The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  2 Tacitus, Annals, trans. A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb (London, 1923), XIV, 30.

  3 Laodicean wool, Geography, XII, 8, 16.

  4 Jordanes, The Origins and Deeds of the Goths, trans. Charles C. Mierow (London, 1915), XXIV, 123; the embassy of Priscus is described by Jordanes in XXXIV, 178ff.

  5 Julius Caesar, The Gallic Wars, trans. W. A. McDevitte and W. S. Bohn (New York, 1869), V, 14; Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. John Bostock (London, 1855), Book XXII, 2, 1.

  6 See Gillian Carr, ‘Woad, Tattooing and Identity in Later Iron Age and Early Roman Britain’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, XXIV/3 (2005), pp. 273–92.

  7 Lucian of Samosata, Heracles, trans. Austin Morris Harmon (Cambridge, MA, 1979).

  8 Homer, Odyssey, XI, ll. 593–640.

  9 See James B. Pritchard, ed., The Ancient Near East (Princeton, NJ, 1958), vol. I, pp. 227–30.

  10 See for instance Behramgore Tehmuras Anklesaria, Zand-Akasih Iranian or Greater Bundahishn (Bombay, 1956), available at www.avesta.org.

  11 Biblical quotations are from the Authorized or King James Version. Orestes’ curse on the man who defiles a virgin’s bed is in lines 71–5 of The Libation Bearers, where one presumes the clinging black blood is primarily a metaphor for wrongdoing, since it would be odd to call the virgin’s blood black.

  12 St Augustine, Enerratio in psalmos, 91, 11; St Jerome, On Jeremiah, 13, 23; Charles Spurgeon, Sermon 266, ‘The Blind Beggar’, delivered on 7 August 1859, available at www.spurgeon.org.

  13 The Acts of Bartholomew are available at www.newadvent.org; for St Antony’s black boy see Athanasius of Alexandria, ‘Life of St Antony’, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, Series II, vol. IV (Grand Rapids, MI, 1892), p. 197; on St Macarius see H. C. Lea, Materials towards a History of Witchcraft (Philadelphia, 1939), p. 67; on Abbot John, The Conferences of St John Cassian, Conference 1, chap. 21; on Abbot Apollos, Conference 2, chap. 13; on breaking stones, Conference 9, chap. 6, texts available at www.newadvent.org; on medieval representations of black and African devilry see Geraldine Heng, ‘Jews, Saracens, “Black Men”, Tartars: England in a World of Racial Difference’, in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford, 2007), pp. 247–69.

  14 Homily on the Song of Songs, I, 6, quoted by Frank M. Snowden Jr in ‘Bernal’s “Blacks” and the Afrocentrists’, in Black Athena Revisited, ed. Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996), p. 126.

  15 Sermon 28 on the Song of Songs available at www.pathsoflove.com.

  16 On monastic dress see G. S. Tyack, Historic Dress of the Clergy (London, 1897); Janet Mayo, A History of Ecclesiastical Dress (London, 1984).

  17 See Giles Constable, ed., The Letters of Peter the Venerable (Cambridge, MA, 1967), especially letters 28 (p. 57) and 111 (p. 289).

  18 St Jerome’s Life of St Hilarion (written in 390 CE) is available at www.newadvent.org.

  19 On the Dominicans and the Inquisition see Bernard Hamilton, The Medieval Inquisition (London, 1981), especially pp. 36–9, 60–63.

  20 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. C. Luibheid (New York, 1987), p. 135; The Cloud of Unknowing is quoted from the original by Denys Turner in The Darkness of God (Cambridge, 1995), p. 195; ‘Stanzas of the Soul’ and commentary, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh OCD and Otilio Rodriguez OCD, in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross (Washington, DC, 1991).

  FOUR: Black in Society: Arabia, Europe

  1 See David Nicolle and Angus McBride, Armies of the Muslim Conquest (Oxford, 1993), p. 5.

  2 On Muhammad and blackness see especially the references to Muhammad in Mumtaz Ali Tajddin, ‘Black Clothes’, in Encyclopaedia of Ismailism at http://ismaili.net. The story of Muhammad’s childhood was told to me by Professor Tarif Khalidi of the American University in Beirut, who mentioned also the variant in which two angels in the form of cranes cleanse the chest of the young Muhammad.

  3 See Amiram Shkolnik, C. Richard Taylor, Virginia Finch and Arieh Borut, ‘Why Do Bedouins Wear Black Robes in Hot Deserts?’, Nature, 283 (24 January 1980), pp. 373–5; Daniel Da Cruz, ‘The Black Tent’, Saudi Aramco World, XVII/3 (May–June 1966), pp. 26–7. On short-wave penetration of animal hair see J. C. Hutchingson and G. D. Brown, ‘Penetrance of Cattle Coats by Radiation’, Journal of Applied Physiology, XXVI/4 (April 1969), pp. 454–64.

