Matthew X. Vernon, The Black Middle Ages: Race and Construction of the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, xiii, 266 pp.

When I agreed to review this book, I had not paid enough attention to the subtitle, which reveals that the author is primarily concerned with the issue of Medievalism. In essence, Vernon is examining how Black or African American medievalists and writers have viewed the Middle Ages and what the study of the medieval world might mean for the struggle of Black Americans against racism and colonialism today. He argues that the examination of the Middle Ages mattered deeply for those intellectuals because many issues in that past are still mirrored in the present. This could be of relevance especially for those who are interested in the history of scholarship and the particular approach to that period from a specific ethnic perspective. Of course, then we would also need books about Asian American medievalists, Hispanic American medievalists, etc., which seems to be valid in political terms, but does not really do justice to the subject matter. At any rate, I cannot examine and evaluate the major portion of this book because it falls into the category of modern Medievalism.