The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages

This book challenges the common belief that race and racisms are phenomena that began only in the modern era.

Geraldine Heng (Author)

9781108435093, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 November 2019

434 pages, 10 b/w illus.
25.3 x 17.9 x 2.4 cm, 1.06 kg

'If anyone still doubts the conceptual validity of religious race, this is the book to convince them. At every turn, readers will be confronted with fascinating evidence - some of it familiar, some startlingly new, illumining surveys of scholarly debates, and rich interpretive work … [The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages] will have a significant impact on scholarly paradigms in medieval studies and critical race studies alike for a long time to come.' Cord J. Whitaker, Critical Inquiry

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Geraldine Heng questions the common assumption that the concepts of race and racisms only began in the modern era. Examining Europe's encounters with Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani ('Gypsies'), from the 12th through 15th centuries, she shows how racial thinking, racial law, racial practices, and racial phenomena existed in medieval Europe before a recognizable vocabulary of race emerged in the West. Analysing sources in a variety of media, including stories, maps, statuary, illustrations, architectural features, history, saints' lives, religious commentary, laws, political and social institutions, and literature, she argues that religion - so much in play again today - enabled the positing of fundamental differences among humans that created strategic essentialisms to mark off human groups and populations for racialized treatment. Her ground-breaking study also shows how race figured in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe in this time.

1. Inventions/Reinventions
2. State/Nation
3. War/Empire
4. Color
5. World I
6. World II
7. World III.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD]