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The 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.
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.
504 pages, Hardcover
First published February 26, 2018
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February 21, 2019
This book really shows the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. It doesn't try to be comprehensive, but even so I find it a really powerful piece of scholarship. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, I think it reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone interested in the long history of race.
Throughout, Heng treats race-making as a repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through differences that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental. Then, these categories are used to guide the differential apportioning of power. Scholars working in critical race studies have clearly demonstrated that culture predisposes notions of race. Heng's work confirms that insight by examining the era before the dominance of biological discourses. Race has always been about strategically creating a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. By exploring race in the European middle ages, Heng lays bare the skeleton of racial thinking as a sorting mechanism for managing human differences.
In Heng's hands, the tools of critical race studies make it possible to name the systems and atrocities of the Middle Ages for what they were, revealing race-making before the modern vocabulary of race coalesced. Bringing together a group of specialized archives that aren't usually in conversation, Heng allows the medieval past to testify to the pre-modern history of race-formation, racial administration, and racist exploitation and oppression.
The book begins with the violent and sweeping anti-Semitism of thirteenth century England, showing the ways that Jews became the template by which other races were measured. That launches a careful exposure of the way that minority groups were (and are) manipulated to create the sense of a national majority. A short but potent comparison to the English treatment of Irish subjects drives the analysis home.
Heng moves on to discuss the formation of race in the crucible of war, from the lies used to create the idea of a "Saracen " race and the history behind fear of "assassins," to the racial ironies created by the pressures of mercantile capitalism during war. In discussing what she calls "epidermal race," Heng examines the theological pressure on the imagining of whiteness and anti-blackness, following the question of when whiteness became central to European identity, and how ideas of epidermal surface became tied to notions of moral interiority. With these studies established, Heng closes the book with searching explorations of European consideration and treatment of Mongols, Native Americans, and Romani peoples, probing and expanding our own understanding of race by giving us a detailed and often horrifying picture of how racist thinking functioned to control populations during the middle ages.
Discussing religion as the magisterial discourse of the era, Heng shows the way that religious thinking configured the understanding of biology, politics, economics, and the rest. It was first and foremost in religious terms that medieval race-making occurred. It was in religious terms that racializing techniques were developed, though they would later be expressed through a biological framework as the dominant modes of thinking shifted away from the church. The texts in this book thus maps the long history of the mechanisms of racism that were adapted into the "scientific" racism of the modern era.
In light of the resurgence in open anti-Semitism, the historical through line of things like naming American cities after white-supremacist crusader kings, the influence of climate change on medieval travel, and the way that stories about immigrants, Muslims, and Jews to are being used to authorize violent nationalism, this book seems all the more important. It certainly will be a foundational piece of my own thinking going forward.
Throughout, Heng treats race-making as a repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through differences that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental. Then, these categories are used to guide the differential apportioning of power. Scholars working in critical race studies have clearly demonstrated that culture predisposes notions of race. Heng's work confirms that insight by examining the era before the dominance of biological discourses. Race has always been about strategically creating a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. By exploring race in the European middle ages, Heng lays bare the skeleton of racial thinking as a sorting mechanism for managing human differences.
In Heng's hands, the tools of critical race studies make it possible to name the systems and atrocities of the Middle Ages for what they were, revealing race-making before the modern vocabulary of race coalesced. Bringing together a group of specialized archives that aren't usually in conversation, Heng allows the medieval past to testify to the pre-modern history of race-formation, racial administration, and racist exploitation and oppression.
The book begins with the violent and sweeping anti-Semitism of thirteenth century England, showing the ways that Jews became the template by which other races were measured. That launches a careful exposure of the way that minority groups were (and are) manipulated to create the sense of a national majority. A short but potent comparison to the English treatment of Irish subjects drives the analysis home.
Heng moves on to discuss the formation of race in the crucible of war, from the lies used to create the idea of a "Saracen " race and the history behind fear of "assassins," to the racial ironies created by the pressures of mercantile capitalism during war. In discussing what she calls "epidermal race," Heng examines the theological pressure on the imagining of whiteness and anti-blackness, following the question of when whiteness became central to European identity, and how ideas of epidermal surface became tied to notions of moral interiority. With these studies established, Heng closes the book with searching explorations of European consideration and treatment of Mongols, Native Americans, and Romani peoples, probing and expanding our own understanding of race by giving us a detailed and often horrifying picture of how racist thinking functioned to control populations during the middle ages.
Discussing religion as the magisterial discourse of the era, Heng shows the way that religious thinking configured the understanding of biology, politics, economics, and the rest. It was first and foremost in religious terms that medieval race-making occurred. It was in religious terms that racializing techniques were developed, though they would later be expressed through a biological framework as the dominant modes of thinking shifted away from the church. The texts in this book thus maps the long history of the mechanisms of racism that were adapted into the "scientific" racism of the modern era.
In light of the resurgence in open anti-Semitism, the historical through line of things like naming American cities after white-supremacist crusader kings, the influence of climate change on medieval travel, and the way that stories about immigrants, Muslims, and Jews to are being used to authorize violent nationalism, this book seems all the more important. It certainly will be a foundational piece of my own thinking going forward.
January 3, 2024
I thought this dense book would take forever to read, but it was so fascinating, well-written, and easy to read that I flew through it. It’s incredible well researched. Highly recommend!
January 14, 2021
Short Review: I don’t think the author understands what race is, but instead presents race and racism as a transhistorical, transcultural phenomenon. The author finds literary and artistic examples of prejudice or even of just noticing difference, and uses this to demonstrate how race developed in the medieval world – all without explaining how this is racial reasoning. The author also never examines legal structures or data from records, meaning that their faulty literary reasoning also does not attempt to describe the lives of people in the real world. This book has many interesting sources and vignettes, but I fundamentally disagree with both the thesis and the methodology and therefore do not recommend it.
Long Review:
My interpretation of race is that:
1) It is prejudice based on your lineage, which is imagined to confer various positive and negative traits.
2) This prejudice is backed by normative and legal coercion.
In other words, racism = prejudice + power, with the caveat that the prejudice is specifically based on the idea your line of descent influences both your biology and your character.