  4 William Muir’s The Caliphate: Its Rise, Decline and Fall from Original Sources (Edinburgh, 1924) is available online at www.answering-islam.org, and a broad account of the caliphate can be found at A General History of the Middle East, chap. 10, ‘The Arab Golden Age’, at http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com.

  5 See especially Patricia L. Baker, ‘Court Dress: Abbasid’, in Josef W. Meri, Medieval Islamic Civilization (London, 2006), vol. I, pp. 178–9; on the high black cap see, for instance, the entry on ‘Kalansuwa’, in M. T. Houtsma, T. W. Arnold, R. Basset and R. Hartmann, Encyclopaedia of Islam (London, 1913–36), vol. IV, pp. 677–8. The caliph was not the first monarch in history to wear black prominently. In China both Confucius and the Daoists called black the king of colours, and the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who unified China in 211 BCE, was appealing to ancient values when he chose the colour black for himself and his dynasty. As with later European monarchs, the choice of black was taken to express humility, austerity and dedication.

  6 On the ‘green’ interlude, see ‘Ma’mun, Abu’l-’Abbas ‘Abd-Allãh, the Seventh Abbasid Caliph’, in Encyclopaedia Iranica, at www.iranicaonline.org.

  7 Quoted in Paul Wheatley, The Places where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands (Chicago, IL, 2000), p. 282.

  8 Quoted in Israr Ahmas Khan, Authentication of Hadith: Redefining the Criteria (London, 2010), p. 20.

  9 A detailed and fully referenced account of the development of secular black fashion in Europe via Burgundy and Spain through Italy, England and the Netherlands is given in my book Men in Black (London, 1995), especially pp. 51–113.

  10 The Sultan is the more moved because his own, Islamic prayers for the cure of his child had been in vain. See J. Perryman, ed., The King of Tars: Edited from the Auchinleck Manuscript, Advocates 19.2.1, Middle English Texts 12 (Heidelberg, 1980), ll. 928–9 (his hide) and 1,226 (blue and black). In a comparable episode in the fourteenth-century Cursor Mundi, King David meets four Saracens who are ‘black and blue as lead’, but instantly switch to white on kissing rods blessed by Moses. For further references and contextual discussion see Geraldine Heng, ‘Jews, Saracens, “Black Men”, Tartars: England in a World of Racial Difference’, in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford, 2007), pp. 247–69.

  11 On the black painting of armour, see Claude Blair, European Armour, circa 1066 to circa 1700 (London, 1958), p. 172. On the Black Prince, and the ‘shadowy’ reference to his ‘armure noire’, see another John Harvey, The Black Prince and His Age (London, 1967), p. 15; also Barbara Emerson, The Black Prince (London, 1976), pp. 1–2. Hubert Cole suggests the Prince fought under ‘sable banners’ (though there is no certain evidence of this) in Emerson, The Black Prince, pp. 9–11.

  12 See J. R. Boyle, Ecclesiastical Vestments: Their Origin and Significance (London, 1896); Herbert Norris, Church Vestments: Their Origin and Development (London, 1949).

  13 See Hilde De Ridder-Symoens, ed., A History of the University in Europe, vol. I: Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992); W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, A History of Academical Dress in Europe until the End of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1963).

  14 See W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, A History of Legal Dress in Europe (Oxford, 1963).

  15 For further direction on sumptuary legislation see Aileen Ribeiro, Dress and Morality (London, 2003), pp. 43–7, 55–8, 63–9, 74.

  16 See, for instance, Albert Racinet, The Historical Encyclopedia of Costume, ed. Aileen Ribeiro (London, 1992), p. 155: Racineťs still-classic Le Costume Historique of 1888 is available in various editions and selectio
ns.

  17 Recent studies of Rubens’s English diplomacy are Gregory Martin, Rubens in London: Art and Diplomacy (London, 2011) and Mark Lamster, The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens (New York, 2010). For an earlier study, see C. V. Wedgwood, The Political Career of Peter Paul Rubens (London, 1975). The subject is discussed in most biographies of Rubens: see, for instance, Christopher White, Peter Paul Rubens: Man and Artist (New Haven, CT, 1987), pp. 215–31; Marie-Anne Lescourret, Rubens: A Double Life (London, 1993), ‘The Embassies’, pp. 141–86. Rubens’s letters are edited by Ruth S. Magurn, The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Cambridge, MA, 1955).

