The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine Heng (review)

The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages is ambitious in scope and impressive in breadth. In its deft synthesis of sources and previous scholarship, the book makes two major interventions: first, it provides one of the most comprehensive pictures of what "race" is and how it is defined in the premodern world; and second, it offers one of the most global perspectives on what "race" or the process of "race-making" looks like outside of the European context. Heng's book is an invitation to question the when, where, and why of premodern race and to consider deeper connections between how ideas of race are made in the past and how they are made today. Moreover, by insisting on the analytical importance of the term race, Heng succeeds in conducting an incisive examination of the construction and maintenance of biopolitical structures of oppression in the premodern world; in doing so, she illustrates the virtues of interrogating the critical vocabularies that shape any given scholarly debate.

Heng takes us around the world in this book, and the book itself is more of an exploration of multiple arcs of inquiry, rather than a single, straightforward trajectory. Her focus on case studies and her frank justification of this methodological decision are one of the book's greatest strengths. Heng writes in a way that easily allows readers to follow the multiple, intricate routes that she traces across the book; its apparatus is also helpful in this regard, with its well-chosen surveys of scholarship and its extensive bibliographical footnotes. Moreover, individual sections of the book are constructed in a way that allows them to be pulled out from the larger framework of Heng's argument and used in a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, or read on their own by specialists and nonspecialists alike. One of the book's exceptional accomplishments is that it illuminates an interconnected premodern world, one that is not always visible from the vantage-point of whatever corner of medieval studies any given scholar might occupy. Politically, Heng's work is a necessary call to accept that race existed in the premodern world (rather than continuing to debate whether it existed), to examine how racial regimes functioned in different premodern settings at different points in time, and to consider how such a deep historical examination might shed light on the making of race in the modern world.

Heng focuses on "moments" and "instances" of "race-making," positing that race is the product of "specific historical occasions in which strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices and pressures, so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment" (3). More important still, she argues for the usefulness of the term race (rather than terms such as "otherness" or "difference"), because the concept yields "tools, analyses, and resources, that can name the past differently" (4). This is particularly true when thinking about the emergence of "the European subject" between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, a development that Heng perceives as a connective tissue between "configurations of power," past and present (5).

The first chapter, "Inventions/Reinventions," carefully traces how race theory is "predicated on an unexamined narrative of temporality in the West" that discards medieval time as "politically unintelligible." This assumption effectively absolves the Middle Ages "of the errors and atrocities of the modern," while at the same time treating the errors and atrocities of the Middle Ages as insignificant to modernity (20–21). For much of this chapter, Heng outlines what she calls the "architectures that support the instantiation of race in the medieval period"; included in this category are: religion (particularly the fate of England's Jewish community and the "universalist ambitions" of the Latin Church), cartography (particularly the role that the mappa mundi played in the racialization of marginalized populations such as the Irish), and skin color (in circumstances in which it functioned ideologically as...