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

Abu-Lughod, Janet. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

The work argues for the existence of a decentralized technological and financial membrane that bound East Asia, West Asia, and Europe between 1250 and 1350 CE into an economic superstructure. The book posits that these areas existed under a single world system, and explores the reasons for its eventual collapse, arguing against the teleology of Europe’s rise to world dominance in the early modern period. The work engages fields such as economics, history of science, and global studies.

Medieval
History

Akhimie, Patricia. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Examines cultural constructions of the body in 16th and 17th century England with specific reference to the works of William Shakespeare. The work argues that socially hierarchical conceptions of appropriate comportment were irreducible from embodied traits for the early modern English, in turn tying bodily difference to the threats posed by persons coded as non-normative. The book engages discussions in the fields of Shakespeare studies, embodiment, drama, social history, and early modern England.

Early Modern
Literature

Alexander, Leslie M. African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 2008.

Explores the relationship between Black identity and political activism in the nineteenth century U.S., using New York City as an illustrative example. The book examines whether newly emancipated Black northerners viewed themselves as Africans or as Americans and discusses how the answer to that influenced the nature and form of Black political and intellectual thought in the nineteenth century.

18th Century
History

Alexander, Leslie M. Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022.

Examines how Haiti—as a sovereign Black nation—created a beacon of hope for free and enslaved Black people throughout the African diaspora in the early 19th century. The book argues that free and enslaved Black people in the United States, cognizant of Haiti’s centrality to the global struggle for Black liberation, defended Haiti and its sovereignty eventually giving birth to Black internationalism. This movement both demanded an end to slavery and insisted on full freedom, equality, and sovereignty for Black people throughout the African diaspora.

18th Century
History

Altschul, Nadia. "Saracens and Race in Roman de la Rose Iconography: The Case of Dangier in Bodleian Douce 195." Digital Philology 2, no. 1 (2013): 1–15.

Engages racialization in the portrayal of a character from a 13th century French drama. The essay examines the ways in which skin pigmentation and other somatic markers were coded to prompt audience responses, and in this way argues against some attitudes in contemporary medieval history which assume racialization is a modern phenomenon. Takes part in discussions about French literature, embodiment, and the history of art.

Medieval
Literature

Andrea, Bernadette. Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Investigates the conceptualization of Muslim societies among early modern English women. The work draws upon a range of sources—including romances, travelogues, and diplomatic correspondence—to sketch the ways in which English women took part in early modern Orientalist encounters. Engages conversations in gender studies, Mediterranean studies, and the cultural history of England.

Early Modern
Literature

Antrim, Zayde. “Qamarayn: The Erotics of Sameness in the 1001 Nights.” Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2020): 1-44.

Interrogates the construction of sameness in medieval Arabic literature through a close reading of one story from the Thousand and One Nights. Antrim offers an argument about how an erotics of physical sameness renders a binary understanding of sex unsuitable for the study of premodern Islamic and Arabophone contexts, and how the reception of medieval Arabic materials reads a sexual binary into older works. The article engages conversations in the study of gender, Islam, race, and Arabic.

Medieval
Literature

Armstrong, Dorsey. "Postcolonial Palomides: Malory’s Saracen Knight and the Unmaking of the Arthurian Community." Exemplaria 18, no. 1 (2006): 175–203.

Engages racialization in the portrayal of a character coded as “Saracen” from medieval English Arthurian literature. The essay argues that the “Saracen” knight ultimately serves to place a limit upon an idealized chivalric community, posing a problem that cannot be resolved through their embodied presence. The work engages the study of conversion, embodiment, and medieval English literature.

Medieval
Literature

Azfar, Farid. "Leviathan and the Asiento: A Counter-History of the Racial Contract." New Literary History 52, no. 3 (2021): 431–467.

A study of Thomas Hobbes's sociopolitical theory in the context of early modern European commercial contracts. Azfar delves into the intersection of racializing practice and early capitalism by embedding the composition of Hobbes's Leviathan within the context of European slaving contracts, providing a trajectory for the history of white supremacy. The work deals with debates in the study of political theory, capitalism, and enslavement.

Early Modern
History

Bale, Anthony. The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350-1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Investigates the rhetorical construction of Jews in medieval English texts. The book is specifically concerned with tropes—such as Jewish murder of Christian youths and Jewish participation in the death of Jesus—circulating in the elite intellectual circles of medieval England long after the forced expulsion of Jews from England. The work engages in the study of religion, anti-Semitism, and English literature.