  FIVE: Two Artists in Black

  1 The standard modern life has been Helen Langdon’s Caravaggio: A Life (London, 1998), but I have worked principally from Andrew Graham-Dixon’s biography, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (London, 2010), which takes account of later archival finds and contains much fascinating further new material. See Andrew Graham-Dixon on Caravaggio’s studio, pp. 184–6; his looks, p. 163; the drawing of him by Ottavio Leoni, fig. 1; the black chest, p. 271; his dog Corvo, p. 399; black cloaks, pp. 70, 99, 162–4, 257, 294, 356; possible pimping, pp. 297–8; attack on waiter, pp. 275–81; house-scorning, p. 287; attack from behind, pp. 293–4; transcript of cross-examination, pp. 260–64; the Madonna of Loreto, pp. 288–93; Carlo Borromeo, pp. 22–44; killing of Ranuccio da Terni, pp. 313–22; in Malta, pp. 358–92; injury and death, pp. 415–34; penalty for sodomy, p. 416. On Caravaggio’s lighting and colouring see also John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London, 1993), pp. 156, 160. On Caravaggio’s hostility to bright colours, and his statement that they were ‘the poison of tones’, see G. P. Bellori’s Le Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti moderni [1672], ed. E. Borea (Turin, 1976), p. 229.

  2 John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing (London, 1857), p. 232: Letter VIII, ‘Of Colour and Composition’, Section C, c.

  3 See Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio, pp. 354–5, and Christopher White, Peter Paul Rubens: Man and Artist (New Haven, CT, 1987), p. 167.

  4 On the quality control of cloth, and the portrait of ‘The Sampling Officials of the Drapers’ Guild’, see Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes (London, 1999), pp. 646–7.

  5 The meanings of the blackness which water can have are memorably discussed by Gaston Bacherlard in Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas, TX, 1999). On black water in Poe see chapter Ten, ref. 17, below.

  6 On Jeremias de Decker see Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, pp. 643–5.

  7 In the two versions for instance of the self-portrait of himself as a young man painted in 1628 and 1629 (both known simply as Self-portrait).

  SIX: Black Choler

  1 The classic history of humoral medicine, black bile and melancholy in medical theory and artistic practice is that by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London, 1964). I engage principally with this study because it culminates, as my argument does, in the discussion of Dürer’s Melencolia I; for a more recent discussion of humoral medical theory, in a global context, see Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York, 1999). The fourfold division of the cosmos – and the four colours – were extended to other domains, such as alchemy, where, during the magnum opus in which gold is created, the philosopher’s stone is successively black, white, yellow and red.

  2 For Galen and Avicenna, see Saturn and Melancholy, pp. 55–95.

  3 Quoted, with translation by Fritz Saxl, in Saturn and Melancholy, pp. 111ff.

  4 My quotations from The Anatomy of Melancholy are from the 1922 edition, ed. Holbrook Jackson, currently in print in facsimile in a single volume, with introduction by William H. Gass (New York, 2001). Roman numerals refer to the original Volumes of this edition, which correspond to the First, Second and Third ‘Partitions’ of Burton’s text: both volume and page numbers are reproduced in the facsimile. Definition of melancholy, vol. I, p. 170; on living death, I, pp. 389–402. Otherwise the phrases cited, with others that are relevant, will be found at I, pp. 169, 172, 200, 209, 218, 219, 222, 224, 240, 260, 262, 302, 377, 383, 384, 406, 413, 419, 420; II, pp. 33, 250; III, pp. 84–5, 150, 186, 395, 406, 410.

  5 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1989), pp. 3–4. On the underlying consistency of Burton’s science, theology and politics see Andrew Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge, 2006). On the day-to-day practice of humoral medicine in the seventeenth century, see Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-century England (Cambridge, 1981), especially pp. 150–64, on Melancholy and Mopishness. See MacDonald also for contemporary corroboration of the connections Burton sees between melancholy and Satan, and between melancholy and religious ‘enthusiasm’; MacDonald pp. 155, 170, 207, 215, 218, 223–4.

  6 William Harvey, Of the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, trans. Robert Willis (London, 1847), chap. 9.

  7 Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, p. 320; Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. I, p. 392.

  8 Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, p. 318.

  9 See T. S. Eliot, ‘Whispers of Immortality’, in Poems, 1920 (New York, 1920); Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky Reminiscences, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), p. 134; Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. David Magarshack (London, 1955), p. 236.

  10 See Kristeva, Black Sun, pp. 71–94, 106–38.

  11 Quotations from Shakespeare are from the current Arden editions. ‘Alas, poor Yorick! . . .’ Hamlet, v.i.182–92; ‘I have of late . . .’ II.ii.294–309.

  12 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. I, p. 130; Burton cites Ben Jonson on III, pp. 463, 472, 474, 478, 480, 507 and Shakespeare on III, pp. 445, 451; on III, p. 187, he slightly misquotes the last lines of Romeo and Juliet without mentioning Shakespeare’s name, presumably believing he and everyone else knew them by heart.

