Selected annotated 
bibliography of PCRS

This bibliography represents a selection of foundational texts in the field of premodern critical race studies (PCRS). It focuses on secondary sources examining premodern race and how constructions of difference in the past continue to reverberate today. While these entries treat a variety of sociohistorical and linguistic contexts, the studies themselves covered here are all produced in English. This is a continuously expanding document created by the ACMRS Postdoctoral Research Scholars in collaboration with the RaceB4Race Executive Board.

Period
Discipline

Hall, Kim F. “‘These bastard signs of fair’: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” In Post-Colonial Shakespeares, edited by Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, 64-83. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Firmly focused on the aggrandizement of whiteness within early modern poetry, and Shakespeare’s sonnets in particular, this essay considers how these literary works perpetuate the racialization of fairness. In reading fairness as an emergent ideology of white supremacy, Hall makes a sharp connection between whiteness and the trope of privilege that endures far past the early modern period.

Hendricks, Margo. "‘Obscured by Dreams’: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream." Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1996): 37–60.

Interrogates the “Indian Boy” in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The article argues that Shakespeare’s comedy continues the racial discourse of travel narratives by representing India as an exotic territory to be conquered and occupied. Yet the text constitutes race as an ideological fissure creating a dichotomy between race as genealogy and race as ethnicity. The article addresses issues of mestizaje and representations of the other suitable to imperial projects.

Early Modern
Literature

Hendricks, Margo. Race & Romance: Coloring the Past. Tempe: ACMRS Press, 2022.

This study brings together race and the literary tradition of romance. It explores the literary and cultural genealogy of colorism, white passing, and white presenting in the romance genre in 15th-17th century England. Hendricks engages with the racecraft of “passing,” the instability of racial identity and its formation from the premodern to the present.

Early Modern
Literature

Hendricks, Margo. "Race: A Renaissance Category?" In A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, edited by Michael Hattaway, 690-98. Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell, 2003.

This chapter offers an overview of the philological history of the word “race” in English and discusses the Renaissance theory of “generation.” The article argues for the use of philology and Renaissance medicine rather than skin color to emphasize this concept's fluidity. This text engages with issues of medicine, genealogy, families, and socioeconomics in the early modern period.

Early Modern
History

Hendricks, Margo, and Patricia Parker, eds. Women, "Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period. New York: Routledge, 1994.

A collection of essays investigating literary inscriptions of women and race in predominantly European contexts between the 16th and 18th centuries. The essays are grouped into four overarching themes: defining differences, male writing, female authorship, and the interrelations between European and colonial contexts. The work engages discussions in gender theory, postcolonial studies, and the studies of various European literatures.

Early Modern
Literature

Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

A study that interprets medieval romance in the context of European encounters with Muslim communities through travel, crusade, and empire formation. The book offers definitions of “race” and “nation” applicable to medieval Europe and focuses on the emergence of England as a nation and the emerging vocabulary of racial classification that arose with it. Chapters focus on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, several vernacular English romances, and The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.

Medieval
Literature

Heng, Geraldine. England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

A study on the ramifications of the religious violence carried out against the Jewish diaspora in the Latin West. It argues that attacks against Jewish bodies and Jewish lives led to the creation of the first racial state in the history of the West. This book applies postcolonial and race studies in the study of religion to illustrate how medieval England became a racial state.

Medieval
Literature

Heng, Geraldine, ed. Teaching the Global Middle Ages. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2022.

The essays in this volume address pedagogy highlighting early forms of globalism during the Middle Ages. Contributions address topics across various disciplines including music, theater, religion, ecology, museums, and literature. The volume includes proposed syllabi, digital resources, classroom activities, and discussion questions.

Medieval

Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

A broad study on race in Europe from the 12th through the 15th centuries. The book examines racialization in various cultural and geographic contexts. It explores the relationship between race and religion, empire and colonization, enslavement, and epidermal race.

Medieval

Heng, Geraldine. Teaching Early Global Literatures and Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Through reviewing early modern studies spanning Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas between the 5th and 15th centuries, Heng argues for premodern texts taught within global frameworks. This book offers pedagogical approaches that foreground mobility, contact, and difference in order to reframe literary study beyond Eurocentric narratives.

Medieval
Literature
Transnational studies

Hornback, Robert. “The Folly of Racism: Enslaving Blackface and the ‘Natural’ Fool Tradition.” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007): 46-84.

Investigates the comic associations of Blackness, made visible through blackface, in early modern England. Hornback argues that the practice of blackface played a key role in theorizing early modern slavery by supporting the claim that Black people were irrational and therefore could be enslaved. The essay is of interest to students of early modern studies, English literature, and Blackness.