This construct of prejudice against (perceived) lineage backed by normative coercion is the sort of race and racism that I think about in regards to:
- Early Modern Iberia, with laws restricting converts and the descendants of converts from holding public office and culminating in the ethnic cleansing of the Jews, Muslims, and Moriscos.
- The Spanish Empire and its convoluted casta system, its two republics (one for Spaniards, one for Indians), its assorted laws regarding the myriad of peoples.
- The United States and South Africa with their systems of de jure and de facto discrimination, with race still recorded by the government to this day.
Premodern peoples certainly expressed prejudice, constructed in-group and out-group dynamics, practiced cruelty towards the “Other”, and noticed the physical differences between people from different locales. However, I fundamentally disagree with the author because I do not think that they analyze race as a social construct, or demonstrate how race was present in medieval Europe.
This is the author’s definition of race:
“Race is one of the primary names we have – a name we retain for the strategic, epistemological, and political commitments it recognizes – that is attached to a repeating tendency, of the gravest import, to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups. Race-making thus operates as specific historical occasions in which strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices and pressures, so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. My understanding, thus, is that race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content. Given the variety of scholarship that critical race studies had amassed over the decades, my working hypothesis was hardly controversial. It stood to reason that the differences selected for essentialism would vary in the longue durée – perhaps battening on bodies, physiognomy, and somatic attributes such as skin color in one location; perhaps on social practices, religion, and culture in another; and with perhaps a multiplicity of interlocking discourses elsewhere.”
Aside from being monstrously written, the issue with this definition is that any form of difference is race for the author. It could be based on body, or on society, or religion, or culture, on any other number of attributes. This means that the author never has to prove that a previous construct was race, since according to the author any us-and-them dynamic is racial.
For instance, Chapter 2 revolves around the discrimination against Jews (primarily in England). To the author’s credit, I found this to be the most convincing chapter. The author described how not only did conversion NOT erase somebody’s Jewishness, but that their Jewishness was sometimes still perceived as affecting their born-Christian descendants. For instance, they describe how one convert Henry of Winchester, who was assigned to judge coin-clipping cases, was challenged by another member of the king’s council because of his Jewish past. They also describe how Antipope Anacletus II was denounced for his Jewishness by Bernard of Clairvaux.
And yet I find this unconvincing because it fails to be prejudice + power. The mitered heads of Europe could complain for a millennium about Jewish Christians exercising public office, and yet Jewish Christians did did. Henry of Winchester remained a judge, Antipope Anacletus II came to power with the full support of the Roman Nobles and the College of Cardinals. This is markedly different from the “limpieza de sangre” laws of early modern Spain, which banned anyone with Jewish heritage from exercising these offices.
Chapter 3 focuses on how Islam was imagined in the medieval mind. Now I want to be clear – medieval people said and did lots of horrible things regarding Muslims. They entertained all sorts of nonsense that Islam was moon-worshipping anti-Christ heresy, they committed atrocities during the Crusades, they applied a white=good dark=bad imagery to their depictions of medieval Muslims. Yet even though the author does not realize it, by their own examples they show how this was not actually race.
They describe marriage alliances: “There were clear military benefits to giving a Christian daughter to a Muslim leader in interracial, interreligious marriage: Barton tells us that in 918, “another such marriage pact” prompted Furtun b. Muhammad to “ally himself with King Sancho Garcés I of Pamplona (905–25)” against Abd al-Rahman III (Conquerors 26).”
They describe how many Muslims rulers were the descendants of European slaves “Ibn Hazm, writing in the early eleventh century, tells us that, with but one exception, all the Umayyad caliphs and their children were blond like their mothers and predominantly blue-eyed” (“Mothers” 69).”
They describe literature: "In the Middle English romance known as The King of Tars, a fair Christian princess is forced, through her kingdom’s military defeat, to become a peace offering to a Muslim sultan. Marrying the sultan and faking conversion to Islam, the princess’ sexual union to a black, “loathly” Muslim king results in the birth not of a mixed-race child, but of a monstrous lump of flesh without blood, bone, or human face – that is, until the lump is baptized, at which point it transforms into the conventional fairest child ever born. This transubstantiation also effects the baptism of his Muslim father, whose own skin color switches from “loathsome” black to all white “without taint” at baptism."
Just to demonstrate from the other side, here is the author describing the “race” of Circassian Mamluk Sultans of Egypt: “Among the earlier Bahri Mamluks there had been the occasional Caucasian or European sultan of Egypt – Al-Muzaffar Baybars was Circassian (P. M. Holt 139) and “Ladjin [1297–99] a Teutonic knight” – but in the Burji dynasty of Circassian Mamluks, “sultan Khushkadam [1461–67] was an Albanian”; there were also Greeks (Ayalon, Studies 143), and “European travelers who visited Cairo in the fifteenth century met there Mamluks of German, Hungarian, or Italian origin” (Ashtor, Economic History 282).”
Here is my issue – if Iberian Christians and Muslims are marrying each other and allying each other to the point that the Ummayad caliphs are blonde and blue, that isn’t a racial divide. Notice how in the literary description the Muslim father becomes white when he is baptized. Race is immutable and inherited, not something that you can literally wash away with a few flecks of water from a priest. If Muslims are whitened by baptism, then – as messed up as that is – that still isn’t race. The social category in both cases is NOT determined by lineage like race, but rather by performing mutable religious and cultural identities. The author is projecting the construct of race back into a society where it is clearly not present.
Chapter 4 talks about color. It is correct that medieval Europeans contrasted light and dark, with light = good and dark = evil. However, that was not racial.
“In medieval European literature, black Saracens abound from the twelfth century on – in the shape of hideous giants, troops ranged in the battlefield against Christians, and enemies whose bodies may also bear nonhuman characteristics such as horns, tusks, bristly spines, or skin as hard as iron, or who may issue animal-sounding speech (for example, Saracens who bark like dogs).”
“Nor are admired Saracen “knights” such as Fierabras/Ferumbras in the French and English romances that bear their names, or the gallant Magariz of Seville in the Chanson de Roland, ever depicted as black. In the Roman de Saladin, the esteemed Saladin is also not portrayed as black. Indeed, Saladin passes easily for a European knight when he makes a prolonged visit to France, and there champions maidens, triumphs in tournaments, distributes largesse, and becomes the secret ami of the French queen. Some of Saladin’s men, however, in the Middle English Richard Coer de Lyon, are black Saracens . . .”
