Moors, Mongols, and the Monstrous: Race and Racism in the Middle Ages

Catalog description

Until fairly recently, most scholars distinguished the concept of race and racism as strictly modern phenomena. Race, in other words, in the estimate of most modern theorists of race, wasn't a consideration in the Middle Ages. Likewise, despite all evidence to the contrary, medieval Europe has been enshrined in the popular imagination as ethnically homogenous and white. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to premodern discourses concerning human difference and ideas of race, considering its intersections with concepts such as ethnicity, religion, monstrosity, and epidermal color, as well as looking at the lived experience of people of color in medieval Europe.