Geraldine Heng
My work focuses on literary, cultural, & social encounters between worlds, & webs of exchange & negotiation between communities & cultures, particularly when transacted through issues of gender, race, sexuality, & religion. I am especially interested in early globalism, & in medieval Europe’s discoveries & rediscoveries of Asia & Africa. In 2021, I was elected to the Society of Fellows, Medieval Academy of America, and in 2023, to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In May-June 2025, I will be part of the American Academy in Rome.
My first book, Empire of Magic (Columbia UP, 2003, 2004, 2012, 533 pp), traces the development of a literary genre—European romance, &, in particular, the King Arthur legend—in response to the traumas of the crusades & crusading history, & Europe’s myriad encounters with the East.
My second book, The Invention of Race in the European MIddle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2018, 504 pp.) conceptualizes medieval race, & treats Jews, Muslims, Africans & blackness, Native Americans, Mongols, & the Romani). Invention of Race was awarded the 2019 PROSE Prize for World History, & was featured by History Today in its Best History Books of 2018 list. It also won the 2019 American Academy of Religion prize in Historical Studies, the 2019 Robert W. Hamilton grand prize, and the Medieval Institute's 2020 Otto Gründler prize..
My short book, England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West, also with Cambridge, appeared in November 2018.
My 2021 Cambridge University Press Element, The Global Middle Ages: An Introduction, inaugurates the 40-title Cambridge Elements in the Global Middle Ages series. I am currently completing a new Cambridge Element, Teaching Early Global Literatures and Cultures.
My seventh book project, "Early Globalities: The Interconnected World, 500-1500," considers the artifacts of a 9th century global ship, global stories, slavery in early globalism, & race in early global contexts.
I've also edited an MLA Options for Teaching volume on the Global Middle Ages, with 26 essays & 34 contributors, half of whom are scholars of color and international scholars. Teaching the Global Middle Ages was published in November 2022.
With Susan Noakes, I coedit a Cambridge University Press Elements series of 40 titles on the Global Middle Ages, & with Ayanna Thompson, a Pennsylvania University Press series—RaceB4Race: Critical Studies on the Premodern—with volumes spanning antiquity, the Middle Ages, all the way till the 18th century.
In 2014, Lynn Ramey & I co-edited a special issue on The Global Middle Ages (10 articles, featuring 10 languages) for Literature Compass, Wiley-Blackwell's digital journal.
My teaching focuses on early global literatures, premodern race, race theory, the literatures & political cultures of the Crusades, holy war, the genealogies & texts of medieval romance, the literatures of medieval England, Chaucer/s, medieval biography, transcultural travel narratives, feminist theory, & transnational feminisms.
A documentary created by a student, Murray Sanders, for my undergraduate Bridging Cultures course, Envisioning Muslims: The Middle Ages and Today, can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/6914846
In spring 2004, I created, coordinated, & taught in “Global Interconnections: Imagining the World 500-1500 CE,” a 9-credit-hour experimental transdisciplinary graduate seminar collaboratively taught by 7 faculty to introduce an interconnected world spanning Europe, Dar al-Islam, Mahgrebi and SubSaharan Africa, India, China, & the Eurasian continent. For a description, see the article, “The Global Middle Ages” under Papers.
In 2007, Susan Noakes & I founded The Global Middle Ages Project (G-MAP), the Mappamundi digital initiatives, & the Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the Middle Ages (SCGMA). The history of our collaborations in G-MAP, & our 17 MappaMundi digital projects (with several more projects queued) can be viewed at: www.globalmiddleages.org
Anonymous donors created the Perceval Endowment ($320,000) in 2007 to honor & support my work.
In 2012-13, I held the Winton Chair ("for paradigm-changing research") at the University of Minnesota, Twin-Cities, where I convened a year-long faculty-graduate advanced seminar as a learning experiment: "Early Globalities I: Eurasia & the Asia Pacific" & "Early Globalities II: Africa, the Mediterranean, & the Atlantic." Syllabi for this year-long Winton Seminar can be found at: www.globalmiddleages.org
In 2013, the Director of the Libraries & Vice Provost at the University of Texas & I were awarded a $154,800 Mellon/CLIR grant to host a postdoctoral fellow in data curation, to help with the creation of MappaMundi, the digital portal of G-MAP. MappaMundi was launched on October 1, 2015 at: www.globalmiddleages.org
I currently hold the Mildred Hayek Vacek and John Roman Vacek Chair in English at the University of Texas, Austin.
