This special issue brings together some of the most dynamic current scholarship addressing race and ethnicity in the medieval and early modern periods. The contents include: "The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World" by Thomas Hahn "Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity" by Robert Bartlett "Black Servant, Black Demon: Color Ideology in the Ashburnham Pentateuch" by Dorothy Hoogland Verkerk "Pagans are wrong and Christians are right: Alterity, Gender, and Nation in the Chanson de Roland" by Sharon Kinoshita "On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England" by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen "Medieval Travel Writing and the Question of Race" by Linda Lomperis "Why 'Race'?" by William Chester Jordan

This book challenges the common belief that race and racisms are phenomena that began only in the modern era.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Geraldine Heng questions the common assumption that the concepts of race and racisms only began in the modern era. Examining Europe's encounters with Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani ('Gypsies'), from the 12th through 15th centuries, she shows how racial thinking, racial law, racial practices, and racial phenomena existed in medieval Europe before a recognizable vocabulary of race emerged in the West. Analysing sources in a variety of media, including stories, maps, statuary, illustrations, architectural features, history, saints' lives, religious commentary, laws, political and social institutions, and literature, she argues that 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. Her ground-breaking study also shows how race figured in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe in this time.

Focusing on a broad range of texts from England, France, Germany, and Italy -- conduct and courtesy books, advice poems, devotional literature, trial records -- the contributors to Medieval Conduct draw attention to the diverse ways in which readers of this literature could interpret such behavioral guides, appropriating them to their own ends. Medieval Conduct expands the concept of conduct to include historicized practices, and theorizes the connection between texts and their concrete social uses; what emerges is a nuanced interpretation of the role of gender and class inscribed in such texts. By bringing to light these subtleties and complexities, the authors also reveal the ways in which the assumptions of literary history have shaped our reception of such texts in the past two centuries.

This volume presents a comprehensive and collaborative survey of how people, individually and within collective entities, thought about, experienced, and enacted racializing differences. Addressing events, texts, and images from the 5th to the 16th centuries, these essays by ten eminent scholars provide broad, multi-disciplinary analyses of materials whose origins range from the British Isles, Western Iberia, and North Africa across Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East. These diverse communities possessed no single word equivalent to modern race, a term (raza) for genetic, religious, cultural, or territorial difference that emerges only at the end of the medieval period. Chapter by chapter, this volume nonetheless demonstrates the manifold beliefs, practices, institutions, and images that conveyed and enforced difference for the benefit of particular groups and to the detriment of others. Addressing the varying historiographical self-consciousness concerning race among medievalist scholars themselves, the separate analyses make use of paradigms drawn from social and political history, religious, environmental, literary, ethnic, and gender studies, the history of art and of science, and critical race theory. Chapters identify the eruption of racial discourses aroused by political or religious polemic, centered upon conversion within and among Jewish, Christian, and Islamic communions, and inspired by imagined or sustained contact with alien peoples. Authors draw their evidence from Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, and a profusion of European vernaculars, and provide searching examinations of visual artefacts ranging from religious service books to maps, mosaics, and manuscript illuminations