Race in the premodern world

(Created for the fall semester of 2022) 

In this course, Mayte Green-Mercado asks students to examine the construction of race and ethnicity in the premodern Mediterranean. By understanding how constructions of race developed in the premodern world, students are invited to consider their own ideas about race and ethnicity. How do these ideas connect to the premodern world? How do they play out in our world today? 

Course Objectives 

• Students will gain a critical understanding of categories such as race, ethnicity, identity, etc. and should be able to question and explore the ways in which these categories were constructed in the premodern world. 
• Students will develop skills in oral and written communication, including sustained argument, and independent thought. 
• Students will have ample practice in reading primary sources and employing primary evidence in textual and historical analysis and argumentation.   

Journaling 

For each primary source students will select ONE word in the assigned source (i.e. cast, race, religion, etc.) and write a 500-word journal entry. The entry must analyze what the word means within the context of the source. Students will also reflect on what the terms mean today and to them.  

Course sequence and topics  

Week 1 - Introductions

Week 2 - The social construction of race

Primary source 

Schaub, Jean-Frédéric, Race Is About Politics: Lessons from History, trans. Lara Vergnaud (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019): 61-121 (Chapter 2: Historiographical Debate). 

Secondary sources 

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

López, Ian F. Haney, “The Social Construction of Race,” in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting  Edge, 3rd ed., Jean Stefanic and Richard Delgado (eds.) (Philadelphia: Temple University  Press, 2013): 238-248. 

Documentary 

Strain, Tracey Heather, et al. Race: The Power of an Illusion (San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel, 2003).

Week 3 - Vocabularies and periodization of premodern race 

Primary source 

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

Audio 

Heng, Geraldine, "Defining Race, Periodizing Race," Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/defining-race-periodizing-race.  [Accessed 9/1/25].

Secondary sources 

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, “Race,” in A Handbook of Middle English Studies ed. Marion Turner (Malden, MA, 2013): 109–22. 

Chaves, María Eugenia, “Race and Caste: Other Words and Other Worlds,” in Race and Blood in the Iberian World, ed. María Elena Martínez, Max. S. Hering Torres, David Nirenberg (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012): 39-58.   

Week 4 - Statutes of purity of blood  

Primary source 

Wolf, Kenneth B., “Sentencia-Estatuto de Toledo, 1449,” Medieval Texts in Translation, 2008. 

Secondary sources 

Martínez, María Elena, Genealogical Fictions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008): 25-41.  

Hering Torres, Max S., “Purity of Blood: Problems of Interpretation,” in Race and Blood in the Iberian World, eds. María Elena Martínez, Max. S. Hering Torres, David Nirenberg (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012): 11-38.   

Week 5 - Race and religion in medieval and early modern Spain  

Primary sources 

Muley, Nuñez, A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery of the City and Kingdom of Granada, ed. Vincent Barletta (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007): 55-64; 68-73; 90-99. 

“Renegade Jew: Luis de la Ysla,” in Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics, eds. Richard Kagan and Abigail Dyer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004): 21-35. 

Secondary source 

Amelang, James, Parallel Histories: Muslims and Jews in Inquisitorial Spain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013): 26-40; 69-79; 83-97.   

Week 6 - Orientalism: Muslims in the early modern European imaginary  

Primary source 

de Cervantes, Miguel, “The Bagnios of Algiers,” in The Bagnios of Algiers, and “The Great Sultana": Two Plays of Captivity, eds. and trans. Barbara Fuchs and Aaron J. Ilika (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010): 2-98.  

Secondary source 

Vitkus, Daniel J., “Early Modern Orientalism: Representations of Islam in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe,” in Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1999): 207-230.   

Week 7 - Race or ethnicity in early modern Spain: The Romani

Primary source  

de Cervantes, Miguel, “The Novel of the Little Gypsy Girl,” in Exemplary Novels, trans. Edith Grossman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016): 11-68. 

Secondary source 

Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, “Vagrants or vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies in early modern Europe,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, eds. Miriam Eliav Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 276-291. 

Week 8 - The curse of Ham in Christian and Islamic discourse

Video 

El Hamel, Chouki, "What is the 'curse' of Ham?" Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/what-is-the-curse-of-ham. [Accessed 9/1/24]. 

Secondary sources 

El Hamel, Chouki, "Race-making and the myth of Ham," Throughlines.  www.throughlines.org/suite-content/race-making-and-the-myth-of-ham. [Accessed 9/1/24]. 

Bashir, Haroon, “Black Excellence and the Curse of Ham: Debating Race and Slavery in the Islamic Tradition,” ReOrient 5/1 (2019): 92–116. 

Week 9 - African diasporas in early modern Europe

Video

Whitaker, Cord J., “Where were the Black people in the Middle Ages?” Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/black-people-in-the-middle-ages.  [Accessed 9/1/24]. 

Secondary sources 

Zhang, Angela, “Rethinking ‘Domestic Enemies’: Slavery and Race Formation in Late Medieval Florence,” Speculum 99/2 (2024): 409-431. 

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

Week 10 - Infrastructures of race in colonial Spanish America 

Primary source 

de Vitoria, Francisco, “On the American Indians” in: Vitoria: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): selections. 

Video 

Stevens, Scott Manning, "The Doctrine of Discovery," Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/the-doctrine-of-discovery. [Accessed 9/1/24]. 

Secondary source 

Nemser, Daniel, Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017): Chapter 1. 

Week 11 - Race and slavery in colonial Spanish America

Primary source 

de Sandoval, Alonso, “Treatise on Slavery” in De instauranda Aethiopum salute, ed. Nicole Von Germeten (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 2008): selections. 

Podcast 

BBC Podcast In Our Time: “Slavery and Empire” 

Secondary source 

Nemser, Daniel, "The Iberian Slave Trade and the Racialization of Freedom," in History of the Present Vol. 8, Issue 2 (2018): 117-139.   

Week 12 - Negotiating identities in colonial Spanish America

Primary source 

Poma de Ayala, Felipe Guamán, The First New Chronicle and Good Government, abridged, trans. David Frye (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2006): 263-277; 231-239. 

Video 

Stevens, Scott Manning, "Indigenous sovereignty," Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/indigenous-sovereignty. [Accessed 9/1/24]. 

Secondary source 

Hidalgo, Javiera Jaque and Miguel A. Valerio, “Negotiating Status through Confraternal Practices,” in Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status Through Religious Practices, eds. Javiera Jaque Hidalgo and Miguel A. Valerio (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022): 9-34. 

Week 13 - Geographies of race  

Primary sources 

Crewe, Ryan Dominic, “A Moluccan Crypto-Muslim before the Transpacific Inquisition (1623–1645),” in The Spanish Pacific, 1521–1815: A Reader of Primary Sources, eds. C.H. Lee and R. Padrón. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 171-187. 

Souza, George Bryan and Jeffrey S. Turley, eds., The Boxer Codex: transcription and translation of an illustrated late sixteenth-century Spanish manuscript concerning the geography, ethnography and history of the Pacific, South-East Asia and East Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2016): selections. 

Secondary sources 

Davies, Surekha, Renaissance Ethnology and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016): 23-46. 

Padrón, Ricardo, “Sinophobia vs. Sinophilia in the 16th Century Iberian World,” Review of Culture (Instituto Cultural do Governo R.A.E. de Macau, 22014) 46: 95-107. 

Week 14 - Casta paintings 

Secondary source 

Carrera, Magali, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003): chapter 1.