My first book, Empire of Magic (Columbia UP, 2003, 2004, 2012, 533 pp), traces the development of a literary genre—European romance, &, in particular, the King Arthur legend—in response to the traumas of the crusades & crusading history, & Europe’s myriad encounters with the East.
My second book, The Invention of Race in the European MIddle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2018, 504 pp.) conceptualizes medieval race, & treats Jews, Muslims, Africans & blackness, Native Americans, Mongols, & the Romani). Invention of Race was awarded the 2019 PROSE Prize for World History, & was featured by History Today in its Best History Books of 2018 list. It also won the 2019 American Academy of Religion prize in Historical Studies, the 2019 Robert W. Hamilton grand prize, and the Medieval Institute's 2020 Otto Gründler prize..
My short book, England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West, also with Cambridge, appeared in November 2018.
My 2021 Cambridge University Press Element, The Global Middle Ages: An Introduction, inaugurates the 40-title Cambridge Elements in the Global Middle Ages series. I am currently completing a new Cambridge Element, Teaching Early Global Literatures and Cultures.
My seventh book project, "Early Globalities: The Interconnected World, 500-1500," considers the artifacts of a 9th century global ship, global stories, slavery in early globalism, & race in early global contexts.
I've also edited an MLA Options for Teaching volume on the Global Middle Ages, with 26 essays & 34 contributors, half of whom are scholars of color and international scholars. Teaching the Global Middle Ages was published in November 2022.
With Susan Noakes, I coedit a Cambridge University Press Elements series of 40 titles on the Global Middle Ages, & with Ayanna Thompson, a Pennsylvania University Press series—RaceB4Race: Critical Studies on the Premodern—with volumes spanning antiquity, the Middle Ages, all the way till the 18th century.
In 2014, Lynn Ramey & I co-edited a special issue on The Global Middle Ages (10 articles, featuring 10 languages) for Literature Compass, Wiley-Blackwell's digital journal.
My teaching focuses on early global literatures, premodern race, race theory, the literatures & political cultures of the Crusades, holy war, the genealogies & texts of medieval romance, the literatures of medieval England, Chaucer/s, medieval biography, transcultural travel narratives, feminist theory, & transnational feminisms.
A documentary created by a student, Murray Sanders, for my undergraduate Bridging Cultures course, Envisioning Muslims: The Middle Ages and Today, can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/6914846
In spring 2004, I created, coordinated, & taught in “Global Interconnections: Imagining the World 500-1500 CE,” a 9-credit-hour experimental transdisciplinary graduate seminar collaboratively taught by 7 faculty to introduce an interconnected world spanning Europe, Dar al-Islam, Mahgrebi and SubSaharan Africa, India, China, & the Eurasian continent. For a description, see the article, “The Global Middle Ages” under Papers.
In 2007, Susan Noakes & I founded The Global Middle Ages Project (G-MAP), the Mappamundi digital initiatives, & the Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the Middle Ages (SCGMA). The history of our collaborations in G-MAP, & our 17 MappaMundi digital projects (with several more projects queued) can be viewed at: www.globalmiddleages.org
Anonymous donors created the Perceval Endowment ($320,000) in 2007 to honor & support my work.
In 2012-13, I held the Winton Chair ("for paradigm-changing research") at the University of Minnesota, Twin-Cities, where I convened a year-long faculty-graduate advanced seminar as a learning experiment: "Early Globalities I: Eurasia & the Asia Pacific" & "Early Globalities II: Africa, the Mediterranean, & the Atlantic." Syllabi for this year-long Winton Seminar can be found at: www.globalmiddleages.org
In 2013, the Director of the Libraries & Vice Provost at the University of Texas & I were awarded a $154,800 Mellon/CLIR grant to host a postdoctoral fellow in data curation, to help with the creation of MappaMundi, the digital portal of G-MAP. MappaMundi was launched on October 1, 2015 at: www.globalmiddleages.org
I currently hold the Mildred Hayek Vacek and John Roman Vacek Chair in English at the University of Texas, Austin.
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Books by Geraldine Heng
Looking across civilizations and cultures, Teaching the Global Middle Ages takes a broad view of the past to foster new habits of thinking, and develop a multilayered, critical sense of the past, to guide learning, teaching, and study in the twenty-first century academy.
The 26 essays in this volume of 34 contributors, half of whom are scholars of color and/or international scholars, reach across disciplinary lines to bring insights from music, theater, religion, ecology, museums, and the history of disease into the literature classroom and beyond. The contributors provide guidance on texts such as The Thousand and One Nights, Sunjata: The Epic of Mali, Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels, and the Malay Annals, and on topics such as hotels, maps, and camels.
Contributors propose syllabus recommendations, present numerous digital resources, and offer engaging class activities and discussion questions. Ultimately, they provide tools that will help students at all levels—undergraduate, graduate, and the general public–evaluate popular representations of the medieval past, and engage with the dynamics of past, present, and future world relationships.
It considers key issues of vocabulary, chronology, and themes central to the conceptualization and theorization of the global in premodernity; treats the relationship of global premodernity to global modernity; and surveys a variety of approaches to the global in earlier and emergent scholarship. This Element compares our current moment’s study of the global with preceding as well as ongoing programmatic studies such as world-systems theories and the teaching of world history and world literature in higher education today.
This introductory Element brings into focus the sustained importance of critical reflection and critical analysis, and promulgates a critical---not an additive---version of early global studies.
Studying stories, maps, statuary, illustrations, architectural features, history, saints’ lives, religious commentary, laws, political and social institutions, and literature, an important focus of the book is how religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental differences among humans that created strategic essentialisms to mark off human groups and populations for racialized treatment. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe in this time.
The book argues that romance arose in the 12th century as a cultural response to the trauma and horror of taboo acts—in particular the cannibalism committed by crusaders on the bodies of Muslim enemies in Syria during the First Crusade. From such encounters with the East sprang the fantastical episodes featuring King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle, The History of the Kings of England, a work where history and fantasy collide and merge, each into the other, inventing crucial new examples and models for romances to come.
After locating the rise of romance and Arthurian legend in the contact zones of East and West, Empire of Magic demonstrates the adaptability of romance and its key role in the genesis of an English national identity. Discussing Jews, women, children, and sexuality in works like the romance of Richard Lionheart, stories of the saintly Constance, Arthurian chivralic literature, the legend of Prester John, and travel narratives, the book shows how fantasy enabled audiences to work through issues of communal identity, race, color, class and alternative sexualities in socially sanctioned and safe modes of cultural discussion in which pleasure, not anxiety, was paramount.
Romance also engaged with the threat of modernity in the late medieval period, as economic, social, and technological transformations occurred and awareness grew of a vastly enlarged world beyond Europe, one encompassing India, China, and Africa. Finally, the author suggests that romance locates England and Europe within an empire of magic and knowledge that surveys the world and makes it intelligible—usable—for the future.
"
Papers by Geraldine Heng
An extraordinary thing happened in the field of critical race studies this fall. A 46-page book review of my 2018 Cambridge University Press book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, appeared in the journal Medieval Encounters. The journal called the 46-page opus a “review essay,” though the review did not treat any other books or any larger subjects, as review essays do: it was just a sustained condemnation of a single book, mine.
As I sought to understand the 46-page hatchet job, it slowly became clear that there were key issues at stake: issues involving what colleagues of color called “white privilege,” which facilitates attacks on scholars of color; the status and legitimacy of critical race analysis in premodern studies today; the vulnerability of junior scholars who want to undertake new work on race; and what race scholarship and pedagogy might look like in the foreseeable future. This essay is an attempt to address as many of these issues as possible.
