“Decolonizing the Medieval Literary Curriculum” shows why the critical teaching of the literatures of the deep past – in the form of a critical canon, and a countercanon – is essential today, at a moment when White supremacist and alt-right groups in the West are weaponizing the symbols, cultures, and histories of the European Middle Ages to assemble a spurious, fantasied past of White racial purity and superiority, prelapsarian Christian homogeneity, and religiopolitical supremacy so as to make this fantasied past the basis of authority for transforming today’s world. At the same time, changing population demographics in the West are creating cohorts of students in higher learning who have diversified substantially in terms of their race, class, countries of origin, sexualities, genders, and physical, cultural, and psychosocial composition. Students, even more than faculty, have called for curricular transformations that are responsive to the urgencies of our time. The pedagogical strategies and curricular offerings in this essay are thus an example of the efforts undertaken today by a community of largely premodernists of color who are working to teach a decolonizing curriculum, and who are profoundly engaged in transforming how the deep past is taught and studied in the twenty-first century academy.

Studies on premodern race have often focused on color as the paramount index of race – so that attitudes toward blackness are sought as the deciding factor adjudicating whether racial behavior and phenomena existed in antiquity and the Middle Ages. To complicate our views on medieval race, I have thus far emphasized multiple locations of race over a singular epidermal focus: fanning out attention to how religion, the state, economic interests, colonization, war, and international contests for hegemony, among other determinants, have materialized race and have configured racial attitudes, behavior, and phenomena across the centuries. But attention to color, and physiognomy characterized in tandem with color, are now the focus of this chapter.

In 1218, Jews in England were forced by law to wear badges on their chests, to set them apart from the rest of the English population. This is the earliest historical example of a country’s execution of the medieval Church’s demand, in Canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, that Jews and Muslims be set apart from Christians by a difference in dress. In 1222, 1253, and 1275, English rulings elaborated on this badge for the Jewish minority – who had to wear it (men and women at first, then children over the age of seven) – its size, its color, and how it was to be displayed on the chest in an adequately prominent fashion. In 1290, after a century of laws that eroded the economic, religious, occupational, social, and personal status of English Jews, Jewish communities were finally driven out of England en masse, marking the first permanent expulsion in Europe.

At the heart of the name by which Muslims – of all races and ethnicities – were known to Western Europeans during the Middle Ages, and for several centuries afterward, was a lie.

Racial form in the medieval period is neither singular nor free of contradiction, as I began to say in Chapter 1, and accrues through variegated and shifting means. In some historical contexts, Jews and Muslims might be treated as proximately alike: so that crusaders setting out to exterminate the infidel occupying the Holy Land, for instance, found it logical first to exterminate the infidel resident in Europe – analogizing readily from one racial-religious enemy to the other – with the result that they wreaked devastation on European Jewish communities en route. In some literary contexts, a slippage between thinking about Muslims and thinking about Jews also leads to conflations of one people with the other: In his celebrated romance, Parzival, for instance, Wolfram von Eschenbach refers to the Caliph of Baghdad as “the Baruch” of Baghdad, as if the leaders of infidel Abrahamic communities were interchangeably alike.

Our efforts in this book to understand how Europe viewed the races and peoples of the world end by considering a persecuted but resilient people whose history in the medieval period has been pieced together by records and laws in the countries through which they passed – an accretion of the written record that, over the centuries, has defined who these people are and attached to them characteristics that enduringly decided their group identity and personality, judging them collectively as a race.

In the two centuries after the encounters with Native Americans in Vinland, the alien races that drew the attention of Latin Christendom’s communities were Jews at home in the towns and cities of Europe and Muslims overseas, as we’ve seen in the discussions in Chapters 2 and 3. The thirteenth century, however, saw the arrival of a new alien race at the doorstep of Europe: At Europe’s northern and eastern corridors, steppe peoples whom the Latin West referred to as Tartars adventitiously made an appearance. The arrival of Mongols threw Christendom into disarray, since Mongols materialized as relentless, devastating conquerors, inexorably overrunning all in their path. In the course of half a century, Europeans therefore toiled mightily to render intelligible this new global race, hitherto unknown to them.

Growing up in a Singapore that was undergoing a process of decolonization from the British Empire, one of my earliest memories of race came as a result of having to earn a badge in the Girl Guides – which was at that time the tepid equivalent, for girls, of the Boy Scout corps created by Lord Baden-Powell and spread across the British imperial world of the twentieth century. As I was born female and Chinese (the majority racial group in Singapore), sexism and misogyny were not unfamiliar recognitions in childhood (for instance, the old immigrant woman from China who lived downstairs in our apartment block still had tiny, crippled, bound feet, or “lotus buds,” as the classic pillow book The Golden Lotus called them), but race is not as easily recognizable for those who inhabit a majority race. Malay neighbors, Indian classmates, Eurasian friends, and the intertwining, multicultural, multireligious life-worlds in Singapore did not foreground racial apartness or a palpable racial hierarchy for a child who belonged to the majority race.

Our discussion of race has thus far centered on the Abrahamic faiths and epidermal binaries of black and white. But what happens to race when Europe encounters a world of differences, in which non-Abrahamic religions and a variety of skin colors proliferate, and few coordinates exist to make sense of a plethora of humans previously unaccounted for?