My complaint in regards the use of skin color in art is that color value was not always related to a person’s complexion. Sometimes it attempted to portray appearance, but very often it was used to express moral value (white = good, black = bad). It could even have contradictory values – a Saracen could be depicted as dark to represent evil, an African could be depicted as dark to represent geography or genuine complexion, and the Virgin could be depicted as dark to represent holiness. The mere variance of color, especially with so many possible meanings, does not demonstrate that race was a meaningful construct.
Chapter 5 focuses on the Norse sagas regarding Greenland. The author describes the exploitative trades and violence that the Norse inflicted upon the Skraelings in the sagas, and then writes this:
“The only shared cultural commonality between these alien races narrated as meeting on the North American continent for the first time is barter. Yet even when trade is the basis of encounter, one side registers its triumph in securing advantageous, exploitative terms, while the other returns in force to avenge slights or hostile actions it does not deem accidental or inadvertent. From as early as the beginning of the eleventh century, the European literature of encounter and colonization shows race relations to be fraught, exploitative, and volatile, ending – seemingly inevitably – in violence and war.”
“Observations of native physiognomy are made and repeated in the Vinland sagas – such as, for instance, that Native Americans have large eyes, broad cheeks, and are short-statured – but variations abound: The man with the children is bearded, the only mention of a bearded male (eirn skeggiadr), and Hauksbók describes the natives in the first encounter as dark (suartir menn), yet the woman who visits Gudrid is described as pale”
I take many issues with this:
1. The Greenland sagas were literary works written 200 years after the events that they described, with the oldest extant copy originating in Iceland. Which is to say that the authors were geographically and temporally far removed from the events described.
2. The author is back-projecting race with no explanation. The author just assumes that the two groups are socially different races, without explaining what race or how it applies.
3. The author ignores anachronisms in the story itself. The story describes Thule houses that are sunk into the ground, rather than the homes of the Dorset culture that was actually present during the events of the saga. The author takes this in stride and never questions if the factual details are wrong.
4. The author does not attempt to resolve the contradiction that the Skraelings are depicted as both dark and pale depending on the situation.
5. The author pulls the weasel trick of swapping “Skraeling” with “Native American”. They are replacing the contemporaneous construct with a modern word, and then using that to justify how the modern construct (race) was really a thing.
This is the most egregious quote: “After all, Europeans have entered the modern era of metal; the natives of the Americas are still Stone Age primitives, situated at a moment in time that is long in Europe’s past.” What on earth do modern eras and Stone Ages have to do with a Norse saga? That is anachronistic. Especially when the author itself follows this up with:
“Moreover, in Eirik the Red’s Saga, the triumph of stone over metal is quietly demonstrated when the steel axe breaks on the rock and is deemed useless, auguring that, in some circumstances, stone can be more efficacious than metal. Most pointedly of all, Alfred Crosby reckons, though “the Norse had metal and the Skraelings did not,” Thorvald Eiriksson received “a mortal wound from a stone-tipped Skraeling arrow”
Now hold on, author! You are trying to tell me that the Norse sagas, written centuries after the fact, are channeling the future “Primitive Native” stereotype back in time even when the “primitive” stone tools are more able to beat back the Norse in the saga? The past needs to be understood on its own terms, and literary devices need to be understood in the context of their culture. Vinland is not a tapestry on which you can project social constructs from the future, which is probably why the author has not even attempted to demonstrate how this is racial reasoning.
Chapter 6 is about the Mongols. There is a lot of fascinating stuff, but the analysis of race itself is very weak.
Chapter 7 is about the Romani in Europe. This is surprisingly convincing, except that the mass-enslavement of the Romani took place from the 1450s to the 1850s, and many of the author’s sources are well past the medieval period.
Overall this is a peculiar book, because while I enjoyed the writing and found the individual stories and accounts enjoyable, I strongly disagree with the overall premise. I think her hypothesis is weak, and that the book as a whole is not rigorous scholarship.
Long Review:
My interpretation of race is that:
1) It is prejudice based on your lineage, which is imagined to confer various positive and negative traits.
2) This prejudice is backed by normative and legal coercion.
In other words, racism = prejudice + power, with the caveat that the prejudice is specifically based on the idea your line of descent influences both your biology and your character.
This construct of prejudice against (perceived) lineage backed by normative coercion is the sort of race and racism that I think about in regards to:
- Early Modern Iberia, with laws restricting converts and the descendants of converts from holding public office and culminating in the ethnic cleansing of the Jews, Muslims, and Moriscos.
- The Spanish Empire and its convoluted casta system, its two republics (one for Spaniards, one for Indians), its assorted laws regarding the myriad of peoples.
- The United States and South Africa with their systems of de jure and de facto discrimination, with race still recorded by the government to this day.
Premodern peoples certainly expressed prejudice, constructed in-group and out-group dynamics, practiced cruelty towards the “Other”, and noticed the physical differences between people from different locales. However, I fundamentally disagree with the author because I do not think that they analyze race as a social construct, or demonstrate how race was present in medieval Europe.
This is the author’s definition of race:
“Race is one of the primary names we have – a name we retain for the strategic, epistemological, and political commitments it recognizes – that is attached to a repeating tendency, of the gravest import, to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups. Race-making thus operates as specific historical occasions in which strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices and pressures, so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. My understanding, thus, is that race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content. Given the variety of scholarship that critical race studies had amassed over the decades, my working hypothesis was hardly controversial. It stood to reason that the differences selected for essentialism would vary in the longue durée – perhaps battening on bodies, physiognomy, and somatic attributes such as skin color in one location; perhaps on social practices, religion, and culture in another; and with perhaps a multiplicity of interlocking discourses elsewhere.”
Aside from being monstrously written, the issue with this definition is that any form of difference is race for the author. It could be based on body, or on society, or religion, or culture, on any other number of attributes. This means that the author never has to prove that a previous construct was race, since according to the author any us-and-them dynamic is racial.
