The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages

Straddling the complicated line between medieval studies and critical race theory, The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages is a comprehensive volume that will change the ways in which medieval history is understood. Operating between two fields that have historically taken little interest in each other, Geraldine Heng addresses race alongside power, empire, gender, religion, culture, literature, and art with tremendous insight built on meticulous research. She compels readers to consider how race shaped medieval European societies and worldviews, and how its roots can be detected far earlier than canonically assumed.At the center of Heng’s work is the question of how to address race and what race represents through a trans-historical lens. She ably demonstrates that race, as a social force enacted by groups of people to categorize human beings via differences believed to be fundamental and immutable, was indeed developing in the Middle Ages and must be studied as such. This timely argument comes after multiple decades of debate among medievalists about whether the term race can be appropriately used in medieval studies, or if such a question has any purchase in the first place. Terms such as “difference,” “xenophobia,” “alterity,” and “otherness” have been championed as more suitable alternatives as medieval peoples themselves never used the word race. By adhering to the methodological lens of critical race theory, Heng persuasively shows how more ambiguous terms such as difference or otherness can quickly lose their potency, and that race, with all of its larger implications, presents the only appropriate term to use. The debates raised and addressed in this work will challenge scholars to radically rethink how they approach the social histories with which they work, and for scholars who consider social context to be an essential aspect of their research, The Invention of Race is a must-read.

This book covers a range of examples of racism in the European Middle Ages, from the treatment of Jews to Mongols to Gypsies, and more. Race and racism appear whenever they are used “to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment” (27). Quoting another author, “permanent outsiders and eternal enemies” (281) is a good description of race-making.For example, concerning Jews in England, Heng demonstrates “how a theory of the religious difference embodied by Jews as a community hardens into a theory of ethnoracial difference accompanied by violence …” (63). As she also notes, “religion can instruct biology” (216).There is a lot of academic jargon here, but if you can get past that, the book is well worth the effort with many good insights.Leon Zitzer

This is a very important book that everyone with a deep interest in the medieval world should read. Race is not an invention of the modern world, neither is racism; and the Middle Ages were not exclusively white, Christian and European. This book is a great starting place for students, academic and the committed general reader interested in a more nuanced understanding of identity and prejudice in the medieval world.

This book really shows the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval Europe. 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 in many cases 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 throughline 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 is all the more pointed. It certainly will be a foundational piece of my own thinking going forward.

This is an important, must-read study on the origins of racism. Heng show that the invention of racism dates further back than the currently accepted landmarks of the eighteenth and nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her scope is impressively broad, including areas and ethnic groups (e.g., Asia, the Romani) that have been little considered in the birth of European racism in past studies. The study is really well thought-out and written, a pleasure to read. Highly recommended! A true paradigm shift.