Leprosi cum sanis habitare non possunt [Third Lateral Council (1179)]
(Keil 1980:1.1251)
The notorious proverb you cannot wash an Ethiopian white, and its biblical equivalent Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? (Jer 13:23), are widely believed to range among the most enduring ‘racist’ catchphrases in the Western tradition.1 The proverbial impossibility of
‘cleansing’ dark skin is echoed by various authors promoting colonial and imperial enterprises, including Edward Long, a prominent 18th century planter violently opposed to curtailing the ‘rights’ of plantation owners, Rudyard Kipling, godfather of the ‘White Man’s Burden’, and Thomas Dixon, the best-known champion of the Ku Klux Klan.2 The saying is also exploited in several eighteenth and nineteenth century illustrations deriding Africans as dull-witted, bestial, and unable to attain ‘white’
sophistication.3 The proverb’s influence on fostering and consolidating anti-abolitionist, segregationist and racist notions of African inferiority has also been pointed out by those fighting such discriminatory rhetoric over the last few centuries. Thomas Tyron identifies the proverb as characteristic of the speech of ruthless slave holders in his Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies (1684) (Krise 1999:54), and the proverb is also discussed in the writings of several 18th and 19th century African-Americans, including Prince Hall, Joseph Sidney, and Frederick Douglass.4 In the late 20th century, numerous studies on the making of ‘race’ have used the saying as an unambiguous indicator of colour prejudice. Adaptations of the proverb in text and image have been reproduced in provocative titles and illustrations in studies intending to expose the prevalence of a widely-disseminated bias in early modern thought, and the staggering number of sources in which the phrase appears (see Appendix 2) seems to prove their case.5
Since most studies discussing the proverb have been primarily concerned with documenting the spread of colour bias rather than Western iconography and symbolism, virtually none of them – one notable study excepted (Prager 1987) – have scrutinised the deictic and symbolic code by which adaptations of the saying operate. Considered as an obvious marker of colour prejudice, the proverb is seen as requiring no further elaboration. Therefore, it has usually been presented as evidence of the
1 Since in Renaissance texts the two sayings are used interchangeably and coalesce into one idiom, they will be analysed as such in this chapter. A collection of references to both versions of the proverb are attached as Appendix 2.
2 Rudyard Kipling’s ”How the leopard got his spots” (1901, reprinted in Just So Stories 1912) and Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden 1865-1900 (1902) both employ the biblical variant of the saying (Jer 13:23) as the underlying rationale for their narratives. Edward Long’s usage appears in an attack on the British judiciary for allegedly favouring Africans over planters: “The invention of printing has been ascribed to a soldier, of gunpowder to a priest; perhaps the longitude may be discovered by a taylor; but the art of washing the Black-a-moor white was happily reserved for a lawyer” (emphasis mine, Candid Reflections (1772) iii, quoted in Thomas (2000:20)).
3 See also the nasty illustrations reprinted in Walvin (1973:179), Blakely (1993:75, 169) and Newman (1987:141).
4 Prince Hall, “A Charge to the African Lodge” June 24, 1797 (Porter 1971:71), Joseph Sidney, “An Oration, Commemorative of the Abolition” January 2, 1809 (Porter 1971:362), Frederick Douglass, Life and Writings (1881) 4.347.
5 Compare the reprints of the adaptation from Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes (1586) in Lyons (1975:book cover), Hall (1995:68), Newman (1987:141), Vaughan (1995:163) and Vaughan and Vaughan (1997:37). The adage also serves as a title in Stanton (1960), Lyons (1975), Newman (1987) and as chapter titles in Hall (1995) and Barthélémy (1987). The history of the proverb’s dissemination in the Renaissance has been meticulously documented by Massing (1995).
crudest sort, and has seldom been used as a medium for furthering the understanding of the making of colonial discourse.
