Hello, all! As I said in the title, this one line has me puzzled because it's perhaps the one line of the poem that I can't make sense of. I initially figured it might be based on race or skin color but I'm unsure if the terms white and black were used in this manner in the 13th century. Is that what this poem is referring to, or do white and black mean something different in this context?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_taberna_quando_sumus The text of the poem, for those who would like to read it for reference
We have lots of evidence of a number of words used to describe skin color in Roman texts dating from around the first centuries AD. Roman authors used many words to talk about skin color in their writings, including niger, albus, fuscus, ater, candidus.
In Ovid's Amores, published in 16 BC, he describes Cypassis as fusca Cypassi. In the Phillipics, a series of speeches written by Cicero around 43 BC, Cicero says "vide quam te amarit is qui albus aterne fuerit ignoras" (roughly this passage says "See how much that man loved you? He didn't even know if you were white or black, but he passed over his own brother to make you his heir, even though he had never seen you.") Text scratched onto the walls of Pompeii, some old school graffiti, reads "Candida me docuit nigras / odisse puellas odero si potero sed non invitus / amabo / scipsit Venus fisica Pompeiana." (again, super roughly, "a fair-skinned girl taught me to hate bright black girls. I will hate them if I can, but boy I wouldn't mind loving them.")
I don't think using "bibit albus, bibit niger" to describe skin color would have been uncommon or unexpected.
Imagining that, though, as something that would match up to our modern notions of "race"" would probably be a mistake! For instance...the term "albus" may have been relative for a population of Mediterraneans...who were definitely not Nordic blonde/pale people. There is a lot of scholarship around how ideas of prejudice and racial identity were evolving in the Middle Ages, which includes understanding the interactions between Romans, Egyptians, and Ethiopians and how those parts of the world were increasingly being contrasted with a white, Christian Europe.
Some interesting reading:
Black Africans in Renaissance Europe edited by: Thomas F. Earle, Kate J. P. LoweCambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005,
The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine Heng
Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks by Frank M. Snowden