Noah's Raven, Noah's Son: The Metamorphoses of Blackness in Early Modern Readings of Genesis 8‐9

Over the past half‐century, scholars have offered various theories to explain when and how an aetiology for black skin became part of the reception history of the so‐called Curse of Ham in Genesis 9—a text that does not include any reference to skin colour. This essay considers one potential piece of this complex history of interpretation in the relationship between the transgressions and transformations of Noah's son and Noah's raven in late medieval and early modern biblical interpretation. It also identifies suggestive points of confluence between the reception history of these two stories and that of the raven's transfiguration in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Building on previous reception histories of Ham's curse, this paper explores the symbolic traffic between Noah's raven, Noah's son and the bird cursed by a God in the Metamorphoses to advance an account of how early modern Christian interpreters may have merged an aetiology of natural slavery and an aetiology of blackness into a single story of divine punishment and permanent transfiguration.