The sultana and her sisters: black women in the British Isles before 1530

This interdisciplinary study examines cultural representation of black women in the British Isles before 1530. It addresses a lacuna in the historiography of black women which has, hitherto, paid little attention to the fact of their existence in the British Isles before British involvement in the slave trade. Representations of black women in stained glass and in poetry of the Middle Ages are examined and their meaning and function interrogated through an analysis of the medieval discourses which framed them and through which they were refracted: biblical exegesis, natural histories and travel literature, bestiaries, constructions of female beauty and medical treatises. These images suggest that the bodies and behaviours of black women were the site for a definition of gender and racial otherness long before the development of the slave trade of Elizabethan and Jacobean England