Now live on H-Net Book Channel here: https://networks.h-net.org/h-net-book-channel and here: https://networks.h-net.org/node/109065/pages/1348052/teaching-essay-race-european-middle-ages
https://smile.amazon.com/Invention-Race-European-Middle-Ages/dp/1108422780/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1516274798&sr=1-1&keywords=Geraldine+Heng
Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features—the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race.
One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time.
Part I—“Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”—surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide.
Part II—“Locations of Medieval Race”—identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.
Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features—the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race.
One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time.
Part I—“Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”—surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide.
Part II—“Locations of Medieval Race”—identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.
A statue that art historians refer to as the Black St Maurice was created for the imperial cathedral of Magdeburg, Germany, announcing to all that Maurice, a famed martyr of the Roman legions executed by Rome for his allegiance to Christianity, was a black African.
From Magdeburg, the idea of Maurice as black spread across Europe, influencing portrayals of the saint in painting, statuary, stained glass, and other art forms for centuries afterward.
Who was responsible for Africanizing St Maurice, and why? And why did an African saint materialize at this time?
“An African Saint in Medieval Europe” analyzes the enigma of racial sanctity through a macro-optic of translocation—how and why Africa is made mobile and transported to Europe through an image possessed by a major cathedral city of the Holy Roman Empire—and a micro-optics of piety: the consolation, identification, play, and reassurance that can be apotropaically tapped in representations of sainted blacks like Maurice.
That convergence—between how to study the global past, and how to read literary texts—drives this essay’s critical examination of salient methods, concepts, and objectives, and of the politics of endeavor.
As examples, the essay analyzes historiographies of the global current today, asking what is at stake in reading global premodernity, and reading literary texts, at a historical moment when universities from Texas to Minnesota, Oxford to Illinois, North Carolina to California are beginning to study early globalities, a Global Middle Ages, or a “Medieval Globe.”
1. SU-FANG NG, "Global Souvenirs: Bridging East & West in the Malay Alexander Romance";
2. ALEXANDER WOLFE, "Marco Polo, Factotum, Auditor: Language & Political Culture in the Mongol World Empire";
3. REBECCA GOULD, "The Cosmopolitan Geography of Prison Poetics: Khaqani of Shirwan's Christian Qasida";
4. KATE NORAKO, "Crusading Gone Global? The Icelandic Magnussonasaga's Visions of the World & Home";
5. GLORIA HERNANDEZ, "The Libro de los ejemplos del Conde Lucanor & the Panchatantra: Translatio, Power, & Comparison";
6. CHRISTOPHER TAYLOR, "Global Circulation as Christian Enclosure: Legend, Empire, & the Nomadic Prester John";
7. JEROLD FRAKES, "Quid Shmuel cum Homero? Greek Culture & Early Yiddish Epic";
8. MARGARET KIM, "Globalizing Imperium: Thirteenth-Century Perspectives on the Mongols";
9. ANNA CZARNOWUS, "The Mongols, Eastern Europe, & Western Europe: The Mirabillia Tradition in Benedict of Poland's Historia Tartarorum and John of Plano Carpini's Historia Mongalorum.""
Looking across civilizations and cultures, Teaching the Global Middle Ages takes a broad view of the past to foster new habits of thinking, and develop a multilayered, critical sense of the past, to guide learning, teaching, and study in the twenty-first century academy.
The 26 essays in this volume of 34 contributors, half of whom are scholars of color and/or international scholars, reach across disciplinary lines to bring insights from music, theater, religion, ecology, museums, and the history of disease into the literature classroom and beyond. The contributors provide guidance on texts such as The Thousand and One Nights, Sunjata: The Epic of Mali, Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels, and the Malay Annals, and on topics such as hotels, maps, and camels.
Contributors propose syllabus recommendations, present numerous digital resources, and offer engaging class activities and discussion questions. Ultimately, they provide tools that will help students at all levels—undergraduate, graduate, and the general public–evaluate popular representations of the medieval past, and engage with the dynamics of past, present, and future world relationships.
It considers key issues of vocabulary, chronology, and themes central to the conceptualization and theorization of the global in premodernity; treats the relationship of global premodernity to global modernity; and surveys a variety of approaches to the global in earlier and emergent scholarship. This Element compares our current moment’s study of the global with preceding as well as ongoing programmatic studies such as world-systems theories and the teaching of world history and world literature in higher education today.
This introductory Element brings into focus the sustained importance of critical reflection and critical analysis, and promulgates a critical---not an additive---version of early global studies.
Studying stories, maps, statuary, illustrations, architectural features, history, saints’ lives, religious commentary, laws, political and social institutions, and literature, an important focus of the book is how religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental differences among humans that created strategic essentialisms to mark off human groups and populations for racialized treatment. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe in this time.
The book argues that romance arose in the 12th century as a cultural response to the trauma and horror of taboo acts—in particular the cannibalism committed by crusaders on the bodies of Muslim enemies in Syria during the First Crusade. From such encounters with the East sprang the fantastical episodes featuring King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle, The History of the Kings of England, a work where history and fantasy collide and merge, each into the other, inventing crucial new examples and models for romances to come.
After locating the rise of romance and Arthurian legend in the contact zones of East and West, Empire of Magic demonstrates the adaptability of romance and its key role in the genesis of an English national identity. Discussing Jews, women, children, and sexuality in works like the romance of Richard Lionheart, stories of the saintly Constance, Arthurian chivralic literature, the legend of Prester John, and travel narratives, the book shows how fantasy enabled audiences to work through issues of communal identity, race, color, class and alternative sexualities in socially sanctioned and safe modes of cultural discussion in which pleasure, not anxiety, was paramount.
Romance also engaged with the threat of modernity in the late medieval period, as economic, social, and technological transformations occurred and awareness grew of a vastly enlarged world beyond Europe, one encompassing India, China, and Africa. Finally, the author suggests that romance locates England and Europe within an empire of magic and knowledge that surveys the world and makes it intelligible—usable—for the future.
"
An extraordinary thing happened in the field of critical race studies this fall. A 46-page book review of my 2018 Cambridge University Press book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, appeared in the journal Medieval Encounters. The journal called the 46-page opus a “review essay,” though the review did not treat any other books or any larger subjects, as review essays do: it was just a sustained condemnation of a single book, mine.
As I sought to understand the 46-page hatchet job, it slowly became clear that there were key issues at stake: issues involving what colleagues of color called “white privilege,” which facilitates attacks on scholars of color; the status and legitimacy of critical race analysis in premodern studies today; the vulnerability of junior scholars who want to undertake new work on race; and what race scholarship and pedagogy might look like in the foreseeable future. This essay is an attempt to address as many of these issues as possible.
Now live on H-Net Book Channel here: https://networks.h-net.org/h-net-book-channel and here: https://networks.h-net.org/node/109065/pages/1348052/teaching-essay-race-european-middle-ages
https://smile.amazon.com/Invention-Race-European-Middle-Ages/dp/1108422780/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1516274798&sr=1-1&keywords=Geraldine+Heng
Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features—the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race.
One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time.
Part I—“Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”—surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide.
Part II—“Locations of Medieval Race”—identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.
Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features—the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race.
One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time.
Part I—“Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”—surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide.
Part II—“Locations of Medieval Race”—identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.
A statue that art historians refer to as the Black St Maurice was created for the imperial cathedral of Magdeburg, Germany, announcing to all that Maurice, a famed martyr of the Roman legions executed by Rome for his allegiance to Christianity, was a black African.
From Magdeburg, the idea of Maurice as black spread across Europe, influencing portrayals of the saint in painting, statuary, stained glass, and other art forms for centuries afterward.
Who was responsible for Africanizing St Maurice, and why? And why did an African saint materialize at this time?
“An African Saint in Medieval Europe” analyzes the enigma of racial sanctity through a macro-optic of translocation—how and why Africa is made mobile and transported to Europe through an image possessed by a major cathedral city of the Holy Roman Empire—and a micro-optics of piety: the consolation, identification, play, and reassurance that can be apotropaically tapped in representations of sainted blacks like Maurice.
