The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II

Locations of Medieval Race1

Bibliographic Data

ID8046836
AuthorsGeraldine Heng (0000-0002-4411-1189, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume8
Issue5
Pages275-293
Publication date2011-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLiterature Compass (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1741-4113 • E-ISSN: 1741-4113
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00795.x
OpenAlexW2138192823
LanguageEN
Citations received23
References cited25

‘The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages’– a two‐part article – questions the widely held belief in canonical race theory that ‘race’ is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries – chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features – the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race. One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion – so much in play again today – enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time. Part I –‘Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages’– surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide. Part II –‘Locations of Medieval Race’– identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Epistemology · Hermeneutics · Identity (music) · Literature · Middle Ages · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Racial formation theory · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics) · Anthropology · Classics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity