Race in Medieval Europe and Racism in Medieval Studies: A Reading List
Medievalists have long resisted conversations about race and European medieval literature and culture. This is due in large part to their tendency to, incorrectly (as a number of scholars have shown), see race as a modern phenomenon with little bearing on medieval studies (see most recently Geraldine Heng and Cord J. Whitaker). In the last two decades especially, scholars have identified the range of reasons for this resistance and emphasized the importance of studying race in the European Middle Ages.
Medievalists investigating the connections between premodern and modern racial-thinking have been criticized as presentist, as anachronistic in injecting the modern into the past, as too political, and more. Geraldine Heng notes in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages that when she was commissioned to write a book about race in 2008 “medievalists in general were not convinced the concept of race had any purchase for the medieval period. Race theorists also deemed the project presentist, convinced that race was a modern phenomenon and that they could safely ignore the Middle Ages, which they saw as a prepolitical era with scant relevance for the cultures of modernity that followed, and thus a period of little interest to them” (Heng, 3). The problem with creating such a temporal barrier between medieval and modern in terms of race, as Heng puts it, is that “medieval time is then absolved of the errors and atrocities of the modern, while its own errors and atrocities are shunted aside as essentially nonsignificative, without modern meaning, because occurring outside the conditions structuring intelligible discourse on, and participation in, modernity and its cultures. The replication of this template of temporality – one of the most durably stable intellectual replications in the West – is the basis for the replication of race theory’s exclusions” (The Invention, 21).
Cord J. Whitaker, in his 2019 book Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking, observes similarly that “many studies consider race an exclusively modern phenomenon: what we understand as racial ideology, predicated on the notion of an insurmountable difference between black and white, has been traced to the seventeenth century, to the increased economic expediency of chattel slavery in the Americas” (Black Metaphors, 1). As Whitaker argues in Black Metaphors, the timeline should be pushed “back much further, to at least the European Middle Ages, with roots in the medieval reception of classical antiquity” (Black Metaphors, 1).
Books and essays addressing otherness and difference (among other synonyms) have become increasingly common in medieval studies, but these studies often don’t use the term race. Geraldine Heng’s comments on the insufficiency of these terms and the necessity of using the term race are important here:
“‘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 operate 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 different treatment. My understanding, thus, is that race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content.
Why the term race?…The short answer is that the use of the term race continues to bear witness to important strategic, epistemological, and political commitments not adequately served by the invocation of categories of greater generality (such as otherness or difference) or greater benignity in our understanding of human culture and society. Not to use the term race would be to sustain the reproduction of a certain kind of past, while keeping the door shut to tools, analyses, and resources that can name the past differently. Studies of ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ in the Middle Ages – now increasingly frequent – must then continue to dance around words they dare not use; concepts, tools, and resources that are closed off; and meanings that only exist as lacunae.
Scholars who are invested in the archaeology of a past in which alternative voices, lives, and histories are heard, beyond those canonically established as central by foundationalist studies, are thus not well served by evading the category of race and its trenchant vocabularies and tools of analysis. For race theorists, the study of racial emergence in the longer durée is also one means to understand if the configurations of power productive of race in modernity are, in fact, genuinely novel. Key propensities in history can be identified by examining premodernity: the modes of apparent necessity, configurations of power, and conditions of crisis that witness the harnessing of powerful dominant discourses – such as science or religion – to make fundamental distinctions among humans in processes to which we give the name of race” (The Invention of Race, 3-5).
Much of the recent work on otherness, difference, and ethnicity, in addition to not using the term race, tends to ignore the decades of work done by scholars of critical race studies and treat the subject as uninhabited land (on this, see Margo Hendricks “Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future” and Dorothy Kim’s introduction to the Literature Compass special issue on Critical Race and the Middle Ages).
The consequences of medievalists neglecting to engage with the subject of race are many. In her 2016 essay “White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies” Sierra Lomuto reveals what’s at stake if medievalists leave race out of the conversation:
“The discussion on race in the Middle Ages has been fraught with controversy since medievalists began having one at the turn of this century. The conversation often stalled on the question of whether we could even talk about race because of a sensed threat of anachronism. In his 2015 postmedieval edition Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages, Cord Whitaker tried to end any lingering resistance to the topic by asserting that now is the time to move on, stop debating whether race is relevant to the medieval, and start thinking about how medieval race-thinking differs from and contributes to modern racism. Yet the debate continues, and the issue is often reduced to a quibble over terminology. This debate must end once and for all. When we refuse to see race in the Middle Ages, the stakes are much greater than etymology or linguistics; we are refusing to see how hierarchical structures of difference operate in all of their nuanced complexities, including within multicultural and transnational contexts. We are allowing the Middle Ages to be seen as a preracial space where whiteness can locate its ethnic heritage. And we end up convening conference panels that uncritically present the use of the medieval in perpetuating white supremacy. I keep returning to this idea that it would have been incredibly powerful, and leagues more significant, if the panel I attended had framed the discussion with a consideration of just how racialized the engagement is between modern pop culture and the medieval world.”
Cord J. Whitaker and David Perry have also recently enumerated the potential consequences.
In Black Metaphors, Whitaker identifies “the profound implications of the historical nexus of blackness and sinfulness for modern life and culture” that has roots in European medieval literature. This “conceptual intersection,” he continues, “is behind current controversies over racialized policing and the resultant Black Lives Matter movement” (Black Metaphors, 1). For Whitaker, the medieval racial thinking that identifies whiteness with innocence and blackness with “unrepentant sinfulness” has clear relevance for contemporary racial politics in the United States and is manifest in both the Black Lives Matter movement and the alt-right movement. Indeed Whitaker argues that critical inquiry into racial thinking in the Middle Ages is needed to confront the cultural fantasy developed by the alt-right, who have co-opted “an entire historical period…into the mirages of white innocence and black criminality that comprise the mirage of racial difference” (Black Metaphors, 2).
In the introduction to the collection Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past, Perry acknowledges that the volume was planned in the “weeks and months after a group of neo-Nazis marched through the college town of Charlottesville, Virginia, wielding clubs and shields bearing medieval insignia. During that march, one of the neo-Nazi demonstrators drove his car into a crowd of counter protesters and killed Heather Heyer, a peaceful counter-protester” (Whose Middle Ages?, 6). Perry continues
“It would be a mistake to end without reckoning, briefly, with the beginning. Many people in the United States and the British Commonwealth still yearn for a homogeneously white, universally Christian, splendidly isolated Middle Ages that never existed. In Europe, men gather under crusader flags, arm themselves with assault rifles, and form militias to patrol their borders in hopes of turning away Islamic refugees from war in Syria in the name of that imaginary Middle Ages. In New Zealand, a white supremacist cited First Crusade rhetoric before murdering Muslims at prayer. In San Diego, another white supremacist wrote about medieval blood libel before murdering Jews. Narratives of European medieval whiteness continue to be used to support some of the most dangerous ideologies in the world. Meanwhile, medieval studies as a field is slow, haltingly, organizing itself against oppressive ideologies” (Whose Middle Ages?, 6).
It is vital, Perry concludes, that medievalists recognize that what happens in academic spaces is connected to what happens in the “streets of Charlottesville, the mosque in New Zealand, and the synagogue in San Diego” because “we are in an era of weaponized nostalgia, in which constructed pasts that may or may not bear much relationship to what scholars actually know about those pasts can shape the fate of nations. Medievalism can manifest as one of those nostalgias. Nostalgia can accelerate and intensify oppressive ideologies as forces react to stave off change through violence and bigotry” (Whose Middle Ages?, 7).
Medievalists have also long resisted acknowledging and confronting the racism embedded in medieval studies (or have completely denied its existence) and the ways in which the Middle Ages have been appropriated. The recent controversy surrounding medievalists’ unwillingness to recognize the problems with the term “Anglo-Saxon” is only one example (see Mary Rambaran-Olm 2017 and 2019 and Adam Miyashiro).
