Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages

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.

'For more than two decades scholars have been hotly debating the appropriateness of the term 'race' and its derivatives in the analysis of medieval European societies. Now, with this book, Geraldine Heng provides the most comprehensive and persuasive validation of race as a way into the medieval cultural 'imaginary'. Race, she acknowledges, was a concept that varied from place to place and changed in multiple ways over time. It was complexly intertwined with religious ideas, and although medieval notions of race shared content with some modern somatic notions (allowing for comparability), its specifically medieval distinctiveness owes much to the various faith communities within which it attained significance. This is not a book about blaming the Middle Ages or the West for racism; it is an erudite plea to pursue the study of racialisms, for truth's sake. No one interested in the vexing and tragic history of racial thought and the practices that it informed can afford to ignore this magisterial intervention into the scholarly conversation.' William Chester Jordan, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Princeton University, New Jersey, '[One cannot overstate the importance of The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages.] Writing with astounding force and clarity, Heng accomplishes what has eluded literary scholars and historians: a breakthrough demonstration of how religion, as both sociocultural and biopolitical technology, produced 'race'. Heng shows that race is a name for an apparatus that structures and deploys human differences across the globe and time. Race would thus be the only adequate name for the process of difference-making. Heng renews the impetus for the global study of the Middle Ages and, in racial terms, shows what we have always known: that modernity is merely the effect of the Middle Ages.' Zrinka Stahuljak, University of California, Los Angeles, '… The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, provides a series of … studies that demonstrate the flexibility of this central thesis, with chapters functioning as densely textured sketches that articulate the mechanisms of racial logic at several geographically and culturally disparate local sites. … The Invention of Race is intended for a broad audience, whose expertise in the field of medieval studies is not assumed: for most of the book, this results in clear prose and translated source material.' Shoshana Adler, EuropeNow, 'In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge), Geraldine Heng shows repeated cases which would unambiguously be classified as racially motivated hate crimes today, grounded in religion. This book is field-defining and vital in the current climate.' Kate Wiles, History Today, '… Heng does an impressive job weaving together various strands of scholarly conversation from a range of academic disciplines, in order to provide a multidimensional picture of how the concept of 'race' defined and redefined social realities in a period that has been habitually excluded from histories of racial categorization. While The Invention of Race may not seek to provide all the answers, it is a clarion call to continue to theorize and retheorize race in the premodern world.' Shyama Rajendran, Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Geraldine Heng is Perceval Fellow and Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (2012), and England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West (Cambridge, 2018). Originally from Singapore, Heng has held the Winton Chair (for 'paradigm-shifting scholarship') at the University of Minnesota. She has received a number of fellowships and grants, and currently holds an ACLS fellowship to begin a new book, Early Globalities: The Interconnected World, 500-1500 CE. Heng is also Founder and Director of the Global Middle Ages Project: www.globalmiddleages.org.