Medieval and modern race-thinking in Frank Yerby’s The Saracen Blade

The popular historical novelist and expatriate author Frank Yerby was criticised by his fellow African American writers for his historical novels, which supposedly ignored racial injustice in the interests of commercial success. Yerby’s first attempts to narrate African American history in his fiction were The Dahomean (1971) and its sequel A Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest (1979). However, this article argues that Yerby’s earlier bestseller, The Saracen Blade (1952), set in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries around the Mediterranean basin, wrestles with both modern and medieval perceptions of race and makes claims for a multicultural medievalism that were radical in the early 1950s. As I show, the novel proposes three overlapping models of race and then demonstrates how they are all artificial. Through the novel’s protagonist, Pietro di Donati, Yerby suggests links between modern and medieval constructions of race and the ways in which these constructions are unstable and inadequate in both the present and the past. Yerby’s portrayal of the way race is historically contingent in The Saracen Blade at once undermines the idea of a ‘pre-racial’ innocence, by racialising medieval characters, and questions the idea of ‘racial progress,’ by showing how ostensibly ‘pre-racial’ formations of difference like religion are not so much transcended as re-formulated by modernity.