That convergence—between how to study the global past, and how to read literary texts—drives this essay’s critical examination of salient methods, concepts, and objectives, and of the politics of endeavor.
As examples, the essay analyzes historiographies of the global current today, asking what is at stake in reading global premodernity, and reading literary texts, at a historical moment when universities from Texas to Minnesota, Oxford to Illinois, North Carolina to California are beginning to study early globalities, a Global Middle Ages, or a “Medieval Globe.”
1. SU-FANG NG, "Global Souvenirs: Bridging East & West in the Malay Alexander Romance";
2. ALEXANDER WOLFE, "Marco Polo, Factotum, Auditor: Language & Political Culture in the Mongol World Empire";
3. REBECCA GOULD, "The Cosmopolitan Geography of Prison Poetics: Khaqani of Shirwan's Christian Qasida";
4. KATE NORAKO, "Crusading Gone Global? The Icelandic Magnussonasaga's Visions of the World & Home";
5. GLORIA HERNANDEZ, "The Libro de los ejemplos del Conde Lucanor & the Panchatantra: Translatio, Power, & Comparison";
6. CHRISTOPHER TAYLOR, "Global Circulation as Christian Enclosure: Legend, Empire, & the Nomadic Prester John";
7. JEROLD FRAKES, "Quid Shmuel cum Homero? Greek Culture & Early Yiddish Epic";
8. MARGARET KIM, "Globalizing Imperium: Thirteenth-Century Perspectives on the Mongols";
9. ANNA CZARNOWUS, "The Mongols, Eastern Europe, & Western Europe: The Mirabillia Tradition in Benedict of Poland's Historia Tartarorum and John of Plano Carpini's Historia Mongalorum.""
In 1290, England became the first European country to expel its Jews, but the literary and cultural manipulation of its now-absent Jews continued into the early modern period, when Shakespeare’s famed Merchant of Venice set the activities of Shylock, arguably the most famous Jewish character in literature, in Venice, not England.
My current book, the Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, includes a chapter that considers medieval England to be Europe's first racial state. The chapter ends with "England's Dead Boys," an analysis of differences in the literary treatment of England’s Jews before and after the Expulsion of 1290, to gain a finer-grained perspective of what changes in the cultural manipulation of Jews.
“England’s Dead Boys” compares three pre- and post-expulsion literary exemplars that narrate, invoke, or mime the plot of young Hugh of Lincoln’s putative murder by Jews in 1255. The coda to this cluster of pre- and post-expulsion retellings is a literary tale that turns the boy-slaughter plot inside out, showing us what can be gained when the story is changed, and the boy does not die.
Texts in this case study are: the Anglo-Norman ballad Hughes de Lincoln, Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, The Christian Child Slain by Jews, and The Jewish Boy. "
1. SU-FANG NG, "Global Souvenirs: Bridging East & West in the Malay Alexander Romance"
2. ALEXANDER WOLFE, "Marco Polo, Factotum, Auditor: Language & Political Culture in the Mongol World Empire"
3. REBECCA GOULD, "The Cosmopolitan Geography of Prison Poetics: Khaqani of Shirwan's Christian Qasida"
4. KATE NORAKO, "Crusading Gone Global? The Icelandic Magnussonasaga's Visions of the World & Home"
5. GLORIA HERNANDEZ, "The Libro de los ejemplos del Conde Lucanor & the Panchatantra: Translatio, Power, & Comparison"
6. CHRISTOPHER TAYLOR, "Global Circulation as Christian Enclosure: Legend, Empire, & the Nomadic Prester John"
7. JEROLD FRAKES, "Quid Shmuel cum Homero? Greek Culture & Early Yiddish Epic"
8. MARGARET KIM, " Globalizing Imperium: Thirteenth-Century Perspectives on the Mongols"
9. ANNA CZARNOWUS, "The Mongols, Eastern Europe, & Western Europe: The Mirabillia Tradition in Benedict of Poland's Historia Tartarorum and John of Plano Carpini's Historia Mongalorum."""
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3yd1sG6GRE&app=desktop