'For more than two decades scholars have been hotly debating the appropriateness of the term 'race' and its derivatives in the analysis of medieval European societies. Now, with this book, Geraldine Heng provides the most comprehensive and persuasive validation of race as a way into the medieval cultural 'imaginary'. Race, she acknowledges, was a concept that varied from place to place and changed in multiple ways over time. It was complexly intertwined with religious ideas, and although medieval notions of race shared content with some modern somatic notions (allowing for comparability), its specifically medieval distinctiveness owes much to the various faith communities within which it attained significance. This is not a book about blaming the Middle Ages or the West for racism; it is an erudite plea to pursue the study of racialisms, for truth's sake. No one interested in the vexing and tragic history of racial thought and the practices that it informed can afford to ignore this magisterial intervention into the scholarly conversation.' William Chester Jordan, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Princeton University, New Jersey
