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Black Legacies looks at color-based prejudice in medieval and modern texts in order to reveal key similarities. Bringing far-removed time periods into startling conversation, this book argues that certain attitudes and practices present in Europe's Middle Ages were foundational in the development of the western concept of race. Using historical, literary, and artistic sources, Lynn Ramey shows that twelfth- and thirteenth-century discourse was preoccupied with skin color and the coding of black as "evil" and white as "good." Ramey demonstrates that fears of miscegenation show up in all medieval European societies. She pinpoints these same ideas in the rhetoric of later centuries. Mapmakers and travel writers of the colonial era used medieval lore of "monstrous peoples" to question the humanity of indigenous New World populations, and medieval arguments about humanness were employed to justify the slave trade. Ramey even analyzes how race is explored in films set in medieval Europe, revealing an enduring fascination with the Middle Ages as a touchstone for processing and coping with racial conflict in the West today.

The text tells stories in which abandonment, abduction, and other kinds of dislocation are commonplace, but in which children nevertheless come of age in precisely the place for which they are destined by birth. Childhood differs profoundly for males and females as it does for saintly and secular figures. Within a secular context, childhood enjoys a special status. It is shaped, elaborated, and turned into a luxury object that helps distinguish courtly culture and that anticipates more modern attitudes. The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100-1350 provides a wealth of information for students and scholars of medieval literature, medieval history, and cultural studies

"This volume is a collection of nineteen original essays by leading specialists on the history, historiography and memory of the Crusades, the social and cultural aspects of life in the Latin East, as well as the military orders and inter-religious relations in the Middle Ages. Intended to appeal to scholars and students alike, the volume honours Professor Sophia Menache of the Department of History, University of Haifa, Israel. The contributions reflect the richness of Professor Menache's research interests - medieval communications, the Church and the Papacy in the central and later Middle Ages, the Crusades and the military orders, as well as the memory and historiography of the Crusades"--Provided by publisher