For instance, Chapter 2 revolves around the discrimination against Jews (primarily in England). To the author’s credit, I found this to be the most convincing chapter. The author described how not only did conversion NOT erase somebody’s Jewishness, but that their Jewishness was sometimes still perceived as affecting their born-Christian descendants. For instance, they describe how one convert Henry of Winchester, who was assigned to judge coin-clipping cases, was challenged by another member of the king’s council because of his Jewish past. They also describe how Antipope Anacletus II was denounced for his Jewishness by Bernard of Clairvaux.
And yet I find this unconvincing because it fails to be prejudice + power. The mitered heads of Europe could complain for a millennium about Jewish Christians exercising public office, and yet Jewish Christians did did. Henry of Winchester remained a judge, Antipope Anacletus II came to power with the full support of the Roman Nobles and the College of Cardinals. This is markedly different from the “limpieza de sangre” laws of early modern Spain, which banned anyone with Jewish heritage from exercising these offices.
Chapter 3 focuses on how Islam was imagined in the medieval mind. Now I want to be clear – medieval people said and did lots of horrible things regarding Muslims. They entertained all sorts of nonsense that Islam was moon-worshipping anti-Christ heresy, they committed atrocities during the Crusades, they applied a white=good dark=bad imagery to their depictions of medieval Muslims. Yet even though the author does not realize it, by their own examples they show how this was not actually race.
They describe marriage alliances: “There were clear military benefits to giving a Christian daughter to a Muslim leader in interracial, interreligious marriage: Barton tells us that in 918, “another such marriage pact” prompted Furtun b. Muhammad to “ally himself with King Sancho Garcés I of Pamplona (905–25)” against Abd al-Rahman III (Conquerors 26).”
They describe how many Muslims rulers were the descendants of European slaves “Ibn Hazm, writing in the early eleventh century, tells us that, with but one exception, all the Umayyad caliphs and their children were blond like their mothers and predominantly blue-eyed” (“Mothers” 69).”
They describe literature: "In the Middle English romance known as The King of Tars, a fair Christian princess is forced, through her kingdom’s military defeat, to become a peace offering to a Muslim sultan. Marrying the sultan and faking conversion to Islam, the princess’ sexual union to a black, “loathly” Muslim king results in the birth not of a mixed-race child, but of a monstrous lump of flesh without blood, bone, or human face – that is, until the lump is baptized, at which point it transforms into the conventional fairest child ever born. This transubstantiation also effects the baptism of his Muslim father, whose own skin color switches from “loathsome” black to all white “without taint” at baptism."
Just to demonstrate from the other side, here is the author describing the “race” of Circassian Mamluk Sultans of Egypt: “Among the earlier Bahri Mamluks there had been the occasional Caucasian or European sultan of Egypt – Al-Muzaffar Baybars was Circassian (P. M. Holt 139) and “Ladjin [1297–99] a Teutonic knight” – but in the Burji dynasty of Circassian Mamluks, “sultan Khushkadam [1461–67] was an Albanian”; there were also Greeks (Ayalon, Studies 143), and “European travelers who visited Cairo in the fifteenth century met there Mamluks of German, Hungarian, or Italian origin” (Ashtor, Economic History 282).”
Here is my issue – if Iberian Christians and Muslims are marrying each other and allying each other to the point that the Ummayad caliphs are blonde and blue, that isn’t a racial divide. Notice how in the literary description the Muslim father becomes white when he is baptized. Race is immutable and inherited, not something that you can literally wash away with a few flecks of water from a priest. If Muslims are whitened by baptism, then – as messed up as that is – that still isn’t race. The social category in both cases is NOT determined by lineage like race, but rather by performing mutable religious and cultural identities. The author is projecting the construct of race back into a society where it is clearly not present.
Chapter 4 talks about color. It is correct that medieval Europeans contrasted light and dark, with light = good and dark = evil. However, that was not racial.
“In medieval European literature, black Saracens abound from the twelfth century on – in the shape of hideous giants, troops ranged in the battlefield against Christians, and enemies whose bodies may also bear nonhuman characteristics such as horns, tusks, bristly spines, or skin as hard as iron, or who may issue animal-sounding speech (for example, Saracens who bark like dogs).”
“Nor are admired Saracen “knights” such as Fierabras/Ferumbras in the French and English romances that bear their names, or the gallant Magariz of Seville in the Chanson de Roland, ever depicted as black. In the Roman de Saladin, the esteemed Saladin is also not portrayed as black. Indeed, Saladin passes easily for a European knight when he makes a prolonged visit to France, and there champions maidens, triumphs in tournaments, distributes largesse, and becomes the secret ami of the French queen. Some of Saladin’s men, however, in the Middle English Richard Coer de Lyon, are black Saracens . . .”
My complaint in regards the use of skin color in art is that color value was not always related to a person’s complexion. Sometimes it attempted to portray appearance, but very often it was used to express moral value (white = good, black = bad). It could even have contradictory values – a Saracen could be depicted as dark to represent evil, an African could be depicted as dark to represent geography or genuine complexion, and the Virgin could be depicted as dark to represent holiness. The mere variance of color, especially with so many possible meanings, does not demonstrate that race was a meaningful construct.
Chapter 5 focuses on the Norse sagas regarding Greenland. The author describes the exploitative trades and violence that the Norse inflicted upon the Skraelings in the sagas, and then writes this:
“The only shared cultural commonality between these alien races narrated as meeting on the North American continent for the first time is barter. Yet even when trade is the basis of encounter, one side registers its triumph in securing advantageous, exploitative terms, while the other returns in force to avenge slights or hostile actions it does not deem accidental or inadvertent. From as early as the beginning of the eleventh century, the European literature of encounter and colonization shows race relations to be fraught, exploitative, and volatile, ending – seemingly inevitably – in violence and war.”
“Observations of native physiognomy are made and repeated in the Vinland sagas – such as, for instance, that Native Americans have large eyes, broad cheeks, and are short-statured – but variations abound: The man with the children is bearded, the only mention of a bearded male (eirn skeggiadr), and Hauksbók describes the natives in the first encounter as dark (suartir menn), yet the woman who visits Gudrid is described as pale”
I take many issues with this:
1. The Greenland sagas were literary works written 200 years after the events that they described, with the oldest extant copy originating in Iceland. Which is to say that the authors were geographically and temporally far removed from the events described.
2. The author is back-projecting race with no explanation. The author just assumes that the two groups are socially different races, without explaining what race or how it applies.