The field originated in the nineteenth century in a period of rising nationalism and scientific racism. The Middle Ages created in the nineteenth-century European imagination was used to maintain the imperial and colonial violence of the age and the consequences of the origins of the discipline continue to haunt the present. David Perry has recently noted that while Renaissance thinkers sought to distance themselves from the medieval period,
“during the succeeding eras of European colonialism and imperialism thinkers placed the Middle Ages at the center of their new national histories. European nation-states sought hegemony over so much of the broader world, subjugating diverse peoples, engaging in mass enslavement and other forms of labor exploitation, and too often seeking to eradicate indigenous cultures, that intellectuals in Western Europe were less ready to erase the centuries during which the cultures that supposedly defined their nations coalesced. European thinkers instead sought a heritage – often a specifically white and Christian one – that used the Middle Ages to link the glories of the Pax Romana of the classical past to Rule Britannia and the continental empires (through the distinct narratives that medieval Europeans themselves told). New narratives of hereditary greatness and racial superiority required a history differentiating a white Christian past from the narratives of other places and peoples. Thus, the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century British invented an isolated race they called the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ as a white early medieval heritage on their isolated, splendid island. The French claimed Charles Martel’s defeat of an Islamic raiding party in Tours in 732 CE as evidence that Carolingians had staved off the Islamification of Europe. Nineteenth-Century German intellectuals, obsessed with a notion of a German people and German state that transcended time, found in the Holy Roman Empire after 1000 CE a reich to remember” (Whose Middle Ages?, 4).
Many medievalists have defended their resistance to conversations surrounding race by expressing a desire to remain politically neutral. Kimberly Anne Coles, Kim F. Hall, and Ayanna Thompson have recently addressed this defense: “if more faculty members do not confront this history, we may actually be aiding those whose political, cultural, and social beliefs many of us find personally abhorrent and intellectually bankrupt” (BlacKKKShakespearean: A Call to Action for Medieval and Early Modern Studies). Coles, Hall, and Thompson further argue that scholars have an “ethical imperative" to equip students “to understand and engage critically with the world as it is” rather than as it has been imagined.
Medievalists must be more willing to do the work, to read, and to listen to their colleagues researching critical race studies and medieval literature and culture. Otherwise, medievalists risk ceding the field (and further discouraging students and future medievalists) to extremist fantasies and violent appropriations if they do not confront these fantasies, the origins of the discipline in nineteenth-century Europe, and the racism embedded in the field.
Below is a reading list consisting of recent publications on premodern race studies and racism in medieval studies. This list is not exhaustive. The bibliography published under the direction of Jonathan Hsy and Julie Orlemanski in Postmedieval volume 8.4 (2017) should be consulted as should the crowd-sourced document behind the published bibliography. See also the crowd-sourced annotated bibliography for Early Modern Race Studies.
Many scholars listed below have presented their latest research at the ACMRS RaceB4Race Conference Series. Many have also published articles at In the Medieval Middle.
Adams, Jonathan and Cordelia Heß. The Study of Antisemitism in the North: History and State of Research. De Grutyer, 2020.
Albin, Andrew, Mary C. Erler, Thomas O’Donnell, and Nina Rowe, eds. Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past. Fordham University Press, 2019.
Chaganti, Seeta, Jonathan Hsy, Sierra Lomuto, and Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh (coorganizers), with Dorothy Kim (on behalf of the Medievalists of Color). “Whiteness in Medieval Studies: A Workshop.”
Coles, Kimberly Anne, Kim F. Hall, and Ayanna Thompson. “BlacKKKShakespearean: A Call to Action for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.” MLA Profession
Davis, Kathleen and Nadia Altschul, eds. Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ Outside Europe. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Dockray-Miller, Mary F. “Old English Has a Serious Image Problem.” JSTOR Daily, 3 May 2017.
Dockray-Miller, Mary F. Public Medievalists, Racism, and Suffrage in the American Women’s College. Palgrave Macmillan: The New Middle Ages, 2017.
“Flags and Other Symbols Used By Far-Right Groups in Charlottesville.” SPLC Hatewatch. 2017.
Gabriele, Matthew. “Why The History Of Medieval Studies Haunts How We Study The Past.” Forbes, July 2018.
Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Cornell University Press, 1995.
Hendricks, Margo. “Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future.” RaceB4Race: Race and Periodization. The Folger Institute, September, 2019.
Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Heng, Geraldine. The Global Middle Ages. Cambridge Elements Series. 2021
Heng, Geraldine and Lynn T. Ramey, eds. Literature Compass 11.7 (2014). Special Issue: The Global Middle Ages
Holsinger, Bruce W. Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007.
Hsy, Jonathan. “Native, Norse, Other: Embodied Difference and Forms of First Contact.” In the Middle, 24 September 2014.
Hsy, Jonathan. “Racial Dynamics in the Medieval Literature Classroom.” What is Racial Difference?, 21 January 2016.
Hsy, Jonathan. Antiracist Medievalisms: From “Yellow Peril” to Black Lives Matter. Amsterdam University Press, 2021.