  13 ‘Something in his soul . . .’ III.i.165–6; ‘out of my weakness . . .’ II.ii.596; ‘my inky cloak . . .’ I.ii.75–84. The copperplate engraving to Rowe’s edition of 1709 was cut by Elisha Kirkall from a drawing by F. Boitard.

  14 To be, or not to be – that is the question . . .

  To die, to sleep –

  To sleep: perchance to Dream; Ay, there’s the rub,

  For in that sleep of death what dreams may come . . .

  Must give us pause . . .

  Who would . . .

  grunt and sweat under a weary life,

  But that the dread of something after death

  . . . makes us rather bear those ills we have

  Than fly to others that we know not of. (III.i.56–82)

  15 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. I, p. 406; the line-references in ‘Il Penseroso’ are: ‘These pleasures . . .’ 175–6; ‘But hail . . .’ 11–21; ‘in glimmering Bowres . . .’ 27–9; ‘Come pensive Nun . . .’ 31–3; ‘forget . . .’ 42; ‘flowing . . .’ 34; ‘sable stole . . .’ 35–6; ‘most musicall . . .’ 62; ‘saddest plight . . .’ 55; ‘Gorgeous Tragedy’, 97–9; ‘such notes . . .’ 106–7; ‘the pealing organ . . .’ 161–2; ‘glowing embers . . .’ 79–80. I reproduce Blake’s illustration of the goddess Melancholy in a black gown, and in a companion illustration Blake shows the poet, in the black mortar-board and gown of a Cambridge scholar, gazing in wonder at ‘the wandring moon’, l. 67.

  16 Book and line references to Paradise Lost are: ‘black tartareous dregs’ VII, 238–9; ‘bituminous gurge’ XII, 41–2 ; sulphurous . . . grain’ VI, 512–5; ‘black fire . . .’ II, 67; ‘sad Acheron . . .’ II, 578; ‘myself am Hell . . .’ IV, 75–8.

  17 Hamlet, III.ii.125–6; Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. III, 392–400; ‘extraordinary valour’ I, 393; Paradise Lost, IV, 75–8.

&n
bsp; 18 Paradise Lost, ‘black low mist . . .’ IX, 180; ‘the other shape . . .’ II, 666–72.

  SEVEN: Servitude and Négritude

  1 This night, Macbeth, I.v.50–1; black vengeance, Othello, III.vi.31–2; black angel, Lear, III.vi.31–2; black gown, All’s Well, I.iii.92–4; Love’s Labours Lost, ebony and chimney sweepers, IV.iii.243–62; pitch-balls, III.i.190–92ff. On ebony, in the Arden edition of Love’s Labours Lost (London, 1998), H. R Woudhuysen notes that Theobald’s emendation of ‘wood divine’ to ‘word divine’ ‘has been widely accepted but is unnecessary’: indeed, the emendation seems itself wooden.

  2 ‘For I have sworn’, sonnet 147; dun breasts, black wires, 130; raven eyes, 127.

  3 Hamlet, I.iv.48ff; Antony and Cleopatra, ‘tawny’, I.i.6; Phoebus’ pinches, I.v.28–9; strumpet, I.i.13; triple-turned whore, IV.xii.13; hotter hours, III.xiii.123–5; lass unparallelled, V.ii.315; baby at breast, V.ii.308.

  4 Othello, ‘the Moor’, I.i.57; thick-lips, I.i.66; ram, I.i.88.

  5 Othello, chop, IV.i.200; Antony and Cleopatra, lingering pickle, II.v.65–6.

  6 ‘Let all . . .’ Merchant, II.vii.79; ‘Zounds’, Titus, IV.ii.73.

  7 For Jonson’s text, see C.H.H. Percy and E. Simpson, eds, Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1941), vol. VII, pp. 169–80. Because of their obscurity, I do not discuss in my text two poems by Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), the elder brother of the poet George Herbert: his ‘Sonnet of Black Beauty’ and ‘Another Sonnet to Black’, both published posthumously in 1665. The first quatrain of the former reads:

  Black beauty, which above that common light,

  Whose Power can no colours here renew

  But those which darkness can again subdue,

  Do’st still remain unvary’d to the sight . . .

  One might of course say that obscurity suits a ‘black’ poem. It is possible the poems relate to the occasion of the Masque of Blackness. It is also possible that they were inspired by a beloved whose skin was dark or black, or who had extremely black hair. Lord Herbert was himself swarthy and black-haired, and it is said that the family were known as the ‘black Herberts’. Together with the Masque, and the lines from Shakespeare quoted, the poems do reflect a sense, in Jacobean culture, of the intrigue of the colour black. More broadly on the black monarchs and saints of Christian tradition – including also Prester John – see Michel Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ, 2009), pp. 82–7.