3. The author ignores anachronisms in the story itself. The story describes Thule houses that are sunk into the ground, rather than the homes of the Dorset culture that was actually present during the events of the saga. The author takes this in stride and never questions if the factual details are wrong.
4. The author does not attempt to resolve the contradiction that the Skraelings are depicted as both dark and pale depending on the situation.
5. The author pulls the weasel trick of swapping “Skraeling” with “Native American”. They are replacing the contemporaneous construct with a modern word, and then using that to justify how the modern construct (race) was really a thing.
This is the most egregious quote: “After all, Europeans have entered the modern era of metal; the natives of the Americas are still Stone Age primitives, situated at a moment in time that is long in Europe’s past.” What on earth do modern eras and Stone Ages have to do with a Norse saga? That is anachronistic. Especially when the author itself follows this up with:
“Moreover, in Eirik the Red’s Saga, the triumph of stone over metal is quietly demonstrated when the steel axe breaks on the rock and is deemed useless, auguring that, in some circumstances, stone can be more efficacious than metal. Most pointedly of all, Alfred Crosby reckons, though “the Norse had metal and the Skraelings did not,” Thorvald Eiriksson received “a mortal wound from a stone-tipped Skraeling arrow”
Now hold on, author! You are trying to tell me that the Norse sagas, written centuries after the fact, are channeling the future “Primitive Native” stereotype back in time even when the “primitive” stone tools are more able to beat back the Norse in the saga? The past needs to be understood on its own terms, and literary devices need to be understood in the context of their culture. Vinland is not a tapestry on which you can project social constructs from the future, which is probably why the author has not even attempted to demonstrate how this is racial reasoning.
Chapter 6 is about the Mongols. There is a lot of fascinating stuff, but the analysis of race itself is very weak.
Chapter 7 is about the Romani in Europe. This is surprisingly convincing, except that the mass-enslavement of the Romani took place from the 1450s to the 1850s, and many of the author’s sources are well past the medieval period.
Overall this is a peculiar book, because while I enjoyed the writing and found the individual stories and accounts enjoyable, I strongly disagree with the overall premise. I think her hypothesis is weak, and that the book as a whole is not rigorous scholarship.
December 22, 2019
This is a fine work, but its primary approach is analysis of texts rather than social history. So, rather than examining how people were identified as being of different races in practice, and how they were treated, Heng focuses on how medieval authors portrayed and wrote about race. It’s much less clear how this mapped to the lived experiences of people identified as being of other races, or to the behavior of Europeans of various strains when interacting with them - although the chapter on the Expulsion of the Jews from England offers some of that detail in passing. It’s very much conducting an archeology of knowledge about various aspects of race in the Middle Ages, so your mileage may depend in part on whether you find that a productive way to approach history.
Heng makes a strong case that, for thinkers in the Middle Ages, race included religious and cultural difference, not just or even primarily skin color - although she spends a couple chapters discussing the (literary) significance of black skin and African features in medieval epics. The religion- and culture-based categories make sense in the historical context, but also beg the question of whether this concept of race provides any useful takeaways for thinking about modern skin-color definitions of race, and whether it makes sense to describe this as the ‘invention’ of race. As Heng notes, the medieval concept does prefigure some of the rhetoric of othering of the ‘Muslim world’ one hears today in the West.
Heng makes a strong case that, for thinkers in the Middle Ages, race included religious and cultural difference, not just or even primarily skin color - although she spends a couple chapters discussing the (literary) significance of black skin and African features in medieval epics. The religion- and culture-based categories make sense in the historical context, but also beg the question of whether this concept of race provides any useful takeaways for thinking about modern skin-color definitions of race, and whether it makes sense to describe this as the ‘invention’ of race. As Heng notes, the medieval concept does prefigure some of the rhetoric of othering of the ‘Muslim world’ one hears today in the West.
March 17, 2020
Pros: good exploration of a challenging topic, lots of examples, thoroughly examines sources
Cons: sometimes uses fictional narratives as if they were accurate historical works, didn’t properly clarify that Ethiopia does not mean the current country, repeats information
The book consists of 8 chapters: Beginnings, Inventions/Reinventions (race studies), State/Nation (Jews), War/Empire (Islamic “Saracens”), Color (Africans), World I (Native Americans as mentioned in the Vinland sagas), World II (Mongol Empire), World III (Romani). There is no conclusion but there are a lot of notes after each chapter.
The ‘Beginnings’ introductory chapter gives a brief overview of what each chapter covers. Chapter one deals with the idea that race is a modern construct and that racism as understood today didn’t exist in the Middle Ages. The author pulls that argument apart with a few quick examples of how Jews were treated in England (wearing a symbol on their clothes, accusations of blood/murder libel, the Jewish exchequer). She also quickly goes over the mappamundi that gained popularity in the 13th century, with their ‘monstrous races’ around the edges of the known European world and how the English wrote about the Irish, Welsh, and Scottish closer to home. She concludes this chapter with a quick example of race as it pertains to colour, specifically black Africans.
With the foundation set, the author moves to the heart of the matter starting with how the Jews were perceived in Medieval England specifically. The first two chapters were a struggle for me as the language was hard to parse, being very academic and dense. As the book progressed the language became more accessible and I found the rest of it easier going. The author repeated some information within chapters, which is great if you’re only reading one section but could get annoying at times when reading the whole thing.
I was impressed with the extent to which the author dissected her sources.
The author had the habit of giving very brief mention to things that should have been emphasized more. For example, in the chapter on black Africans there’s little reinforcing of the fact that “Ethiopia” referred to anywhere in Africa south of Egypt, and often included India (as goods from India traveled to Europe via ports in Africa). It would be easy to assume the term deals with the modern country. Similarly, while the same chapter uses fictional works to show the European attitudes towards black characters the author later uses other fictional narratives as if they were pure historic documents (while the Norse sagas might have a high level of accuracy, taking minutae written 200 years after the fact at face value is unwise).
There was a lot of great information imparted, and some interesting works broken down. I learned a lot from this book, especially on topics I have less background in. For example it was great that the author brought in archaeological information about Native American tribes that supported information from the Norse sagas. But there were times when had I not had the grounding on a certain topic (having read several books on ancient/medieval Ethiopia, taken a course in university on the challenges of using fictional primary sources for accurate historical information) I might have come away with the wrong conclusions.
