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

Lomuto, Sierra. “Tensions of Geography: Orientalism in the Man of Law’s Tale and Floris and Blancheflour.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 55, no. 3 (2025): 419–438.

Considering the desire for Christian dominance in the Mediterranean world of the 14th century, this article reads two romances (Floris and Blancheflour and Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale) to track the instability of representations of religious and cultural difference. It contends that shifting geographic frameworks generate racializing logics through movement, conversion, and narrative dislocation rather than fixed borders.

Medieval
Literature
Poetry

Loomba, Ania, and Martin Orkin, eds. Post-Colonial Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 1998.

A collection of essays exploring questions of colonialism and race with respect to the works of Shakespeare. The volume is divided into sections examining, respectively, the critical analysis of Shakespeare within early modern European contexts and the later reception of the same works. Shakespeare’s oeuvre is theorized as a constitutive element of global connected histories, an available resource for postcolonial receptions of colonial history, and a lexicographical mechanism for the theorization of colonial processes themselves. The volume as a whole engages conversations in postcolonial theory and Shakespeare studies.

Early Modern
Literature

Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Charts the development of English anglophone thinking about race between the context of Shakespeare’s plays and the beginnings of English colonial expansion in the 17th century. The book draws upon the ways in which Shakespeare’s stage simultaneously coded experience of non-English social worlds for English viewing audiences while being built upon broader cultural understandings of non-English persons. Loomba argues that scholars should avoid conceptualizing European social worlds through the isolation of European lenses alone. The work builds upon prior conversations in the study of Shakespeare, colonialism, and the beginnings of nationalism.

Early Modern
Literature

Lopez-Jantzen, Nicole. “Kings of All Italy? Overlooking Political and Cultural Boundaries in Lombard, Italy.” Medieval Perspectives 29 (2014): 75-92. 

Considers the idea and image of Italy as advanced by the Lombard kings of the early medieval period and the Byzantine Empire. The essay focuses on the attempts of the later Lombard dynasty to link themselves to traditions of Roman rule, playing down Lombard ethnic identity. This scholarship is of interest to students of medieval studies, Italian studies, and Byzantine studies.

Medieval
History

MacDonald, Joyce Green. Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Interrogates the techniques by which Black women’s bodies have been re-visibilized in North American and Caribbean adaptations and imaginings of Shakespeare’s works. Beginning from a context in which Black women were encoded as ephemeral presences within Shakespeare’s plays during the early modern period, the book explores how a variety of contemporary works—such as Mosquito, Mississippi Masala, A Branch of the Blue Nile, Harlem Duet, and King Charles III—are used to critically interrogate matters of race in both early modern English contexts and the New World’s social present. It draws upon discussions in the fields of Shakespeare studies and performance studies.

Early Modern
Literature

MacDonald, Joyce Green. Women and Race in Early Modern Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Investigates the racialization of women’s bodies in early modern anglophone dramas. The book takes on a series of case studies—such as Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, and Katherine Phillips’s Pompey—to explore twinned phenomena: the historical invisibilization of racialized non-white bodies in early modern dramas, and the techniques by which those same bodies might be recovered and centered. The work intervenes in discussions within the study of Shakespeare, gender theory, and performance studies.

Early Modern
Literature

Marcocci, Giuseppe. "Blackness and Heathenism: Color, Theology, and Race in the Portuguese World, c. 1450-1600." Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 43, no. 2 (2016): 33–57.

Theorizes the Spanish and Portuguese empires through a religious and biological frame during the 15th – 17th century. It explores the intersections of skin color and the development of an anti-Jewish theory based on blood purity. This article focuses on racialization, religion, and enslavement.

Early Modern
Literature

Marcocci, Giuseppe. "Conscience and Empire: Politics and Moral Theology in the Early Modern Portuguese World." Journal of Early Modern History 18, no. 5 (2014): 473–494.

Explores how politics and moral theology influenced Portugal during the 16th and 17th century. Marcocci argues that Portugal had an imperial consciousness as they began their maritime expansion. It shows how the Mesa da Consciência (“Board of Conscience”) contributed to issues like enslavement, war, conversión, and commerce, and how it shaped Portugal’s imperial ideology.

Early Modern
Literature

McCoskey, Denise, ed. A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.

The collection foregrounds the diversity of antique societies (ancient Mediterranean between 3000 BCE and 800 CE)—including Assyrians, Persians, Egyptians, Scythians, Ethiopians, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians—to explore the intersection of race with environment, religion, science, politics, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and more.

Ancient

McCoskey, Denise. Race: Antiquity and its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Explores constructions of race both with and beyond somatic markers in classical Greek and Roman contexts. The book deploys case studies in classical Greek and Roman understandings of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Jewish, and Persian cultures—alongside echoes in contemporary anglophone materials—to map the distances between antique and contemporary formulations of racial difference. It engages conversations in the fields of classical literature, cultural history, and cross-cultural connectivity.

