THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA OF RACE: CLASSICAL PARADIGMS AND MEDIEVAL ELABORATIONS1 A Review Essay (original) (raw)
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The Invention of Race in the European MIddle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages
“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely-held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features—the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race. One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time. Part I—“Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”—surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide. Part II—“Locations of Medieval Race”—identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.
2021
This essay proposes a new approach to the history of race and religion: that of simultaneously constructive and destructive comparison. It offers historical sketches of two biocultural processes, one in medieval Christianity (Iberia/Spain) and one in medieval Islam (Maghreb/North Africa), each of which can fruitfully be understood as ‘racializing’. Of each it asks similar questions. First, how did episodes of mass conversion or spiritual migration affect thinking about the heritability of certain characteristics within these religions? In other words, did such episodes effect something that today we might call the racialization of religion? Second, how do these episodes relate to each other? Can we speak of their histories in terms of origins, or of a causal or genealogical relationship to each other? Can we say that any of the three religions involved in these episodes – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – ‘invented race’ or practiced race-making?
The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race
“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely-held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features—the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race. One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time. Part I—“Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”—surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide. Part II—“Locations of Medieval Race”—identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.
Speculum, 2020
Race (a fifteenth-century linguistic invention) is a problematic concept when interpreting premodern thought, practices, and behaviors of people who did not use the term and did not know its accompanying theoretical baggage nor its usages after its dramatic impact in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But why call something race, when many older terms-ethnocentrism, xenophobia, premodern discriminations, prejudice, chauvinism, fear of otherness and difference, or even proto-racism-have comfortably served for various medieval encounters? asks Geraldine Heng, developing a line of thought elaborated in her wellreceived Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (2003). By not using race, she maintains in The Invention of Race, we restrict, hence distort, the scope of our historical analyses: we skirt an array of questions, concepts, tools, and resources in our historical investigation. "The refusal of race destigmatizes the impacts and consequences of certain laws, acts, practices, and institutions in the medieval period, so we cannot name them for what they are" (4). Heng believes that by not using the term, we wrongly absolve the Middle Ages of the errors and atrocities of the modern world, and we misinterpret that period. Heng holds that race, no longer a biological concept invoking the body as its singular referent and applicable to modern times only, is "one of the primary names we have. .. that is attached to a repeating tendency. .. 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. .. it is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences" (3). Such a definition allows her to speak of "religious races" (Christian, Jewish, Muslim), to claim that Canon 68 of Lateran IV requiring Jews and Muslims to be publicly marked instantiated a racial regime and racial governance in the Latin West through the force of the law, and to describe acts of atrocious aggression against Jews in thirteenth-century England based on religious beliefs in Jewish guilt and malignity as the state's racial acts against a racialized minority. Heng views England's colonial strategy and rhetoric in Wales and Ireland as racist or racial, crudely linked to the colonial racisms of the postmedieval centuries typical of the subsequent English empires. But transposing Joan W. Scott's critique regarding some feminist historians' belief in the fundamentally unchanged structures of patriarchy, one should perhaps ask here: Doesn't race as defined above impose another set of blinders, one that seeks to validate the present by finding its analogues in the past, one that imposes current notions of race and racisms on actions that may have other explanations? It is our duty as historians to avoid the pitfalls of reading the past as identical to the present, and to achieve a necessary critical distance when approaching our sources. Pressing the notion of simple continuities can sometime undermine this goal. By focusing on race in the Middle Ages, Heng makes a valuable contribution to a lively, often contentious debate among medievalists about the importation of presentist concerns and categories into the past. Imported from contemporary daily experiences (the author frankly confesses that she has been teaching and publishing as a gendered, raced, postcolonial subject) and reflecting the acrimonious political discourse about race in present-day America, one of the benefits of the racial focus is to introduce much needed relevancy into our scientific output, linking premodernity to the modern era in a way that could render medieval studies more intelligible among our students and the general public. The reader however must recognize the price: by applying to our research in the Middle Ages a word (race) and its adjective (racial) that are overloaded with associations, memories, and emotions, we may confound, not enlighten, the understanding of a period and its
What is the purpose of giving the name race to a set of descriptors (language, law, customs, and lineage) that medieval writers attributed to contemporary social groups? 1 What payoff is there in regarding medieval attitudes toward people of different "races" as "racist"? Medieval Catholic writers who labelled various groups did frequently use biological terminology ( gens, for example, and natio), as is made clear in the essays offered in this collection. This labelling can be called racial, if one chooses to use the adjective as a synonym for ethnic or biological or as a substitute for a clumsy and old-fashioned phrase, like "related by blood."