Rather startingly, though, the adaptation in Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber (1531) reproduced here (Fig. 26) thwarts the expectations raised by the proverb’s ‘racist’ reputation. Even though the Latin text faithfully reproduces Erasmus’ lines from the Adagia (Phillips 1982:1.4.50), and speaks of the vain attempt to ‘cleanse’ an ‘Aethiopian’, the accompanying woodcut rather oddly shows a physician with his assistant attending to a ‘white’ patient. To the reader familiar with the making of the Emblematum liber (1531), such a discrepancy between image and text seems perhaps more understandable. After all, the collection of epigrams compiled by Andrea Alciato was originally intended to be published as a pure text collection, and was only subsequently enriched with woodcuts, nota bene without the author’s consent. Alciato openly voiced his misgivings about the unauthorised woodcuts, especially since the illustrator had occasionally missed the point of a proverb, or had supplied an adage with an already existing woodcut in order to save on time and expenditure.6 Whatever the particular circumstances behind the editing of the page reproduced above, it seems rather peculiar that the printer should have settled for a European patient lying supine on a sickbed, whose facial features, straight hair and white complexion do not even remotely hint at an African.7 Ironically, this blunder even lends an unintended, subversive pun to the caption itself, for it is truly impossible to recognise the patient as an “Aethiops” without any reference to the text.
Then again, the illustrator’s faux pas, whatever its origins, points towards a topos which has hitherto been largely ignored in studies of early modern discourse: the reading of skin colour as disease. There are indeed several Renaissance adaptations of the proverb which endorse the association which the ‘faulty’ illustration in the Emblematum liber visualises. The Scotsman James Melville (c1600), for instance, speaks of the futility of “washing of sick Moores” (Whiting 1951:100), while the Anglican clergyman Thomas Adams in a sermon entitled The Blacke Devill (1615) lectures on the impossibility to “metamorphose Satans posions, […] [to] wash the Blak-more[’]s skin white, and [to] make leprosies faire and sound” (Prager 1987: 262-263). The same displacement of skin colour with disease also occurs with more prominent authors of the self-same period. John Calvin’s Commentaries on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah and the Lamentations, for instance, interpret Jeremiah’s metaphor of the Ethiopian’s unchangeable skin as a reference to the state of habitual sin to which humans accustom themselves, and which governs them like an ‘incurable disease’ (Owen 1850-55:Jer 13:23). By further elaborating on the parallels between physical disease, mental disease and sin,
6 Although distancing himself from the first “pirated” Augsburg edition (1531) with its “crude” woodcuts, Alciato eventually approved a later Paris edition (1536) by Christian Wechsel (Graham 1998:214). For concise biographical notes on Alciato’s life see the introduction prefaced to the first volume of Daly’s authoritative index (1985:not paginated). A concise history of the Liber Emblematum (1531) and its subsequent editions is provided by Saunders (1988:97-101).
7 Notice that several wonderful, life-like portraits of Africans by European artists had appeared before the Emblematum liber, such as Albrecht Dürer’s admirable “Portrait of a black man” (1508) and his “Portrait of Katharina” (1521), reprinted in Bugner 2.2.Figs. 264, 263.
Calvin not only testifies to the importance of metaphors of disease in exegesis, but also reveals a predilection for pathologising somatic difference which is typical of his age.
This element of disease which these texts project onto the African is already present in the earliest extant version of the proverb ‘to wash an Ethiopian white’, though in a quite different form. In the ‘Aesopian’ fable generally believed to have given rise to the proverb,8 illness is not the patient’s original condition, but rather the result of being maltreated by the hands of the ‘physician’. In ‘Aesop’, the foolish owner of a newly-bought African slave actually makes the African sick with his effort to rub off the ‘stain’ on his skin:
He took him home and used all kinds of soap on him and tried all kinds of baths to clean him up. He couldn’t change his colour, but he made him sick with all his efforts. [Nature remains as it used to be.]9 (Perry 1965:no. 393)
In a curious twist, Renaissance texts after Erasmus significantly alter the roles of the original narrative.
