Yale University Library Research Guides: Medieval Christianity: Interfaith Relations

Race in Medieval Period

Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages (Online) by Lynn T. Ramey Argues that certain attitudes and practices present in Europe's Middle Ages were foundational in the development of the western concept of race. Using historical, literary, and artistic sources, Black Legacies explores the multitude of ways the coding of black as "evil" and white as "good" existed in medieval European societies.
Figuring Racism in Medieval Christianity by M. Lindsay Kaplan Expands the study of the history of racism through an analysis of the Christian concept of Jewish hereditary inferiority. Imagined as a figural slavery, this idea anticipates modern racial ideologies in creating a status of permanent, inherent subordination.
The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Online) by Geraldine Heng Examining Europe's encounters with Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani ('Gypsies'), from the 12th through 15th centuries, this books argues that racial thinking, racial law, racial practices, and racial phenomena existed in medieval Europe before a recognizable vocabulary of race emerged in the West.
Racisms: From the Crusades to the 20th Century (Online) by Francisco Bethencourt A comprehensive history of racism, with the first chapters focusing on the Crusades in the Middle Ages.

The Bloomsbury Reader in Christian-Muslim Relations, 600-1500 by David Thomas (Editor) Brings together nearly 80 extracts from major works by Christians and Muslims that reflect their reciprocal knowledge and attitudes. It spans the period from the early 7th century, when Islam originated, to 1500.
Stories Between Christianity and Islam (Online) by Reyhan Durmaz Offers an original and nuanced understanding of Christian-Muslim relations that shifts focus from discussions of superiority, conflict, and appropriation to the living world of connectivity and creativity. Here, the late antique and medieval Near East is viewed as a world of stories shared by Christians and Muslims.

Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World (Online) by Michael Philip Penn Te first book-length analysis of encounters between Syria Christians and early Islam, Envisioning Islam highlights the ways these neglected texts challenge the modern scholarly narrative of early Muslim conquests, rulers, and religious practice.
Invitation to Syriac Christianity (Online) by Michael Philip Penn (Editor) Collecting key foundational Syriac texts from the second to the fourteenth centuries, this anthology provides unique access to one of the most intriguing, but least known, branches of the Christian tradition, which interacted with early Islam.
When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam by Michael Philip Penn Explores the earliest interactions between what eventually became the world's two largest religions, shedding new light on Islamic history and Christian-Muslim relations.

A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations by Edward Kessler (Editor); Neil Wenborn (Editor) An A to Z companion to 2,000 years of encounter between Judaism and Christianity.
Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (Online) by Anthony Bale Explores the medieval Christian attitude toward Jews, which included a pervasive fear of persecution and an imagined fear of violence enacted against Christians.
Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (Online) by David Nirenberg Examines how Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived with and thought about each other during the Middle Ages and what the medieval past can tell us about how they do so today.
Under Crescent and Cross: Jews in the Middle Ages by Mark R. Cohen Offers a systematic comparison of Jewish life in medieval Islam and Christendom--the first in-depth explanation of why medieval Islamic-Jewish relations, though not utopic, were less confrontational and violent than those between Christians and Jews in the West.