A major new look at Africa's influence on European culture and how colonization remade Africa in the image of a medieval Europe.
Virgil. Chaucer. Petrarch. These names resonate with many as cornerstones of European culture. Yet, in Atlas's Bones, D. Vance Smith reveals that much of what is claimed as European culture up to the Middle Ages—its great themes in literature, its sources in political thought, its religious beliefs—originated in the writings of African thinkers like Augustine, Fulgentius, and Martianus Capella, or Europeans who thought extensively about Africa. In fact, a third of Virgil's Aeneid takes place in Africa. Francis Petrarch believed his most important achievement was his epic Africa; while Geoffrey Chaucer wrote repeatedly about the figures of Scipio Africanus, actually two different men who defeated and destroyed Carthage.
Smith tells the story of how Europe created a false ""medieval"" version of Africa to acquire resources and power during the era of imperialism and colonialism. The first half of the book, ""Reading Africa,"" traces Egypt's, Libya's, and Carthage's influence on classical and medieval thinking about Africa, highlighting often ignored literary and legendary traditions, for example, that Alexander the Great named himself the son of an African god. The second part, ""Writing Africa,"" focuses on how the different cultures of the two great African cities—Carthage and Alexandria—shaped modern literary criticism and political theology and examines the cross-influences of modern anthropology, medieval studies, and colonial law.
Atlas's Bones firmly re-establishes the significance of Africa in European intellectual history. It will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how much of Africa informs our artistic and cultural world.
By:
D. Vance Smith
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 28mm
Weight: 680g
ISBN: 9780226830308
ISBN 10: 0226830306
Pages: 432
Publication Date: 06 March 2026
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Preface: An Atlas for This Book Introduction African History and White Noise 1 “Africa,” the Fallout of Metonymy 00 All of Africa 00 I. Ancient and Medieval: Reading Africa Chapter One. Egypt, the Exception Africa, the Continent 00 Alexander the Great African 00 The Libyan God of Europe 00 The Fluid Land 00 Egypt in Medieval Europe 00 Moses the African 00 Alexander’s African Romance 00 Egyptology’s History of Europe 00 Egypt Theory 00 Chapter Two. Africa, Fulcrum of Epic Mythic Landing: The Iliad, the Argonautica, the Pharsalia, the Aeneid 00 Britain’s African Foundations: Geoffrey of Monmouth 00 The African Invention of England 00 Chapter Three. The Specter of Carthage Carthage the Symptom: Virgil, Silius Italicus, Horace, Freud 00 Carthage and African Identities: Sallust, Tertullian, Augustine 00 Augustine’s Scandalous Carthaginian Theory 00 The Dream of Scipio Africanus: Cicero and Macrobius 00 Petrarch’s Modern Africa 00 Chaucer and the African 00 Chapter Four. Ghosts of Language: Punic, Lybic, African Myth The African Tumor in Language 00 Martianus Capella: In the Palace of Myth 00 Fulgentius: Africa’s Mythic Language 00 Libyc, the Purest Language 00 The Symbolic Violence of Lost Languages: Bourdieu 00 Our Most Secret Writing: Assia Djebar 00 II. Medieval and Modern: Writing Africa Chapter Five. Allegory of Two African Cities Auerbach in Alexandria 00 Auerbach in Carthage 00 Chapter Six. The King’s African Bodies Kantorowicz’s African Body 00 Mystical Kings, European and African 00 Anthropology’s Divine Kings and Colonial Rule: Leo Frobenius and Max Gluckman 00 Chapter Seven. Kenya’s Medieval Charter The Feudal Metaphor 00 Medieval Land Law in Africa 00 How Oxford Medievalists Ruled the World 00 Independent Feudalism 00 Kenyatta and Malinowski Imagine Land 00 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Land before Time 00 Chapter Eight Fanon Outside History: Manicheism, Augustine, and Hegel Which Manicheism? 00 Manicheism and Dialectic 00 Struggling with Augustine, Then and Now 00 Chapter Nine Zimbabwe and the Fear of the Medieval The Specter of Carthage, Again 00 Picturesque Archaeology 00 Barbarian Invasions: Rhodes’s Gibbon 00 The Inconvenience of the Medieval 00 Coda The New Divine Kings Acknowledgments Notes Index
D. Vance Smith is professor of English and former director of medieval studies at Princeton University. His many books include Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews for Atlas's Bones: The African Foundations of Europe
""Encompassing Africana studies, medieval scholarship, historiography, and philosophy, this book surveys centuries of literature, history, and theology to argue for Africa’s influence on Europe’s self-conception. Hegel’s fantasy that Africa ‘is no historical place in the world’ guides Smith as he leaps from ancient civilizations, such as those of Alexandria and Carthage, to close readings of Virgil, Frantz Fanon, and Erich Auerbach. Smith’s synthesis of a wide range of sources, from antiquity to the modern era, strengthens his central claim: that “Africa was not only known to Europeans but played a profound role in how Europeans imagined both the world and themselves.” * The New Yorker * “A fascinating exploration of the place of Africa and Africans in the intellectual life of classical Europe, its later erasure, and some of the consequences in the making of the cultures of Empire.” -- Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of 'The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity ' “Smith finds that medieval European literature relies on knowledge of a real (not just a mythic) Africa and writings by Africans, and his invitation to reorient our understanding of the relationship between continents is both provocative and persuasive. His compelling challenge to the use of a false ‘medieval’ to support racial hierarchies and conquest is important for historians, literary scholars, and everyone seeking to better understand the world as it was and as it is.” -- David M. Perry, coauthor of 'The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe' “This brilliant book affirms that Africa has never been alien to Europe. European self-understanding has always depended upon its southern neighbor, and yet Europe has regarded Africa as a place perennially medieval, in need of neo-feudal law, and incapable of comprehending modernity. Smith expertly guides us through this tangled web of mutual indebtedness and pseudo-feudal mystification. A landmark achievement.” -- David Wallace, author of 'Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418' “We live in an exciting historical moment in medievalist scholarship. While two decades ago Euromedievalists hardly noticed the vast world outside Latin Christendom, an increasing number of scholarly studies today are unearthing the crucial debts that Euromedieval literature, history, and thought owe to Afro-Asian worlds. Atlas’s Bones, in particular, treating literary history, philosophy, and medievalism through nine expansive chapters, will surely be one of the new studies that will be read for a long time.” -- Geraldine Heng, author of 'The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages'
