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Teaching Essay | Race in the European Middle Ages
Page published by Geraldine Heng on Thursday, February 8, 2018
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This essay is the third in the Book Channel's Teaching Essays series, which aims to help teachers and
instructors incorporate the latest research into their classroom curricula. It is also a response to
ongoing debates within medieval scholarship about race and diversity debates which have been
covered extensively by outlets from Salon to the Chronicle of Higher Education (note: behind a
paywall). Heng's essay provides practical guidance for educators seeking to integrate discussions of
racial and religious diversity in their courses on the European Middle Ages, as well as a bibliography
of recommended readings. Readers will also find links to online versions of many of the
recommended primary sources throughout the essay. Geraldine Heng is the Perceval Associate
Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also teaches in Middle Eastern
Studies and Women's Studies. She is the founder and director of the Global Middle Ages Project (G-
MAP). Currently, Dr. Heng holds an ACLS fellowship to begin work on her fourth book, Early
Globalities: The Interconnected World, 500-1500 CE. Her newest book, The Invention of Race in the
European Middle Ages, comes out from Cambridge University Press on March 8, 2018. Assistant
Editor Adrienne Tyrey
When I was a graduate student, I was taught (believe it or not) that women hardly featured or
mattered in European medieval literature: this was a literature written by men, about men, and for
men.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and we see women everywhere in medieval literature and history:
we see that they mattered, a lot. And not just women: college courses today highlight medieval
sexuality and sexual identity; the politics of physical disability and disease; ecology and the
environment; Jews, Muslims, and colonized peoples; peasants and social class an ever-expanding
list.
Citation: Geraldine Heng. Teaching Essay | Race in the European Middle Ages. The H-Net Book Channel. 02-26-2018.
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Healing of the Gadarene demoniacs. Psalter, folio 3v (detail), from Canterbury, c. 1200.
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, reproduced from The Invention of Race in the European
Middle Ages.
What about race in the Middle Ages? For generations, race studies taught us that race was a concept
with meaning only for the modern era. Originally defined in biological terms, race was thought to be
determined by skin color, physiognomy, and genetic inheritance. The more astute scholars, however,
soon realized that race could also be a matter of cultural classification, as Ann Stoler s 1977 study of
the colonial Dutch East Indies makes plain:
Race could never be a matter of physiology alone. Cultural competency in Dutch
customs, a sense of belonging in a Dutch cultural milieu, disaffiliation with things
Javanese, domestic arrangements, parenting styles, and moral environment were
crucial to defining who was to be considered European. [1]
Yet even after we saw that people could be racialized through cultural and social criteria, the
European Middle Ages was still seen as outside the history of race (I speak only of the European
Middle Ages since I am a euromedievalist it is up to others to discuss race in Islamic, Jewish, Asian,
African, and American premodernities).
Citation: Geraldine Heng. Teaching Essay | Race in the European Middle Ages. The H-Net Book Channel. 02-26-2018.
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My book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (appearing March 8, 2018), suggests
that such thinking has been overly influenced by the era of scientific racism (in the so-called Age of
Enlightenment) when science was the magisterial discourse of racial classification.
But today, in news media and public life, we see how religion can also function to classify people in
absolute and fundamental ways Muslims, who hail from a diversity of ethno-races and national
origins, have been talked about as if their religion somehow identified them as one homogenous
people.
Invention of Race thus puts forward an understanding of race more apposite to our time, as well as
medieval time:
Race is one of the primary names we have a name we retain for the 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
identified as absolute and fundamental, so as to distribute positions and powers
differentially to human groups. In race-making, strategic essentialisms are posited and
assigned through a variety of practices: This suggests that race is a structural
relationship for the management of human differences, rather than a substantive
content. [2]
Citation: Geraldine Heng. Teaching Essay | Race in the European Middle Ages. The H-Net Book Channel. 02-26-2018.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/109065/pages/1348052/teaching-essay-race-european-middle-ages
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English Jew wearing the Jewish badge on his chest
in the form of the tablets of the Old Testament. BL
Cotton MS Nero, D2, fol.180, thirteenth century.
British Library, UK, reproduced from The Invention
of Race in the European Middle Ages.
