Sylvester Johnson hosts a small round table discussion on race in the European Middle Ages with Geraldine Heng and Matthew Gabriele.
Geraldine Heng is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, with a joint appointment in Middle Eastern studies and Women’s studies. She holds the Perceval Professorship, created by anonymous donors to support her career. She is also Founder and Director of the Global Middle Ages Projects (G-MAP): www.globalmiddleages.org
Her first book, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (Columbia University Press, 2003, 2004, 2012; 533 pp.) traces the development of a medieval literary genre—European romance, and, in particular, the King Arthur legend—in response to the traumas of the crusades and crusading history, and Europe’s myriad encounters with the East.
Heng’s second book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University press, 2018; 504 pp. in a larger, 10 x 7 format) argues that the medieval period was not a pre-political, pre-racial era, and that religion then (and now)—as much as science, in the high-modern era of “scientific racism”—was selectively deployed to identify differences among humans that were essentialized as absolute and fundamental, so as to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups, in practices that we would today call acts of race. Invention of Race won the 2019 PROSE prize in Global History, and was listed among History Today's best books of 2018.
Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies and the chair of the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. He has published numerous academic articles and several books, including An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade, which received the Southeastern Medieval Association’s Best First Book in 2013.
Dr. Gabriele is a regular contributor to Forbes.com; his public writing has appeared in such places as The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Slate, and The Roanoke Times; and interviews with him have aired locally, nationally, and internationally.