Medieval
Literature

Barker, Hannah. That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260–1500. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

Interrogates the common culture of slavery between the Genoese, Venetian, and Mamluks in and around the later medieval Mediterranean. The work uses Arabic and Latin sources to present the ways in which the Black Sea trade in enslaved persons entwined actors across cultures and kingdoms, while also portraying the social landscape against which medieval enslaved persons lived and acted. Barker's work demonstrates that an integral part of that landscape was the construction of racial difference. This work is part of broader conversations in the study of the Mediterranean, cultural history, enslavement, and trade.

Medieval
History

Bashir, Haroon. "Black Excellence and the Curse of Ham: Debating Race and Slavery in the Islamic Tradition." ReOrient 5, no. 1 (2019): 92–116.

Examines Muslim scholars' refutations of the "Curse of Ham" narrative in largely medieval Arabic religio-historical works. The article draws upon a breadth of sources from premodern Muslim historians, theologians, and Sufis to excavate a longstanding tradition of Black Excellence in Islamic contexts, within which the Curse of Ham narrative was refuted on religiohistorical grounds. The article engages conversations in the study of religion, Islam, historiography, and Blackness.

Medieval
Religious Studies

Bassett, Molly H., and Vincent W. Lloyd, eds. Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh. New York: Routledge, 2015.

A compendium of essays engaging race and sainthood in largely Christian global contexts. The essays are interested in the tension between the titular “marked flesh” of the racialized body and the “holy flesh” of a presumably universal saint, interrogating this dichotomy in premodern Aztec, Andean, Caribbean, English, Indian, and other contexts. The collection deals with discussions in the study of colonialism, sainthood, and global studies.

Early Modern
Religious Studies

Bennett, Herman L. African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

This book outlines new analytics for framing the earliest history of the African-European encounter between the 11th to 19th centuries. It outlines how and under what circumstances Catholic dogma, institutions, and law mattered in the European encounter with Africans. Bennett argues that the under-examined and under-theorized African presence should be examined for its role in Western formation—a history in which Africa and Africans figured as objects and as historical subjects.

Early Modern

Betancourt, Roland. Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Investigates the entanglements between concepts of sexuality, gender, and race in the context of the Byzantine Empire from the 4th to 15th centuries. The book draws upon a range of case studies to excavate a history of overlapping marginalizations and minoritizations in the Byzantine world. It engages conversations across several fields including the study of gender, sexuality, religion, and art history.

Medieval
History

Bethencourt, Francisco. Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

A diachronic engagement with racializing projects in global contexts from largely European perspectives, from premodern to contemporary times. The work argues against a grand narrative of racism in favor of a contextualized approach, emphasizing that projects of racism must be understood as facets of specific sociohistorical conditions. It engages conversations in the study of captivity, displacement, colonialism, and global studies.

Medieval
History

Beusterien, John. An Eye on Race: Perspectives from Theater in Imperial Spain. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006.

Analyzes and theorizes the presence of the Hispano-Moorish in Spanish imperial theater in the 16th and 17th centuries. The book discusses how Spain visualized the religious and dark-skinned outsider. Beusterien seeks to depict how theater in imperial Spain showed blackness as a defiled religion and skin color.

Early Modern

Bigelow, Allison Margaret. Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. Omohundro Institute of Early American History Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Presents the transatlantic transfer of knowledge and language of mining developed in the 16th and 17th centuries from the Americas that contributed to European colonization of the New World. This study describes how the impurity of ores and metals was employed to describe the religious, racial, and gender markers of the mine and metalworkers. Bigelow uncovers ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors.

Early Modern

Biller, Peter. "Black Women in Medieval Scientific Thought." In Micrologus XIII: La Pelle Umana. The Human Skin, (2005): 477-492.

Analyzes a series of texts from antiquity and their reception among medieval intelligentsia on Black women’s bodies. The essay demonstrates a typography and conceptualization of Black women as objects of sexual desire through scientific traditions, such as the theory of humors. The essay engages conversations in the study of Blackness, sexuality, and history of science.

Ancient

Bindman, David, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume II: From the Early Christian Era to the "Age of Discovery." Cambridge: Belknap, 2010.

Examines figural representations of Black bodies in medieval European Christian visual arts, including manuscripts, portraiture, and sculptures. The work addresses a wide array of contexts—including Black saints, such as St. Benedict and St. Maurice, and literary characters such as Othello—to trace a range of attitudes on Blackness. The work engages the fields of art history, religion, and embodiment.

Medieval
Art History
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