A Cultural History of Race in the Middle Ages

Buch | Hardcover

288 Seiten

2023
Bloomsbury Academic (Verlag)
978-1-350-06743-1 (ISBN)

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This volume presents a comprehensive and collaborative survey of how people, individually and within collective entities, thought about, experienced, and enacted racializing differences. Addressing events, texts, and images from the 5th to the 16th centuries, these essays by ten eminent scholars provide broad, multi-disciplinary analyses of materials whose origins range from the British Isles, Western Iberia, and North Africa across Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East. These diverse communities possessed no single word equivalent to modern race, a term (raza) for genetic, religious, cultural, or territorial difference that emerges only at the end of the medieval period.

Chapter by chapter, this volume nonetheless demonstrates the manifold beliefs, practices, institutions, and images that conveyed and enforced difference for the benefit of particular groups and to the detriment of others. Addressing the varying historiographical self-consciousness concerning race among medievalist scholars themselves, the separate analyses make use of paradigms drawn from social and political history, religious, environmental, literary, ethnic, and gender studies, the history of art and of science, and critical race theory. Chapters identify the eruption of racial discourses aroused by political or religious polemic, centered upon conversion within and among Jewish, Christian, and Islamic communions, and inspired by imagined or sustained contact with alien peoples. Authors draw their evidence from Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, and a profusion of European vernaculars, and provide searching examinations of visual artefacts ranging from religious service books to maps, mosaics, and manuscript illuminations

Thomas Hahn teaches in the English Department at the University of Rochester, USA. In addition to more than 50 scholarly publications, he has edited Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales (1995), as well as a number of academic collections: these include Reconceiving Chaucer: Literary Theory and Historical Interpretation (1990); Retelling Stories: Structure, Context, and Innovation in Traditional Narratives (1997); Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice (2000); and Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages (2001).

List of Illustrations
General Editor’s Preface, Marius Turda
Introduction, Cord Whitaker
1. Definitions and Representations of Race, Christine Chism
2. Race, Environment, Culture, Suzanne Conklin Akbari
3. Race and Religion, David Nirenberg
4. Race and Science, Maaike van der Lugt
5. Race and Politics, Geraldine Heng
6. Race and Ethnicity, Thomas Hahn
7. Race and Gender, Sarah Salih
8. Race and Sexuality, Steven F. Kruger
9. Anti-Race, William Chester Jordan and Helmut Reimitz

Notes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	04.11.2021
Reihe/Serie	The Cultural Histories Series
Zusatzinfo	44 bw illus
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	169 x 244 mm
Gewicht	1000 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	1-350-06743-1 / 1350067431
ISBN-13	978-1-350-06743-1 / 9781350067431
Zustand	Neuware