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, wellinformed 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.

In recent discussions of Geraldine Heng's foundational book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, one chapter has received much critical attention: chapter 2, "State/Nation: A Case Study of the Racial State: Jews as Internal Minority in England." This chapter and her separate book, England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West, delineate how England, over 400 years, created the blueprint for an almost complete racialized state and continued to use Jewish racialization after Jewish expulsion in 1290. 1 She uses medieval England's situation as a "case study of medieval race that concentrates on one country …" and in so doing tracks how structural racism is attached to medieval English Jews. Heng explains her method and approachmicrohistory and case study-as well as how this methodology reinforces her main argument about race in the medieval European past in The Invention of Race:The aim of this book is to sketch paradigms and models for thinking critically about medieval race, … that call attention to tendencies and patterns, inventions and strategies in race-making and identify crucibles and dynamics that conduce to the production of racial form and raced behavior. 2 Chapter 2, a microhistorical analysis, explains how this focus on local context, political and religious power, and western European parallels reveal an "English example" of medieval Jewish racialization that is "at once situation-specific and resonant." 3 There is no equivocation about the scope, range, methods, and critical theories Heng uses to discuss the Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages.