The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Geraldine Heng

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine Heng Celeste Chamberland The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. By Geraldine Heng. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 493 pages. $49.99 (cloth). Categories of race and ethnicity have long elicited heated debate about the complex ways in which structural conditions and differential access to power have shaped identity and social relations in the modern world. While such discussions have shed much light on contemporary racial paradigms, they have focused less on the pre-modern origins of racial thought. Canonical race theory, in particular, has provided crucial insight into the historical connections between systemic racism and cultural perceptions of race, but has typically focused on the construction of race as a modern phenomenon that emerged in tandem with colonial encounters alongside the Spanish Conquest and the Atlantic Slave Trade. While early modern [End Page 196] constructions of race undeniably aligned with practices of plunder and hegemony in the era of colonialism and imperialism, their ancient and medieval origins are generally overlooked by scholars who have typically regarded the category of race as too presentist to appropriately characterize categories of identity prior to the sixteenth century. As Geraldine Heng persuasively asserts in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, however, long before the advent of modern constructions of epidermal race, Europeans developed discourses of colonialism as ideological justification for occupying the territories of others and marginalizing Jewish and Muslim communities in their midst. Heng’s masterful analysis traces the nebulous formation of race alongside configurations of power and discourses of difference in medieval Europe. Identifying the development of pre-modern racial disparity and prejudice, as Heng asserts, is not only vital to our understanding of medieval history, but also illuminates contemporary categories of race, since the interplay of the past and the present continues to inform racial thought and the pervasiveness of systemic racism. By providing heretofore widely overlooked historical context through the lens of an innovative multidisciplinary methodological framework, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages will undoubtedly initiate crucial scholarly discussions about the pre-modern origins of race that will likely be of great interest to medieval scholars and critical race theorists alike. Inasmuch as the construction of pre-modern racial thought reflects the shifting intersections of religious dogma, legal theory, mercantile capitalism, and expressions of cultural belief, The Invention of Race adopts a thematic scheme of organization that effectively underscores the complex processes of othering that unfolded from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. As Heng incisively contends, ideas of race in medieval Europe were not only formed as a result of colonial encounters in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, but were also expressed in the cultural treatment of Jews, the conquest of neighboring Christian countries, and anti-Islamic sentiment in the high and late Middle Ages. By focusing on themes [End Page 197] of state, color, empire, slavery, and the European imagination across Europe, Heng’s analysis effectively reflects the complexities of numerous sites and contexts of racial formation. The book, moreover, assesses nascent pre-modern racial thought through the methodological lens of medieval studies and draws theoretical inspiration from an array of disciplines, ranging from Queer Studies to Postcolonial Theory. Rather than merely cataloguing or describing taxonomies of race and ethnicity in medieval Europe, Heng’s aim is to provide new paradigms and an appropriate model with which the notion of pre-modern race can be approached. By considering the construction of race within the context of early Christian Europe, Heng’s brilliant volume not only contributes a sorely needed dimension to the existing scholarship on race, but also sheds light on a central, but long overlooked, component of the socio-cultural history of medieval Europe. In recent years, some medievalists, notably Robert Bartlett and Peter Biller, have addressed the concept of race in medieval Europe, but they have generally focused exclusively on the somatic and biological features of race, such as bloodline, purity, and physiognomy. As Heng ably demonstrates in this shrewd work, however, such narrow focuses overlook the socio-cultural determinants of race in the Middle Ages, particularly religion and concepts of barbarity and civility...