Written by Georgie Anderson is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent.
When talking of race, particularly regarding skin colour, there is a central, defining event people are always drawn to thinking of – the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved people. The ideologies which facilitated the trans-Atlantic trade and those born from it have shaped the way the modern world thinks about, conceives of and discusses race. Consequently, there is often the assumption that white bodies have been afforded a certain privilege; therefore, all other bodies exist in a space reserved for the ‘lesser than.’
There are questions and discussions that need to be had concerning the impact of these ideologies both historically and in our contemporary moment, but these cannot occur in the space of the premodern. There are multiple reasons why the carriage of these assumptions relating to a modern conception of race into the premodern space is problematic. Firstly, it negates the complexity of race in the period, reducing it to the static and binary workings which are attached to the modern period. Secondly, it applies the ideological workings, primarily that of white supremacy, onto an age where it does not belong. Continuing to grant these two strands of though precedence here allows for history to become warped to fit a singular narrative. How then do we break through this impasse to locate a starting point for the examination of race in our medieval past?
One starting point is to accept the canonical theory of race has no place, other than to inform where to step back from, in the discussion. Canonical race theory understands that ‘racial formation’ occurs only in modern time. This is because of its relationship to
conditions of labor and capital in modernity such as plantation slavery, the rise of capitalism or bourgeois hegemony, or modern political formations such as the state and its apparatuses, nations and nationalisms, liberal politics, new discourse of class and social war, colonialism and imperialism, and globalism and transnational networks.
(1) Geraldine Heng
These structures are intrinsically linked to modernity – they are born from it and continue to shape it – yet, they have zero relation to the premodern age. In using canonical race theory as prerequisite, we exclude an entire period and its people from the narrative, and by denying the premodern a place in the long history of race we run the risk of ascribing yet another image to the period which is a fantasy. Negating the presence of race and race-making readily suggests that the period and its people existed within a race-free ‘utopia;’ in turn this suggests that the premodern mind cannot comprehend complex ideas. By allowing the premodern a place in the ever mutating and shifting matrix of race serves a dual purpose. It allows us to add underrepresented groups back into the narrative, tackling myths of racial homogeny, but that does not mean that this endeavour is interested purely in the ‘positives.’ To fully conceive of the place of race and the ‘other’ in the premodern world we must interrogate both the ‘positives’ and the ‘negatives.’ Only by looking across the broader spectrum can we ascertain the manifold ways that race behaves and functions in the premodern, away from its modern, canonical building blocks.
The field of Premodern Critical Race Studies is a field which is hard to tie down – it is packed full of paradoxes and discursive avenues that intersect or lead down dead ends. What looms largest in the current state of play is that there are not enough sufficient terminologies that accurately account for the socio-political and cultural shifts between the modern age and our premodern past. It is the reliance of modern terms (linked with canonical race theory) which carry entirely modern semantic baggage that continue to skew our understanding of race into modern conceptual frameworks. To criticise terms such as colonial, postcolonial and even race may seem an excess to those not familiar with the field, as these terms are familiar to us, and whilst they capture a sense of what is going on in the medieval world, this sense is still tainted by modernity. To avoid the possibilities of anachronism different terminologies should be available, however, there is a problem as currently there are no terms available. One of the central aims of my thesis currently titled Tracing the Figure of the Black Knight in Chivalric Romances from North-Atlantic Europe is to establish new terminologies which better represent the state of race and race making in medieval North Atlantic Europe, and I do so through a literary and codicological (use of manuscripts and their inter-relationships) analysis. Unlike other works within the field which tend to ‘cherry pick’ examples across a broad geographic and chronological space and whilst this shows the myriad of ways in which race was understood and represented across the medieval world it does run the risk of universalising race across the period. Therefore, by conducting a literary and codicological analysis of a set corpus of texts, from a specific geographic locale (North Atlantic Europe) means I can recognise the disparities in cultural contacts when compared with the Mediterranean and tease out medieval racial constructions whilst ascertaining who is interacting with these ideas.
In my talk for Fulham Palace on 17 September 2025, titled Mapping medieval manuscripts I look to explore the main aims of my thesis in more detail, teasing out why a codicological analysis is particularly well suited to answering some of the larger questions surrounding premodern race studies. To provide an insight into my research I will explore the Middle Dutch Arthurian romance Moriaen and its extant manuscript KB MS 129 A 10, more simply known as the ‘Lancelot Compilation.’ What I hope to do with this project aside from carving a path through terminological impasses is to continue to shed light on the often overlooked and ignored fact that medieval Europe was a thriving diverse and multicultural space and that locating the presence of overlooked individuals goes beyond having definitive archaeological proof – these lives can equally be located through an examination of the literary and cultural record. As Sagan is wont to remind us – absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
About the author
Georgie Anderson is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent. Her project, Tracing the Figure of the Black Knight in Chivalric Romances from North Atlantic Europe, is supported by CHASE and the Stuart Hall Foundation. Her research uses both literary and manuscript-based methods to explore the presence of People of Colour in the medieval world. Her recent publication includes a chapter titled Masculinity, Monstrosity, and the Uncanny in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and David Lowery’s The Green Knight (2021), featured in Unveiling the Green, edited by Dr Jonathan Fruoco and published by Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre.
References
- Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) pp. 16-17.