Rather than oppose premodern prejudice to modern racisms, we can then see the vilification of
medieval Jews who were fantasized as possessing a fetid stench, a male menses, subhuman and
bestial qualities, and a congenital need to ingest the blood of Christian children whom they tortured
and crucified to death as more than mere prejudice. We can acknowledge that their mob
exterminations, legalized murder by the state on the basis of community rumors and lies, tagging
with identifying badges, and herding into specified towns in England were racial acts, which today we
could possibly call hate crimes, of a sanctioned and legalized kind.
In this way, we would bear witness to the full meaning of acts and events in the medieval past, and
understand that racial thinking, racial practices, and racial phenomena can occur before there is a
vocabulary to name them for what they are.
How, then, would we teach medieval race?
In art history, scholars have identified a multitude of images, objects, and architectural features
that can be productively studied by students in classes on race. Volume 2 Part 1 of The Image of the
Black in Western Art: From the Early Christian Era to the Age of Discovery by Jean Devisse
(recently reissued with a new introduction by Paul H. D. Kaplan) offers an extraordinary array of
images for investigation from grim black African executioners of John the Baptist and black African
torturers of Christ to the enigmatic Black St. Maurice, a martyr who after a thousand years was
suddenly depicted as a black African at Magdeburg Cathedral in Germany, where he was (and still is)
the patron saint.
Citation: Geraldine Heng. Teaching Essay | Race in the European Middle Ages. The H-Net Book Channel. 02-26-2018.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/109065/pages/1348052/teaching-essay-race-european-middle-ages
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Face (detail) of the statue of the Black St Maurice
of Magdeburg. Magdeburg Cathedral, Germany,
1220-1250. The Menil Foundation, Houston; Hickey
and Robertson, Houston; and Harvard University s
Image of the Black Project, reproduced from The
Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages.
Paul Kaplan s The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art gives us a point of entry for thinking about
how blackness and Africa serve the story of Christianity, while Madeline Caviness tells the other side
of the story how whiteness ascended to primacy in defining Christian European identity from the
mid-thirteenth century on. By focusing not on black but on white as the key determinant of identity,
Caviness s article, From the Self-Invention of the Whiteman in the Thirteenth Century to The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly, rounds out how to think about color as a medieval racial project.
Debra Higgs Strickland s Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art and Ruth
Mellinkoff s Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages show us
the implications of the iconography that visualized Jews, Muslims, Mongols, and monstrous humans
for medieval audiences. Strickland reminds us that the human freaks depicted in art, cartography,
and literature often celebrated as wondrous and marvelous should not teach us that medieval
pleasure is pleasure of a simply and wholly innocent kind. The Monstrous Races tradition, she
urges, provided the ideological infrastructure for understanding other types of monsters , namely
Ethiopians, Jews, Muslims, and Mongols (42). This is a lesson to heed and pass on in how to think
Citation: Geraldine Heng. Teaching Essay | Race in the European Middle Ages. The H-Net Book Channel. 02-26-2018.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/109065/pages/1348052/teaching-essay-race-european-middle-ages
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about medieval race.
In literature, courses examining anti-black, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic stories are growing in
number. My first book, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy,
drew attention to texts little-noticed a decade and a half ago, like the Middle English romances
Richard Coer de Lyon and The King of Tars. Reading the former, students are riveted by how the
crusader King Richard, an aggressive imperialist, becomes a lip-smacking cannibal through a joke
that turns the Saracen Muslim enemy black-skinned, with white, grinning teeth into delicious
food, stewed in a dish that looks like the first iteration of the colonial mishmash later known as curry.
This romance can be taught as early colonial literature that gleefully propagandizes on race and
religion.
Human monstrosities in southern Africa. Hereford world map, Hereford Cathedral,
thirteenth century. The Dean and Chapter of Hereford and the Hereford Mappa Mundi
Trust, UK, reproduced from The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages.
The King of Tars, which teaches how religion is so supreme that it can reconfigure race, can also be
Citation: Geraldine Heng. Teaching Essay | Race in the European Middle Ages. The H-Net Book Channel. 02-26-2018.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/109065/pages/1348052/teaching-essay-race-european-middle-ages
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taught in religious studies classes. Here, a black, loathly Muslim king turns spotless white at his
baptism, and a lump of flesh the fetal issue of this black king and a lily-white Christian
princess transforms into the fairest child ever born, again at baptism. Medieval literature teaches
that Christian sacraments are powerful race-makers.
