A mainstay of medieval literature classrooms, El Cantar de Mio Cid expands upon crusades rhetoric in the multicultural and multilingual Iberian Peninsula.

Using The Merchant of Venice to demonstrate an early modern interest in maintaining racial divides, particularly in a context where those boundaries regularly collapse.

Rather than try to tell a sociological story about the "violent Black man" myth, we can examine one instance of this racial mythmaking in a widely studied, influential literary forebear: Shakespeare’s Hamlet.