medievalpoc: The British Library’s Medieval Manuscripts Blog has done an entry here featuring
medievalpoc:The British Library’s Medieval Manuscripts Blog has done an entry here featuring one of my faves, Egerton MS 1500. It’s full of genealogies that include Cleopatra, Ptolemy, Saladin and other rulers, all painstakingly illuminated in this 14th-century chronicle from southern France. I’ve posted about it before, but one of the most common questions I get is, “what race was Cleopatra, REALLY?” which is funny because we can literally never know. BUT.We have this very intense cultural assumption that not only was everyone we know of “from history” a white person, but that all intervening imaginations and permutations, especially Medieval European ones, MUST have been what we would consider a white person. And that is just very much not the case. at all.This manuscript isn’t making a case for what any of these people would have actually looked like. What it does do is make a very strong case for what a French illuminator in the 1300s thought they WOULD HAVE looked like…and that is very, very interesting.It’s fair to say that Cleopatra is always depicted as beautiful, and here’s she’s shown with dark skin contrasted with very white teeth, as are many of the other dark-skinned royalty shown here. Between depictions like these and works of literature being created at around the same time (Sir Morien’s description for example), I’m starting to think that the contrast of dark skin and white teeth was also a kind of standard of beauty, not unlike pale skin being shown with almost violently red cheeks and lips. It’s fascinating to think about. -- source link
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