There s more. Wolfram von Eschenbach s Parzival has a fair-skinned Arthurian knight from Christian
Europe venture into a heathen African country of black folk, where he sires a piebald son on a black
African queen before abandoning her. This parti-colored son, Feirefiz, later marries the radiantly fair
Grail maiden, and the polychromatic nuptial pair move to India, where they become the birth parents
of Prester John (thus supplying the earlier, twelfth-century epistolary legend of Prester John with a
luminous backstory), and Feirefiz evangelizes India by writing letters, like the apostles Peter and
Paul. I leave readers to decide what this literary fantasy of global race relations means.
In the Dutch romance Moriaen, the plot arc is reversed. A black African knight from Moorland visits
Arthurian Europe in search of his father, a knight of King Arthur s who had promised, but failed, to
marry the young knight s mother. This exquisite, little-taught text has a unique innovation: the
African knight is piously Christian and superior in every chivalric way to the knights of the Round
Table. Moriaen even gives us an inner view of what it is like to be shunned and abhorred because you
are black, and contemplates conditions under which epidermal differences should be ignored.
Texts like Mandeville s Travels, the Croxton Play of Sacrament, Jewish boy murder stories (Chaucer s
Prioress s Tale, the Anglo-Norman ballad of Hugh of Lincoln, miracles of the Virgin tales like The
Christian Boy Killed by Jews), and the Siege of Jerusalem are rich repositories of anti-Semitic content.
Islamophobic texts are also not hard to find. My favorite teaching texts include the Sultan of Babylon
and the Song of Roland, but Muslims are targeted more than we realize. Read Marco Polo s
Description of the World again, with a watchful eye to how Muslims are described and what stories
are told about them, for eye-popping revelations.
The Vinland Sagas have a lot to say about Native Americans, and crow over exploitative trade
relations with indigenous people half a millennium before Columbus. Gerald of Wales s twelfth-
century excoriations of the Irish demonstrate how even fellow Christians can be racialized portrayed
as quasi-human, savage, infantile, and bestial in the propaganda projects of settler-colonization. Read
with students Gerald s views of the Irish alongside, say, Edmund Spenser s views four hundred years
later, to see what, if anything, has changed in racial strategy toward the Irish from the medieval to
the early modern period.
Citation: Geraldine Heng. Teaching Essay | Race in the European Middle Ages. The H-Net Book Channel. 02-26-2018.
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African executioner of John the Baptist, Cathedral
of Notre Dame, Rouen: tympanum, north portal,
west façade, c. 1260. The Menil Foundation,
Houston; Hickey and Robertson, Houston; and
Harvard University s Image of the Black Project,
reproduced from The Invention of Race in the
European Middle Ages.
Chronicles, ethnographies, travel texts, and letters are of course also the subject matter of historians.
History courses can introduce students to how Urban II s crusading address at the Council of
Clermont in 1095 depicts Muslims as an unclean, polluting, infernal race from whom Christians must
wrest the Holy Land. Bernard of Clairvaux s treatise on the Templars, In Praise of the New
Knighthood, goes further: it announces that killing a Muslim is not really homicide at all but
malicide the extermination of incarnated evil, not the killing of a person.
Race-making in the crucible of international war takes different forms, and centuries of holy war
produced a multitude of teachable documents. An eyewitness chronicle of the First Crusade, the
Gesta Francorum (Deeds of the Franks) shows how desecration of dead Muslims through piecemeal
decimation of their bodies dehumanizes humans into thinghood. The First Crusade s eyewitness
chronicles also register crusader cannibalism that transforms dead Muslims into edibles, food. One
chronicle, Raymond d Aguilers , even conceptualized the multifarious, chaotic hordes of crusaders as
a single race, melded together by their religion, Christianity. Christians, it seems, are a race, too.
Historians can also scrutinize canon law and state legislature with students: to see how Canon 68 of
Citation: Geraldine Heng. Teaching Essay | Race in the European Middle Ages. The H-Net Book Channel. 02-26-2018.