Michel Montaigne in his essay On the resemblance between children and fathers, for instance, paraphrases the ‘Aesopian’ to illustrate his point that physicians often endanger their patients by administering harmful medicine, which may in extreme cases even lead to their patients’ death (Florio 1603:2.37.442). With Montaigne and with many other contemporaries, the hapless ‘Ethiopian’ victim becomes a sick patient, while the daft master turns into a compassionate physician. As a result, the foolhardy attempt to remove his servant’s skin is rehabilitated as a well-meant effort to relieve the African from his inner suffering.
Once cause and effect have been reversed, the symbolic meaning attached to the removal of skin colour undergoes a significant transformation. While the earliest Greek sources still speak of a
‘rubbing’ or ‘scrubbing’ of the African, early Patristic authors fashion this into a ‘washing’,10 a symbolic act which in a Christian context also stands for the administering of the sacrament of baptism, and for the freeing from original sin. Jerome, for instance, retells the salvation of humankind through Christ’s self-sacrifice through the image of washing off dark skin colour:
People of the Ethiopians means those who are black, being covered with the stain of sin. In the past we were Ethiopians, being made so by our sins and vices. How? Because sin had made us black. But then we heeded Isaiah [Isa 1:16] – ‘Wash yourselves, be clean’ – and we said, ‘Thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow’ [Ps 50[51]:9]. Thus we, Ethiopians that we were, transformed ourselves and became white. (Courtès 1979:27)
The impossibility of washing an Ethiopian white, then, also possesses a spiritual dimension. Indeed, it seems no coincidence that on the Emblematum liber’s woodcut, the physician’s sprinkling of water appears more ceremonious than functional, and resembles a spiritual cleansing rather than the painful scrubbing featured on the illustrations of later editions.11 The same spiritual subtext is also preserved
8 Notice that the fable is now generally thought to be Aphthonius’ (early 4th c. AD) rather than Aesop’s.
9 The final sentence is missing in Perry (1965), but is included in Schnur’s (1978) reprint of Halm (1863).
10 As Lutz Röhrich (1973:1134) correctly notes, many Greek versions speak of ‘rubbing an Ethiopian’ (Αίφίοπα σµήχειν).
The change from pagan authors, who speak mostly of a ‘rubbing’, to the ‘washing’ in patristic writing, is reflected in the examples provided in the Thesaurus Proverbiorum Medii Aevi (“Mohr” 2).
11 On the interpretation of the physician’s gesture, notice that John Calvin and others regard the sprinkling of water as a perfectly satisfactory method of baptising someone: “And whether the Baptized be dipped in water, and that once or thrise, or have the water sprinkled or powred upon him, it is a matter indifferent, and oought to be free in the Church according to the
in the earliest adaptation printed in the English language by Geoffrey Whitney (1586). Whereas Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes (1586:57) speaks of the “skowring” or scrubbing of skin colour, the accompanying etching (Fig. 27) truly visualises a mere symbolic ‘showering’ of the African body.12 Analogous to the duality involved in this physical and spiritual cleansing, darkness is often situated both without and within the African body. If the Ethiopian cannot be washed, Whitney’s illustration implies, this is not just because his colour is too durable; rather, it is very much the reluctance on behalf of the ‘patient’ which frustrates any attempt at ‘curing’ his body or mind.13
Figure 27. From Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes (1586:57) The first line of the accompanying text reads: “Leave of[f] with paine,
the blackamore to skowre, […]” (emphasis added)
The duality inherent in the ‘skowring’ and ‘showering’ of the African body points towards a pathologising of non-Europeans which is twofold, and based on an othering of physical and mental properties. The vilifying of colonial subjects as mentally deficient is a well-known cliché and does not need to be reiterated here in detail. As Charles H. Lyons’ study on British ideas about Black African educability (1975) has shown, notions of ‘racial inferiority’ may be traced back to Elizabethan and Jacobean texts denouncing Africans as ‘dull’, ‘mad’, and lacking the mental capacities of learned Englishmen, if not even further.14 Charles H. Lyons stresses the fact that the spread of such views is difficult to assess, mostly because Renaissance texts fail to operate with the kind of terminology used in modern assessments of human intelligence and mental sanity (Lyons 1975:16-19). In spite of such
diversitie of countreys” (1596: 24.8.141). Notice also the biblical analogies of baptising the ill, as e.g. Namaan’s curing from leprosy through bathing in the river Jordan (2 Kings 5:1-14).
