Marking Religion on the Body:
Saracens, Categorization, and The King of Tars

Siobhain Bly Calkin, Carleton University

The relationship between individuals' physical appearances and their religious affiliations was very much a concern in the later Middle Ages, as shown by the Fourth Lateran Council's decree that Muslims and Jews should differentiate themselves from Christians by wearing distinctive clothing. Medieval ideas about the categorization of individuals, about how the physical appearances of individuals relate to and communicate sociocultural identities such as religion and nationality, have also become the subject of an increasing number of scholarly studies. While some scholars have explored ideas about race and ethnicity in the Middle Ages, others have examined the extent to which physical identities could be changed by acts such as conversion. One text frequently cited in such discussions is The King of Tars, particularly one incident in this taleûthe stunning change of skin color experienced by a Saracen sultan when he converts to Christianity: "His hide, pat blac & lopely was, / Al white bicom, purth Godes gras " (ll. 928–29). Steven Kruger describes this incident as a "relatively rare " medieval example of "biological differences . . . disappearing with moral change. " Thomas Hahn finds the conversion an "anecdote " that "project[s] race as the spectacular counterpart of an essentialized identity: you are what you are seen to be, " while Jeffrey Jerome Cohen identifies the event as "a striking example of the inextricable bodily link between Saracen race and Saracen masculinity. " In all these cases, discussion of The King of Tars focuses on the sultan's conversion alone, and the text is characterized as offering readers a stunningly straightforward vision of the ways in which religious affiliation is marked on individuals' bodies. Similarly, Geraldine Heng's rich recent reading of the text as a whole asserts that in The King of Tars, Christianity "possesses a spiritual essence with the power to reshape biological fleshly matter. " In The King of Tars, it seems, religious and biological identities overlap easily and neatly: Saracens have black skin while Christians have white skin. The categorization of individuals appears to be a simple process.