Taking Revenge on God’s Black Punisher: Blackness and Retribution in Diu Crône ’s Story World

In one episode of the early thirteenth-century romance Diu Crône , the presence of a dark-skinned “Moor” is featured quite literally as a blessing and a curse. Yet by simultaneously including two opposed perspectives on this God-sent punisher, the text fixates on his deeds and on his place in the story world, dispensing with any interpretation of his blackness, positive or negative. Diu Crône circumvents the period’s views of skin colour as an indicator of a person’s character and the literary stereotypes associated with processes of race-making, all the while showing some awareness of their existence in other passages. The text’s neutral stance towards this ambivalent figure’s blackness, and its refusal to formulate a fixed notion of dark skin as referring to anything other than itself, are therefore reminders that literature is not bound by overarching ideologies.