D. Vance Smith, "Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

May 2, 2026

D. Vance Smith, Princeton medievalist and author, reclaims Africa as the source of key European cultural texts. He traces African influence on Virgil, Chaucer, and Petrarch. He explores how medieval studies and colonial institutions erased African literacies and reshaped race, law, and museum displays. The conversation moves from medieval links to modern consequences.

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INSIGHT

Europe’s Common Unconscious Is African

Smith reframes Europe’s cultural roots as deeply indebted to Africa rather than sui generis, calling Africa a common unconscious of Europe.
He avoids Jameson-style historicism to show Africa’s influence is visible in plain sight across European texts and institutions.

INSIGHT

Medieval Training Shaped Colonial Administration

Many colonial administrators were trained as medievalists and applied medieval English legal frameworks to classify African societies.
Concepts like 'tribe' and racialized governance came from medieval categories and shaped catastrophic colonial policies like in Rwanda.

INSIGHT

Egypt Was Made An Exception To Erase African Roots

Europeans treated Egypt as an exception to Africa to protect a narrative that civilization is essentially European-rooted.
Egyptology (e.g., Flinders Petrie) racialized Egyptian antiquity, feeding into eugenicists like Francis Galton and later racist science.

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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: The African Foundations of Europe (U Chicago Press, 2025), 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.

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.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

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