An enormous body of scholarship on the history of race and racism in the West has appeared over the last several decades. The majority of studies seeking the origins of modern racial ideologies are by specialists of the postmedieval centuries who argue for the predominant influence of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and modern scientific theories of genealogy and evolution. In recent years, however, specialists of antiquity such as Benjamin Isaac, and of later medieval Europe such as Suzanne Akbari, Geraldine Heng, and Cord Whitaker, have pointed to adumbrations of the modern beliefs in those eras. The ideas about race still haunting western society today have demonstrable roots in ancient and medieval thought.
Most scholarship on these issues gives at best peripheral attention to early medieval sources. Bede and the Beginnings of English Racism helps fill a major gap in the history of race, while also contributing valuably to studies of the eighth-century English monk and scholar, Bede. Using methodologies derived from New and Structuralist Criticism, Foley offers a penetrating formal analysis of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (c. 731) aimed at discerning its “racial” ideology (37–38). Foley distinguishes two levels on which Bede's text may be interpreted: a simple level that less educated audiences of his day would have grasped and a more sophisticated level probably only accessible to Latin-literate religious or clergy. As Foley observes, modern analyses of the History, too, often neglect the latter level of meaning. A fundamental argument of his book is that much imagery in the History apparent at the simple level is racially charged. Above all, this is true of Bede's stereotypical portrayal of the Britons, the population living in Britain when the Angles and Saxons arrived in the fifth century. Bede, Foley contends, “excoriated [the Britons] not just as individuals, but as an entire race” (24). Close reading at the more sophisticated interpretive level, though, reveals ways Bede qualified this imagery on the basis of his conviction that all human beings, even the British, “receive their redemption from a God who is a respecter neither of persons nor of races” (50).
Foley's prologue traces the personal motivations for writing his book: a childhood in the Jim Crow South, graduate research on early English culture, and a summer in Oxford studying how Victorian and Edwardian historians read Bede. The latter project introduced Foley to the nefarious reconstructions of England's medieval past published by nineteenth-century “Anglo-Saxonists,” mainly in Britain, whose historiography was indebted to Bede's History (17–23). A prominent refrain in those publications was the racial superiority of the English over other groups within Britain and beyond its borders. English superiority was held to derive from innate qualities inherited from Angle and Saxon forebears. The guiding question behind Foley's research for the present monograph has been to determine whether Bede is himself responsible for such racialized interpretations. The answer given is largely affirmative: the History constructs “durable and recognizable” stereotypes (35) that Victorian and Edwardian historians easily adapted to conform with their racist beliefs.
Chapters 2–5 analyze Bede's representation of four population groups identified in his History: the English, British (Britons), Irish, and “Latins.” Bede refers to these groups as gentes (plural), a term that Foley contends is properly translated by “races.” Chapter 2 examines Bede's vision of the universal church of Rome comprising a Latin “spiritual race.” In Foley's estimation, Bede's portrayal of this “race” lacks racial specificity and is thus “analogous to what some scholars observe about the status of whiteness in the contemporary world” (68). Chapters 3–5 center on three “council-type scenes” (37) in the History involving interactions between the Latin and other gentes of Britain. In each scene, a gens (singular) must decide whether to abandon its parochial religious practices to join Rome's church. The meetings have varied outcomes, but each illumines Bede's understanding of the participants’ prevailing characteristics. The British are portrayed as implacably opposed to Rome as well as to the English, whereas the English and later the Irish embrace catholic unity.
In the concluding Chapter 6, “The Historia and Its Legacy of Racist Discourse,” Foley argues that Bede's representation of the British, English, and Irish is “consistently sober, earnest, and morally serious” (183), yet when the History is read at its simple interpretive level, the portrayal of the British, especially, guides readers toward a moral outlook corresponding with modern racial prejudices. This is the reading level that informed the historiography of Victorian and Edwardian scholars. In Foley's view, Bede's History bears “more than just a little responsibility for whatever racist legacy it engendered” (204).
Overall, Foley's analysis of the History is full of new insights into Bede's intent. While this is a scholarly book, its prose is easily within reach of non-academic readers. My one significant concern lies with the insistence on translating Bede's gentes by “races,” and the implications for the book's larger argument. Foley himself acknowledges that Bede's conception of human group identity was, in crucial respects, distant from modern racial ideologies. A particular difference is that Bede lacked the modern “understanding of race rooted in the language of ‘blood’” (24). The early medieval antecedents of modern theories of race have received too little scholarly attention, yet the disparities also need careful evaluation. Foley's repeated translation of gens/gentes as race/races, usually without reminding readers that Bede used the Latin terminology of gentes, collapses the differences in ways that undercut an otherwise nuanced exposition. The somewhat strained comparison—noted above—of Bede's vision of a Latin spiritual gens to current thinking about whiteness is indicative of the problem.
Still, it is important to recognize, first, that Foley's reading of Bede through a racial lens is in line with Heng's path-breaking work on race-thinking in later medieval literature and with much subsequent scholarship building on that foundation. Second, leaving aside whether it is appropriate to describe Bede's imagery as racial or to contend that his History represents the “beginnings of English racism,” Foley's masterful reading of key portions of Bede's text opens an important new window on its central themes and formal design. There is much to learn from and admire in this provocative, well-written, thoughtful monograph.