Early Modern
Literature

Hsy, Jonathan. Antiracist Medievalisms: From "Yellow Peril" to Black Lives Matter. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2021.

A study on modern usages of medievalisms by distinct communities of color. The book argues that through “restorying,” racialized minorities have long appropriated the medieval past to build solidarity and fight for justice. It puts materials from African American and Asian American studies in dialogue with medieval studies.

Medieval
Literature

Irigoyen-Garcia, Javier. Moors Dressed as Moors: Clothing, Social Distinction and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.

Investigates the intersection of clothing and racial difference in early modern Iberia. Beginning from the context of bans on Muslims wearing clothes coded as "Moorish," Irigoyen-Garcia shows how sartorial praxes and epistemologies configured the construction of a Christian ruling class in 16th and 17th century Iberia, while simultaneously becoming a key part of a racializing code for forcibly converted Muslims and their descendants (Muslim and Christian alike). The book considers conversations in the history of clothing, cultural history, public ritual, and Iberia.

Early Modern
History

Iyengar, Sujata. “Race and Skin Color in Early Modern Women’s Writing.” In The History of British Women’s Writing, 1500-1610, Volume 2, edited by Caroline Bicks and Jennifer Summit, 277-95. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

This chapter discusses early modern conceptions of race and skin color in women’s writing. The chapter argues that race can be read as divine in Mary Sidney Herbert’s Psalms, cosm(et)ic catastrophe in Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam, and contaminatio in Aemilia Lanyer. This text explores topics of class, theories of racialization, and gender.

Early Modern
Literature

Iyengar, Sujata. Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

A study of theories of racial difference in early modern England. The book uses the forms of the narrative, lyric, masque, and romance as evidence for understanding race-making processes. In resisting a teleological approach towards racism or racialization, this book explores discursive understandings of skin color and race through cultural ties, kinship, science, and religion. This text participates in discussions of premodern critical race studies, Blackness studies, and whiteness studies.

Early Modern
Literature

Iyengar, Sujata. “Strangeness: Early Modern European Women and the Invention of Whiteness.” Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue: European Women in Early Modern Drama 27 (2017). 1-6.

This afterword to the special issue discusses early modern European women and whiteness. The issue offers topics such as cultural and historical contexts, conceptions of gender and language, and identity markers for hierarchical social structures. The afterword asks readers to consider contemporary notions of European whiteness, religion, gender, and sexuality alongside early modern literature and history.

Early Modern
Literature

Jeong, Don Hyeon. "Simon the Tanner, Empires, and Assemblages: A New Materialist Asian American Reading of Acts 9:43." The Bible & Critical Theory 16, no. 1 (2021): 41–63.

Explores a counter-anthropocentric reading of premodern literary evidence through a passage in the New Testament. The essay situates the episode in question within the frameworks of premodern industry, with specific reference to tanning and the manufacture of leather, and contexts of colonization to challenge anthropocentric hermeneutics in readings of Biblical materials addressed to Asian American communities. The essay is situated within intellectual currents of new materialism and Biblical hermeneutics.

Ancient
Religious Studies

Johnson, Paul Michael. “At First Blush: Race, Rouge, and the Transnational Performance of Turning Red.” Renaissance Quarterly 78, no. 1 (2025): 65–94.

Taking up transnational exchanges linking Europe, East Asia, and North America between the 16th century and the 21st century, this article traces cosmetic practices and their afterlives in contemporary media. It argues that rouge operates as a marker of racial difference, with the visibility of blushing a part of the construction of whiteness. Johnson examines how Black Africans used rouge in performance, and how the notion of “turning red” shaped performances of visibility, femininity, and difference across time.

Early Modern
Performance
Transnational studies

Jones, Nicholas R. Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019.

Analyzes early modern Spanish performances of Africanized Castilian, or habla de negros, from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The book argues against the interpretation of habla de negros as caricature, and finds space in the representations and performances of Black characters for resisting early modern projects of white supremacy. This work is of interest to students of performance studies, Iberian studies, and Black studies.

Early Modern
Performance

Jones, Nicholas R., Christina H. Lee, and Dominique E. Polanco, eds. The Routledge Companion to Race in Early Modern Artistic, Material, and Visual Production. London: Routledge, 2025.

Spanning Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries, this companion assembles object-centered studies of artistic and material production across global contexts. The visual and material cultures presented foreground non-European expressive traditions, reframing race through cross-cultural exchange and colonial encounter rather than Eurocentric representation.

Early Modern
Art History
Transnational studies
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