“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, 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.

Race, Population Affinity, and Mortality Risk during the Second Plague Pandemic in Fourteenth-Century London, England

“…This white nostalgia is rooted in the same white supremacist ideology that has fed contemporary violence. Likewise, medieval studies scholarship has boosted this "preracial" version of the premodern past that has allowed medieval cultures, societies, writers, and powerbrokers to hide behind "white innocence," when the truth is that race (structural racism) was invented, refined, and rehearsed in medieval England (Kim 2021).…”

“…Our definition of race centers the Black feminist material turn (biopolitical and sociocultural)dependent on location and temporality (Spillers 1987(Spillers , 2003Weheliye 2014). Although many historians have argued that using "race" to describe the medieval phenomena of structural racism is anachronistic, others in premodern critical race studies, as well as critical race theorists, have in the past several decades made it emphatically clear that the term to use is race rather than anything else (Heng 2021;Kim 2021;Mills 2020;among others).…”