12 Similarly to Alciato’s forerunner, Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes (1586) also represents a collaborative work. The woodcuts added were those of the Dutch printer Plantin, who re-used more than 200 illustrations found in other emblem editions of his (Henkel and Schöne 1967:lxviii).
13 This point of resistance on behalf of the one being scrubbed is accentuated even more in the anonymous 18th century illustration in Walvin (1973:179), on which a grotesque male figure placed in a giant bathtub is only approached by washing maids armed with long brushes, signifying the danger emanating from his hypersexualised physicality.
14 See also the stereotyping of the African as the madman in German medieval literature as analysed by Gilman (1985:142-44).
difficulties, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that biased views of ‘dull’ Africans often prevailed;
however, since “the idea of intelligence was intimately connected with the spiritual nature of man”
(Lyons 1975:17), it is obvious that a similar prejudice would have been borne towards any other non-Christian nation, regardless of its ethnic background.
While several studies have analysed the Renaissance stereotyping of the African or the exotic colonial subject as the madman, the association with physical disease is one aspect of the pathologisation of colour which has been sorely neglected in Renaissance studies. The reason for this absence seems partly related to the relative scarcity of Renaissance texts making this semiotic link of colour with illness explicit. Therefore, Winthrop Jordan in his landmark study White over Black (1968) only cautiously refers to “an ancient, vague tradition” of associating somatic difference with leprosy, which according to him flares up intermittently in the Western tradition. The textual references Jordan cites are indeed separated by enormous time gaps. Jordan names among the writers proposing such an argument the 16th century Frenchman Jean Bodin, the 17th century Dutch explorer Isaac Vos, and the late 18th century American physician Benjamin Rush (1968:519.n.13). Curiously, though, Jordan’s hypothesis of such an elusive tradition does not seem to have been adequately pursued in any of the major studies on colour in the 16th and 17th centuries. The following pages do not claim to offer a final verdict on the viability of Jordan’s claim; nevertheless, they hope to show that the association of skin colour with disease would have been common currency in Renaissance culture.
Furthermore, they aim to document that scientific arguments interpreting colour as a symptom of leprosy would have been easily accessible in Renaissance England, first and foremost through the writings of Jean Bodin, but also via other sources perpetuating and expanding on Bodin’s theory.15
Perhaps the best approach to understanding the pathologisation of colour in the Renaissance is to remind oneself of the classical and medieval doctrine which such a theory displaced. Prior to the discovery of the New World, medieval scholars unanimously adhere to the Greek and Roman idea that only climate, or more precisely, geographical latitude, determines skin colour. As the term Ethiopian (Gk. aithiops, i.e. ‘burnt face’) suggests, Africans were frequently perceived as having been scorched by the sun,16 and the self-same idea is preserved in a dense textual legacy stretching from Isidore to the
15 The importance of Jean Bodin and his Méthode (1565) for the development of Renaissance notions on non-European physiognomy and subsequent ‘racial’ categorisations has also been hinted at by Ivan Hannaford (1996:155-57) and by Ania Loomba (2000:201n.17), yet without offering any substantial analysis.
16 See the following explanation from Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos: “For while the region which we inhabit is in one of the northern quarters, the people who live under the more southern parallels, that is, those from the equator to the summer tropic, since they have the sun over their heads and are burned by it, have black skins and thick, wolly hair, are contracted in form and shrunken in stature, are sanguine in nature, and in habits are for the most part savage because their homes are continually oppressed by heat; we call them by the general name Ethiopians” (Goold 1980:2.2.55-56).
late Middle Ages.17 Classical and medieval scholars often think of colour as an unstable condition which gradually wears off if a person moves to a Northern climate. John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomew Anglicus, for example, affirms: “[I]n temperate contrees and londes that beth somdele colde, blo [‘blue’] men geteth children temperate in colour, as Macrobius, Aristotil and Avicenne meneth” (Seymour 1975:21.9.1282-83). Such myths are of course disproved in the age of discovery, as baffled explorers discover (comparatively) light-skinned peoples in South America and in the highlands of Ethiopia, and much darker nations in the more temperate zones near the Cape of Good Hope.18
With their traditional paradigm shattered, Elizabethans find themselves in a metaphysical void in which various theories are proposed, yet none wholeheartedly believed in. John Lok, reprinted in Richard Eden’s compilation (1555), rather helplessly attributes the making of colour to a “secreate woorke of nature” (360v), and several geographers after him share the same kind of confusion. Samuel Purchas, for instance, enumerates various theories, yet eventually finds them all wanting. According to Purchas, colour has been variously ascribed to geographical latitude, to heat, to the “drynesse of the earth”, to “hidden qualities of the soile”, to “the blacknesse of the Parents[’] sperme”, or to “heavenly constellation and influence”, yet without rendering a satisfactory answer (1613:6.14.545-46). Amid the speculations Renaissance explorers, geographers, natural scientists and theologians offer on the subject, there are three main theories which keep resurfacing at regular intervals: first, the reading of colour as the biblical curse by Noah on Ham’s offspring; second, colour as a ‘monstrous’ condition emanating from the female body and mind; and third, the diagnosing of colour as an illness or disease.
The pathologisation of colour described below, therefore, does not represent the only reading of colour prevalent at the time, but merely one version which constantly interacts with a plurality of alternative texts.
Even though these alternative readings greatly differ from each other with respect to the physiological explanation they propose, they employ a similar imagery irrespective of the scientific belief they subscribe to. Colour is unanimously viewed as a condition resulting from a moral or physiological ‘fall’ incurred by a prelapsarian white ancestor which has been transmitted from one generation to the next. Significantly, these images of the ‘African as the fallen’ are by no means novel in themselves, but merely adaptations of a much older topos already present in classical texts. As Ovid
17 See Isidore’s Etymologies (Lindsay 1911:14.5.14): “Aethiopia dicta a colore populorum, quos solis vicinitas torret”
(‘Ethiopia derives its name from the colour of its inhabitants, who are burnt by their proximity to the sun’, translation mine).
Isidore’s definition reverberates throughout medieval writing, as e.g. in Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, translated by John Trevisa: “That partie [...] hatte Ethiopia of the colour and hewe of the men of the lond, that beth blewe [i.e. ‘black’] men, and is for gret brennynge and hete of the sonne, that is hem ful nyh” (Babington 1865:1.157-159).
18 On the discrepancies between the demography of colour and climate, see Eden (1555:360v), Best (1578:28), Bateman (1582:15.87.251r), Pory (1600:36), Purchas (1613:6.14.545). The point is expressed most forcefully by George Best (1578):
“[I]f the Ethiopians[‘] blacknesse came by the heate of the Sun, why should not those Americans and Indians also bee as blacke as they, seeying the Sunne is equally distant from them both[?]” (28). Later on, Best adds that “black men are found in all partes of Africa, [...] even unto Capo d’buono Speranza Southward, where, by reason of the Sphere, should be the same
“[I]f the Ethiopians[‘] blacknesse came by the heate of the Sun, why should not those Americans and Indians also bee as blacke as they, seeying the Sunne is equally distant from them both[?]” (28). Later on, Best adds that “black men are found in all partes of Africa, [...] even unto Capo d’buono Speranza Southward, where, by reason of the Sphere, should be the same