This is a good book that discusses an important topic, but it’s not for beginners and should be read with care.
Cons: sometimes uses fictional narratives as if they were accurate historical works, didn’t properly clarify that Ethiopia does not mean the current country, repeats information
The book consists of 8 chapters: Beginnings, Inventions/Reinventions (race studies), State/Nation (Jews), War/Empire (Islamic “Saracens”), Color (Africans), World I (Native Americans as mentioned in the Vinland sagas), World II (Mongol Empire), World III (Romani). There is no conclusion but there are a lot of notes after each chapter.
The ‘Beginnings’ introductory chapter gives a brief overview of what each chapter covers. Chapter one deals with the idea that race is a modern construct and that racism as understood today didn’t exist in the Middle Ages. The author pulls that argument apart with a few quick examples of how Jews were treated in England (wearing a symbol on their clothes, accusations of blood/murder libel, the Jewish exchequer). She also quickly goes over the mappamundi that gained popularity in the 13th century, with their ‘monstrous races’ around the edges of the known European world and how the English wrote about the Irish, Welsh, and Scottish closer to home. She concludes this chapter with a quick example of race as it pertains to colour, specifically black Africans.
With the foundation set, the author moves to the heart of the matter starting with how the Jews were perceived in Medieval England specifically. The first two chapters were a struggle for me as the language was hard to parse, being very academic and dense. As the book progressed the language became more accessible and I found the rest of it easier going. The author repeated some information within chapters, which is great if you’re only reading one section but could get annoying at times when reading the whole thing.
I was impressed with the extent to which the author dissected her sources.
The author had the habit of giving very brief mention to things that should have been emphasized more. For example, in the chapter on black Africans there’s little reinforcing of the fact that “Ethiopia” referred to anywhere in Africa south of Egypt, and often included India (as goods from India traveled to Europe via ports in Africa). It would be easy to assume the term deals with the modern country. Similarly, while the same chapter uses fictional works to show the European attitudes towards black characters the author later uses other fictional narratives as if they were pure historic documents (while the Norse sagas might have a high level of accuracy, taking minutae written 200 years after the fact at face value is unwise).
There was a lot of great information imparted, and some interesting works broken down. I learned a lot from this book, especially on topics I have less background in. For example it was great that the author brought in archaeological information about Native American tribes that supported information from the Norse sagas. But there were times when had I not had the grounding on a certain topic (having read several books on ancient/medieval Ethiopia, taken a course in university on the challenges of using fictional primary sources for accurate historical information) I might have come away with the wrong conclusions.
This is a good book that discusses an important topic, but it’s not for beginners and should be read with care.
February 23, 2023
Had a lot of interesting facts, but to my mind this book ultimately functions as a proof by contradiction. Heng assumes race as a basic organizing fact of the Middle Ages and it leads her to some very confusing places. In the one chapter I had background knowledge on – the Norse settlement in Vinland – I spotted several obvious errors, which makes me worried about what I didn't see. Her definition of race is so loose as to be almost useless – yes, granted, race is a loose concept, and yet I'm pretty sure being gay isn't part of it. Heng's definition of race does not successfully exclude sexuality, gender, or ability, which is why I am going to stand by the idea that racial ideology requires belief in inherited biological components.
To take the book chapter by chapter:
- Ch 1: Inventions/Reinventions: Bit of a grab-bag. Don't remember what was in this.
- Ch 2: State/Nation: Details the history of Jews in England. This is one of the stronger chapters; Heng is clearly knowledgeable here and the time limits on either side force the argument to be tightly confined. I don't think she ever really proves that antisemitism was a racial rather than a religious matter in medieval England. (For a bit of background: people debate the extent to which recognizable racial ideology was part of medieval antisemitism. Two important questions to understand this: Can they convert? Are the children of converts fully accepted? As far as I can tell, the answer to both these questions in the Middle Ages was sometimes "yes", but by the Inquisition the answer - in Spain - becomes a definite "no". Hence the racial component - Judaism is a matter of blood, not practices.) It was interesting to learn about this history – I didn't know how closely associated the Jewish community was with the king. They came to England with William the Conqueror and were officially under the king's protection/ownership (because they produced tax revenue).
- Ch 3: Figures in the International Contest: The Islamic 'Saracen': Christians dehumanized their Islamic enemies during the Crusades. Sure. Heng's definition of race includes the imposition of hierarchy, which is ... not addressed here, but sure. The argument that the Mamluks (the ruling class of the Mamluk Sultanate) are their own race is also confusing.
- Ch 4: Oh God. It's Vinland. Heng seems to be arguing that the Norse approached Native Americans with the same racist framework as Columbus, but ... how? How much could 10th century Vikings and 15th century Italians possibly have in common? The Church? Was there an official psalter on colonialism? It's also contradictory because Heng points to the Crusades as a moment when Europeans start to develop racial consciousness but the Crusades were after Vinland! Time only goes in one direction! Also, she does not seem to be aware of the multiple sides of some hotly debated academic ideas. She accepts Jared Diamond-esque geographical determinism and the population estimate of ~100 million in the Americas at first contact as facts and oh boy, are there people who disagree with that. Also, smallpox isn't a bacterial epidemic.
- Ch 5: The Mongols. Western Europeans are confused by them and think they're barbaric. They don't like Nestorian Christians, either, because they're heretics. All this is interesting, but I still don't think it's race. Things start to get more interesting with the more literary accounts (eg. Marco Polo's) that exoticize the East, but the interesting thing here would be to engaged with the concept of Orientalism, which doesn't really happen.
- Ch 6: Romani. Also one of the stronger chapters, in that points out the exclusion and enslavement of an ethnic group, but somewhat weakened by the fact that it's mostly about Eastern Europe not in the Middle Ages (she cites a lot of sources from the 17th and 18th centuries).
This has gone on for a very long time, so to some up: lots of things to learn! But Heng never convinces me that she's using an appropriate framework.
To take the book chapter by chapter:
- Ch 1: Inventions/Reinventions: Bit of a grab-bag. Don't remember what was in this.
