2014is part of an ethics of viewing that resists the impulse to explain away our discomfort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The unease that rises in us has a history. It signals recognition. And in tracing the recursive life of race-making across time, we glimpse not a clean path from past to present, but a set of enduring structures that demand to be seen. To look straight at the Middle Ages is, finally, to look straight at ourselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I could not look at the dismembered Ethiopian leg without feeling the weight of a racial history that has never quite let up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":61554,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[15,2063,347,515,1352],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1135,1138],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-61546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","tag-art","tag-blackness","tag-global-black-history","tag-medieval","tag-middle-ages","section-art","section-global-black-history"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nExtracting Blackness, from the Middle Ages to Today - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I could not look at the dismembered Ethiopian leg without feeling the weight of a racial history that has never quite let up.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=61546\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Extracting Blackness, from the Middle Ages to Today - 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