Ancient

Moosa, Hassana. “Marking Muslims: The Prince of Morocco and the Racialization of Islam in The Merchant of Venice.” In Global Shakespeare and Social Injustice, eds. Chris Thurman, Sandra Young, Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, David Schalkwyk, and Silvia Bigliazzi. 120-141. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.

Study of the Prince of Morocco’s depiction in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. The essay argues that the play reinforces the Prince of Morocco’s racial and religious difference from the white Christian order by marking him as Muslim through sociocultural markers. Of interest to students of English, performance studies, and Shakespeare studies.

Early Modern
Performance

Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Draws on archives in the Caribbean and the American South to consider how the expectation of enslaved women’s reproductive ability shaped their experience with enslavement and racialization. Morgan argues that African women’s physical and reproductive labor is at the center of the system of slavery and that enslavement impacts familial structures. This work takes part in conversations about gender, embodiment, and Black feminism.

18th Century
History

Morgan, Jennifer L. Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

Considers the lives of enslaved African women in the 16th and 17th centuries. The work centers enslaved women’s worldviews and explores how they understood their inclusion in the racializing logics of enslavement and reproduction. Morgan articulates how early modern ideas of numeracy, value, and commodification in the Atlantic co-constituted African women’s understanding of motherhood and kinship. Engages in the African diaspora, Black feminism, racial categories, and discussions of embodiment.

18th Century
History

Mudimbe, V.Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Interrogates Euro-American epistemological constructions of Africa from Antiquity to the relative present, alongside African scholarly responses within colonially imposed frameworks. The book engages a wide range of themes conjoined by an overarching concern about how African philosophy has, and might still, engage the hermeneutical trappings of Western knowledge systems. Beyond the context of African history, this work engages conversations in history of philosophy, colonial studies, and postcolonial studies.

Ancient
History

Murray, Jackie. “A Critical Race Studies Approach: Race and Racecraft in Apollonius’s Argonautica.” In The Epic World, ed. Pamela Lothspeich. 15-29. London: Routledge, 2023.

Study of classical Greek epic literature about the Argonauts. The chapter shows how the Argonauts dehumanize particular opponents—the people of Cyzicus, the Bebrycians, and a Libyan herder—and argues that these slain enemies are configured along the lines of racial monstrosity. Of interest to students of the Classics, Greek literature, and mythology.

Ancient
Literature

Ndiaye, Noémie. Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.

Examines the representation of Black characters by white performers in 16th and 17th century England, France, and Spain. The book traces the performative technologies used by such performers—anchoring its analysis upon blackface, coded speech patterns, and dances—in order to incubate racializing conceptualizations of Black personhood among performers and audiences across Europe. The book engages conversations in performance studies, Blackness, the study of embodiment, and colonialism.

Early Modern
Literature

Ndiaye, Noémie, and Lia Markey, eds. Seeing Race before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World. Tempe: ACMRS Press, 2023.

This volume explores the many ways that race and racial thinking are represented in the visual culture of premodern times, particularly between the 1300s to the 1800s. It explores the visual manifestations of the “racial matrix” across the medieval and early modern era through transnational and multilingual geographies. Contributors aim to debunk claims that “race did not exist” prior to the Enlightenment by incorporating vast visual archives from different centuries.

Nemser, Daniel. “Triangulating Blackness: Mexico City, 1612.” Mexican Studies 33, no. 3 (2017): 344–366.

Investigates accounts of a 1612 Black uprising in Mexico City as well as their reception. The essay explores both the Spanish account of the event—excavating how Black male bodies were coded as predisposed to the rape of white women—and a Nahuatl account of the same event, which reflects upon the effects of the Spanish gaze upon Black bodies. It goes on to parse the slippages in translation, with respect to the Nahuatl account, which tend to reinscribe colonial categories of knowledge. The work considers discussions in the study of slavery, freedom, gender, Blackness, indigeneity, and colonialism.

Early Modern
History

Newton, Melanie J. The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.

Examines the political movements of free people of color in Barbados during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This book complicates understandings of these people as both enslavers and kin to enslaved peoples. Newton argues that although they were often a marginalized population, free people were a vital part of the political landscape during the abolition and amelioration period. This text engages with the history of Afro-Barbados, racialization, and enslavement.

18th Century
History

Ng, Su Fang. "Making Race in the Early Modern East Indies." New Literary History 52, no. 3 (2021): 509-33.

Examines early modern English and Malay accounts of cross-cultural encounters to consider racial formation in the Indian Ocean during the advent of European maritime expansion. The essay focuses on the epistemological encounter between Arabic physiognomy and European ideas about skin, the use of ethnic categories, and the emergence of “Malay” as a category. This scholarship is of interest to students of early modern studies, the Indian Ocean, Orientalism, and colonialism.

Early Modern
History
No results found.
There are no results with this criteria. Try with a different search query.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.