- Ch 2: State/Nation: Details the history of Jews in England. This is one of the stronger chapters; Heng is clearly knowledgeable here and the time limits on either side force the argument to be tightly confined. I don't think she ever really proves that antisemitism was a racial rather than a religious matter in medieval England. (For a bit of background: people debate the extent to which recognizable racial ideology was part of medieval antisemitism. Two important questions to understand this: Can they convert? Are the children of converts fully accepted? As far as I can tell, the answer to both these questions in the Middle Ages was sometimes "yes", but by the Inquisition the answer - in Spain - becomes a definite "no". Hence the racial component - Judaism is a matter of blood, not practices.) It was interesting to learn about this history – I didn't know how closely associated the Jewish community was with the king. They came to England with William the Conqueror and were officially under the king's protection/ownership (because they produced tax revenue).
- Ch 3: Figures in the International Contest: The Islamic 'Saracen': Christians dehumanized their Islamic enemies during the Crusades. Sure. Heng's definition of race includes the imposition of hierarchy, which is ... not addressed here, but sure. The argument that the Mamluks (the ruling class of the Mamluk Sultanate) are their own race is also confusing.
- Ch 4: Oh God. It's Vinland. Heng seems to be arguing that the Norse approached Native Americans with the same racist framework as Columbus, but ... how? How much could 10th century Vikings and 15th century Italians possibly have in common? The Church? Was there an official psalter on colonialism? It's also contradictory because Heng points to the Crusades as a moment when Europeans start to develop racial consciousness but the Crusades were after Vinland! Time only goes in one direction! Also, she does not seem to be aware of the multiple sides of some hotly debated academic ideas. She accepts Jared Diamond-esque geographical determinism and the population estimate of ~100 million in the Americas at first contact as facts and oh boy, are there people who disagree with that. Also, smallpox isn't a bacterial epidemic.
- Ch 5: The Mongols. Western Europeans are confused by them and think they're barbaric. They don't like Nestorian Christians, either, because they're heretics. All this is interesting, but I still don't think it's race. Things start to get more interesting with the more literary accounts (eg. Marco Polo's) that exoticize the East, but the interesting thing here would be to engaged with the concept of Orientalism, which doesn't really happen.
- Ch 6: Romani. Also one of the stronger chapters, in that points out the exclusion and enslavement of an ethnic group, but somewhat weakened by the fact that it's mostly about Eastern Europe not in the Middle Ages (she cites a lot of sources from the 17th and 18th centuries).
This has gone on for a very long time, so to some up: lots of things to learn! But Heng never convinces me that she's using an appropriate framework.
March 21, 2024
The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages attempts to relocate the more conventional Early-modern or nineteenth-century genises of race in the 12th and 13th centuries. The foundation of Heng’s thesis - that race is an essentializing paradigm by which human hierarchies are strategically articulated - is persuasive, fairly well supported, and much needed among scholarship that seems to preclude the possibility of modern racisms from the Middle Ages.
Heng is a comparative lit scholar, basing her analysis almost entirely on literary sources. She quotes historians, theorists, and other literary scholars at often excessive length, relying frequently on only a few authorities for each section of her work. Its scope therefore seems restricted, lacking critical nuance and historical context in a number of instances. Similarly, the book does not contain a conclusion, instead being comprised of case studies after an introduction that essentially presents her claim in full. The 400 something pages of this dense monograph thus feel bloated and all too often unnecessary. Judging solely Heng’s argument, however, I am impressed and certainly think she has adequately demonstrated the need to investigate the concept of race in periods antedating its traditional inception.
Heng is a comparative lit scholar, basing her analysis almost entirely on literary sources. She quotes historians, theorists, and other literary scholars at often excessive length, relying frequently on only a few authorities for each section of her work. Its scope therefore seems restricted, lacking critical nuance and historical context in a number of instances. Similarly, the book does not contain a conclusion, instead being comprised of case studies after an introduction that essentially presents her claim in full. The 400 something pages of this dense monograph thus feel bloated and all too often unnecessary. Judging solely Heng’s argument, however, I am impressed and certainly think she has adequately demonstrated the need to investigate the concept of race in periods antedating its traditional inception.
July 21, 2020
* 3.5 / 5
February 21, 2023
Closer to 2.75.
I'm of two minds about this! Because on one hand, this is a topic that really, REALLY needs exploration and Heng's book is really important in actually opening up the conversation beyond "well, race is a thing invented during the Age of Exploration, """medieval people""" (by this people almost always mean Latin Christian Europeans) were just super antisemitic and islamophobic"!
But it's still very much a first attempt, you know? Heng's approach of looking at literary sources rather than political or legal ones isn't even bad, but it does hurt your concept when you write "the definitive book on race in the Middle Ages" and the inside is like "well in story a x and y happens, and in story b y happens too, but so does z"... along with how dense some of the chapters were (often with information that was relevant to the source Heng was analyzing, but not race-making itself), this made the book tedious to read. It's definitely a workable jumping off point as well as a good place to mine for sources if you're interested in "x people group in Medieval European literature," but I can't say I wasn't sometimes frustrated with the needlessly wide scope of the analysis.
Speaking of scope: I get that the book is about the European Middle Ages, but there's so much more race-related stuff going on in the Medieval World that would have strengthened the argument, I feel like. Obviously it's good to limit your scholarship to a time and place but if your scope is already going to be wide enough to include 10th century Norse-Indigenous interactions and 14th century Italian-Mongolian interactions under the same umbrella of "European"... well, the only thing connecting those two European groups is the fact that they're both white in modern, American constructions of race. Idk man. Excited for the class discussion.
I'm of two minds about this! Because on one hand, this is a topic that really, REALLY needs exploration and Heng's book is really important in actually opening up the conversation beyond "well, race is a thing invented during the Age of Exploration, """medieval people""" (by this people almost always mean Latin Christian Europeans) were just super antisemitic and islamophobic"!
But it's still very much a first attempt, you know? Heng's approach of looking at literary sources rather than political or legal ones isn't even bad, but it does hurt your concept when you write "the definitive book on race in the Middle Ages" and the inside is like "well in story a x and y happens, and in story b y happens too, but so does z"... along with how dense some of the chapters were (often with information that was relevant to the source Heng was analyzing, but not race-making itself), this made the book tedious to read. It's definitely a workable jumping off point as well as a good place to mine for sources if you're interested in "x people group in Medieval European literature," but I can't say I wasn't sometimes frustrated with the needlessly wide scope of the analysis.