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the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 installed racial law in the Latin West by ordering Jews and
Muslims to mark themselves by a difference of dress. Students can go on to track how English law
and statutes elaborated on this badge of shame, and constricted the freedom of Jewish subjects
more and more till the 1275 Statute of Jewry created de facto residential enclaves by forbidding
Jews from living among Christians. Was this the beginning of the ghetto? By 1290, of course,
parliamentary law drove Jews from England altogether, marking their first permanent expulsion from
a European country.
Courses can teach the history of peoples like the Romani ( Gypsies ), a dark-skinned race of migrants
from India in the eleventh century, who in moving westward, were enslaved in southeastern Europe.
They can survey the fortunes of the Cagots, an abject people living on either side of the western
Pyrenees who were shunned and abhorred. Or they can explore whether the treatment of heretics
and peasants, the diseased and the disabled, ever amounted to racialization.
The possibilities are endless, and I hope that, like courses on medieval women and medieval
sexualities, teaching on medieval race will soon become common.
Notes
[1] Ann Laura Stoler, "Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth." Political Power and Social
Theory 11 (1997): 191.
[2] Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2018, 3.
Recommended Readings
Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-
1450. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.
Bale, Anthony. The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Anti-Semitisms, 1350-1500. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Biller, Peter. Black Women in Medieval Scientific Thought. Micrologus 13 (2005): 477-92.
. Proto-racial Thought in Medieval Science. In Feldon, Isaac, and Ziegler, eds. The Origins of
Racism in the West, 157-180. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
. Views of Jews from Paris around 1300: Christian or Scientific ? In Christianity and Judaism,
edited by Diana Wood, 187-207. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Caviness, Madeline. From the Self-Invention of the Whiteman in the Thirteenth Century to The
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 1
Citation: Geraldine Heng. Teaching Essay | Race in the European Middle Ages. The H-Net Book Channel. 02-26-2018.
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(2008): 1-33.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of Wales. In The
Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 85-104. New York: St. Martin s Press, 2000.
Devisse, Jean. The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Early Christian Era to the Age of
Discovery. Vol. 2 Pt. 1: From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood. Translated by
William G. Ryan. New York: William Morrow, 1979. Reissued with an introduction by Paul H. D.
Kaplan and a preface by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2010.
Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, eds. The Origins of Racism in the West.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Fraser, Angus. The Gypsies. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
Hahn, Thomas, ed. Special Issue on Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages. Journal of Medieval and
Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001).
Hancock, Ian. We are the Romani People. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002.
Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003.
. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2018.
Hsy, Jonathan and Julie Orlemanski, eds. Race and Medieval Studies, a Partial Bibliography.
Postmedieval 8, no. 4 (2017): 500-531.
Kaplan, Paul H. D. The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,
1985.
Kruger, Steven F. Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories. In
Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz, 158-
179. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Lampert, Lisa. Race, Periodicity, and the (Neo-) Middle Ages. Modern Language Quarterly 65
(2004): 392-421.
Mastnak, Tomaz. Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Mellinkoff, Ruth. Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages. 2
vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Perry, David. People of Color in European Art History. Twitter, https://twitter.com/medievalpoc.
Citation: Geraldine Heng. Teaching Essay | Race in the European Middle Ages. The H-Net Book Channel. 02-26-2018.
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Ramey, Lynn T. Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages. Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2014.
Stacey, Robert C. Anti-Semitism and the Medieval English State. In The Medieval State: Essays
Presented to James Campbell, eds. J. R. Madicott and D. M. Palliser, 163-177. London: Hambledon,
2000.
Strickland, Debra Higgs. Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Sturtevant, Paul, ed. Special Series on Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages, The Public Medievalist.
https://www.publicmedievalist.com/race-racism-middle-ages-toc/.
Tolan, John V. Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002.
. Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2008.
Trachtenberg, Joshua. The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to
Modern Antisemitism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1943.
Whitaker, Cord, ed. Special Issue on Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages. Postmedieval 6, no. 1
(2015).
Ziegler, Joseph. Physiognomy, Science, and Proto-racism 1200-1500. In Feldon, Isaac, and Ziegler,
eds. The Origins of Racism in the West, 181-99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Citation: Geraldine Heng. Teaching Essay | Race in the European Middle Ages. The H-Net Book Channel. 02-26-2018.
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