The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages

'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