Speaking of scope: I get that the book is about the European Middle Ages, but there's so much more race-related stuff going on in the Medieval World that would have strengthened the argument, I feel like. Obviously it's good to limit your scholarship to a time and place but if your scope is already going to be wide enough to include 10th century Norse-Indigenous interactions and 14th century Italian-Mongolian interactions under the same umbrella of "European"... well, the only thing connecting those two European groups is the fact that they're both white in modern, American constructions of race. Idk man. Excited for the class discussion.
November 21, 2021
Verbose and grandiose. This is sadly a very disappointing book; it starts with the author’s self-serving positioning, where she boldly decides that, as a Singaporean American academic, she gets to speak on behalf of medieval Jews, Muslims, Romani and others. She would have been better establishing her right to speak on scholarly grounds. The scholarship of the book is very poor and markedly ungenerous towards excellent earlier works like those by Metlitzki, Khanmohamadi, Chism, Kinoshita, Lavezzo, Ingham, Ramey, Phillips. This is because Heng is invested in trumpeting how her work is “groundbreaking” when, in fact, this is methodologically and evidentially a conservative book. The argument is that race emerges as a recognisable category in “medieval Europe”, although the book is largely based on unusual English sources. She tries to cover too much ground and in doing so falls back on ignorant stereotypes and historical platitudes. This book should have been rethought in less grandiose terms and then it might have been more successful as an intervention. Ultimately, however, the author shows that she does not know what she does not know.
October 10, 2020
9/4/2020: Since I stand accused of being an unfair reader for having marked this book with one star without explaining myself on this platform, I include here my published review of the book: https://www.academia.edu/44018118/The...
March 12, 2023
Heng’s definition of “race” is incredibly vague and could encompass other aspects of identity such as gender, sexual orientation, and religion.
I do however applaud her on finding a new innovative way of examining prejudice in history, specifically the Middle Ages.
I would have rated it 4/5, however I found the chapter on the Icelandic Sagas incredibly infuriating. Did Heng read ALL of the sagas? Likely not. S.J. Peirce wrote a very critical review on this work, in which she said Heng’s writing was “magpie like” (ie. Heng picks and chooses what supports her arguments) and that I have to agree. Heng conflated magic in the Icelandic sagas with some sort of exoticization of indigenous peoples in Greenland which is. Just. Wrong. In the sagas there are women with the power to curse, and in one of them, a Hjalti got cursed with a dick so large he could no longer pleasure his wife. I mean… it was memorable use of magic, which Heng didn’t even bring up.
Lastly I have a major issue with the language she used in the chapter concerning the enslavement of the Romani peoples. Heng wrote that they “fell into slavery” like it was some sort of accident, completely removing the oppressor from the statement. In fact, there were plenty of times Heng got too comfortable adopting the language of the oppressor in an effort to show the reader where her primary source is coming from. It made me. Just a bit uncomfy.
I do however applaud her on finding a new innovative way of examining prejudice in history, specifically the Middle Ages.
I would have rated it 4/5, however I found the chapter on the Icelandic Sagas incredibly infuriating. Did Heng read ALL of the sagas? Likely not. S.J. Peirce wrote a very critical review on this work, in which she said Heng’s writing was “magpie like” (ie. Heng picks and chooses what supports her arguments) and that I have to agree. Heng conflated magic in the Icelandic sagas with some sort of exoticization of indigenous peoples in Greenland which is. Just. Wrong. In the sagas there are women with the power to curse, and in one of them, a Hjalti got cursed with a dick so large he could no longer pleasure his wife. I mean… it was memorable use of magic, which Heng didn’t even bring up.
Lastly I have a major issue with the language she used in the chapter concerning the enslavement of the Romani peoples. Heng wrote that they “fell into slavery” like it was some sort of accident, completely removing the oppressor from the statement. In fact, there were plenty of times Heng got too comfortable adopting the language of the oppressor in an effort to show the reader where her primary source is coming from. It made me. Just a bit uncomfy.
November 29, 2020
Ooof. Big. Wide-ranging. Incredibly useful. I'm aware of the trenchant critique esp of her treatment of Islam, but as that hinges on 'too reliant on the literary imaginary' it's not a huge barrier for me. I *am* rather more skeptical of the last two chapters, on the Mongols and the Romani respectively - the former, for about half of it, doesn't seem to as carefully distinguish between 'to European observers Mongols SEEMED animalistic because of...' and giving an emotive paraphrase of 'they were x and y'... Heng is much more careful with this re: Islam, and, hmm. Ditto the Romani chapter: I don't know enough to critique the historical claims but it seemed very obvious to me that a lot of the authoritative secondary sources she quotes are deeply prejudiced, and she doesn't really get into that (eg: why assume that the Romani devised the story about wandering in exile due to ancestors having abandoned Christianity as a _cunning plot_, at all? Given many Romani are *now* usually Catholic, could not the same influences identified as giving them the info on Christianity needed to devise such a story actually have resulted in conversions and the creation of such a narrative within some groups?).
July 20, 2019
Heng covers a lot of ground in this dense (both intellectually and physically. You could kill someone with this thing) work. The chapters were written to be self-containing, so no need to read it cover-to-cover, but if you do, you're in for a ride. She's clear where research is in its infancy (the chapter on the Roma, for instance) and covers what she can in those cases. I did get the idea she was preaching to the choir a little bit. Medievalists working in this area are familiar with, if not specifics, the broad strokes of her argument. Folks who aren't working in this area would be a great audience.
October 14, 2024
hated this so much want to write her an email telling her how much i disagree but i give it an extra star bc i bought it on amazon for $50 and then returned it bc i got an online version for free and then amazon refunded me and i got to keep the book so now i have her horrible argument abt medieval race forever
July 13, 2025
interesting theory and well researched. the information gained was great, but horribly written. sentence structure needlessly complex. Louis of footnotes but still put citations in parenthesis making it even harder to read.
March 18, 2021
Academic and incredibly researched. I believe this topic could benefit from a more accessible and psycho-social analysis. Fascinating.
Read
November 15, 2024Dnf. Skimmed first three chapters and got what I wanted for now. May return.
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