Hsy, Jonathan and Julie Orlemanski, eds. “Race and Medieval Studies: A Partial Bibliography.” Postmedieval 8.4 (2017), 500-531.
Karkov, Catherine E., Anna Kłosowska, and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, eds. Disturbing Times: Medieval Pasts, Reimagined Futures. Punctum Books, 2020.
Kaufman, Amy S. and Paul B. Sturtevant. The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past. University of Toronto Press, 2020.
Kim, Dorothy. “Antifeminism, Whiteness, and Medieval Studies.” In the Middle, 16 January 2016.
Kim. Dorothy. Digital Whiteness and Medieval Studies. ARC Humanities Press, 2019.
Kim, Dorothy. “Teaching Medieval Studies in a Time of White Supremacy.” In the Middle, 28 August 2017.
Kim, Dorothy. “The Unbearable Whiteness of Medieval Studies.” In the Middle, 10 November 2016.
Kim, Dorothy. “White Supremacists Have Weaponized an Imaginary Past. It’s Time to Reclaim the Real History.” Time, April 2019.
Kim, Dorothy, ed. Literature Compass 16.9-10 (2019). Special Issue: Critical Race and the Middle Ages.
Krummel, Miriamne Ara and Tison Pugh. Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other. Palgrave Macmillan: The New Middle Ages, 2017.
Livingston, Josephine. “Racism, Medievalism, and the White Supremacists of Charlottesville.” New Republic, 15 August 2017.
Lomuto, Sierra. “White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies.” In the Middle, 5 December 2016.
Medievalists of Color. “On Race and Medieval Studies: A Collective Statement by Medievalists of Color.” Medievalists of Color, 1 August 2017.
Miyashiro, Adam. “Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Response to ISAS in Honolulu.” In the Middle, 29 July 2017.
Perry, David M. “White Supremacists Love Vikings. But They’ve Got History All Wrong.” The Washington Post, 31 May 2017.
People of Color in European Art History.
“Race, Racism and the Middle Ages.” Special Series from The Public Medievalist.
Rambaran-Olm, Mary. “Anglo-Saxon Studies (Early English Studies), Academia and White Supremacy.” Medium, June 2018.
Rambaran-Olm, Mary. “‘Black Death’ Matters: A Modern Take on a Medieval Pandemic.” Historianspeaks and a longer version at Medium. June 2020.
Rambaran-Olm, Mary. “‘Houston, We Have a Problem:’ Erasing Black Scholars in Old English.” The Sundial. March 2020.
Rambaran-Olm, Mary. “Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Studies.” History Workshop, November 2019.
Rambaran-Olm, Mary and Matthew Gabriele. “The Middle Ages Have Been Misused by the Far Right. Here’s Why It’s So Important to Get Medieval History Right.” Time. November, 2019.
Rambaran-Olm, Mary, M. Breann Leake, and Micah James Goodrich. “Race, Revulsion, and Revolution.” Postmedieval 11.4 (December 2020).
Rambaran-Olm, Mary, and Erik Wade. “Race 101 For Early Medieval Studies: Selected Readings.” Medium, 2020.
Rambaran-Olm, Mary and Erik Wade, eds. Race in Early Medieval England. Forthcoming in the Cambridge Elements Series. See also the reading list compiled by the authors.
Ramey, Lynn T. Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages. University Press of Florida, 2014.
Steel, Karl. ‘Bad Heritage: The American Viking Fantasy, from the Nineteenth Century to Now.’ In Nature, Culture, Ecologies: Nature in Transcultural Contexts, ed. Gesa Mackenthun and Stephanie Wodianka. Waxmaann, 2018, 75-96.
Teaching Medieval Slavery and Captivity. Hannah Barker, SHPRS (Arizona State University School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies).
Turda, Marius, Anthology Ed. A Cultural History of Race. 6 vols. Bloomsbury, 2021 (volume 2: A Cultural History of Race in the Medieval Age (800-1350); volume 3: A Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age (1350-1550)).
Vernon, Matthew X. The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan: The New Middle Ages, 2018.
Whitaker, Cord J, ed. “Making Race Matter.” Postmedieval 6.1 (2015).
Whitaker, Cord J. Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Whitaker, Cord J. and Matthew Gabriele, eds. “The Ghosts of the Nineteenth Century and the Future of Medieval Studies.” Postmedieval 10.2 (2019).
