Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Medieval Europe

Plan for a course I hope to teach in AY 2024-2025 Course Description: Categories like race, ethnicity, and religion into which humanity divides itself are not unchanging constants but social constructions that vary across time and place. Medieval Europeans understood these categories differently than we do (particularly in conflating race and religion), and often differently from each other, but the process of drawing and renegotiating boundaries and the reasons they did so are familiar. This course will explore how medieval Europeans in various settings thought about their identities and when and why they emphasized particular ones. We will look at religious and ethnic conflict, multicultural spaces, and intersectional overlap, but also instances when such differences did not matter. Doing so will illuminate the choices medieval people made to activate—or not—specific identities in specific circumstances and the ways these choices altered the racial, ethnic, and religious categories themselves.