“The politics of the medieval preracial”i

Abstract

For several decades, medieval scholars have argued over race's definition and its use for geographies, contexts, and group dynamics in premodern Europe. In medieval history, this discussion has been based on a non-scholarly definition of race that never cited any work in critical race studies. Medieval history's uncritical definition of race, which is defined with a eugenicist, pre-World War II classification and has ignored the last 60 years of scholarship, has stopped medieval studies from having a sustained, well-informed discussion. Medieval history remains willingly stuck in pre-civil rights methodologies of white supremacist history, but other disciplines offer useful correctives. For instance, scholars in literary and religious studies use critical race concepts drawn from social sciences to better understand medieval ideas of race.