The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages

by Geraldine Heng

Among neighbors in Latin Christendom, Ireland presents a resonant example of how even commonalities of faith can be adroitly manipulated to subserve colonial interests. English invasion and occupation of Ireland required a theological hermeneutic that insinuated difference of a fundamental kind between the Christianity of the colonized (rendered as inferior, defective, and deviant) and the Christianity of their Anglo-Norman colonizers (assumed as superior and normative). No less than the magisterial Bernard of Clairvaux in his Vita Sancti Malachiae declared the Irish to be “uncivilized in their ways, godless in religion, barbarous in their law, obstinate as regards instruction, foul in their lives: Christians in name, pagans in fact” (qtd. in Bartlett, Gerald of Wales 169, emphasis added). Given that the Irish members of Latin Christendom were pagans in fact, Pope Adrian IV, writing to Henry II of England in 1155, could authorize the English monarch to occupy Ireland – a land that had converted to Christianity a century and a half before England itself – “with a view to enlarging the boundaries of the church …

Exposition of a fundamental Irish difference in Christianity is accompanied by the elaboration of Irish socioeconomic difference and Irish cultural differences: Layer upon layer of negative judgments are nested in such a way as to discover a vast civilizational gulf between Ireland and England on a vertical axis of evolutionary development. Ireland’s economic practices of transhumance signified backwardness, evidence that the Irish “have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral living,” as Gerald of Wales, the gifted chronicler and ethnographer who accompanied his Anglo-Norman masters from England to Ireland derisively put it in his Topographia Hiberniae (O’Meara 101; Brewer 5: 151).42 Labor in Ireland is transformed into a condition of lack – moralized as willful laziness and self-indulgence – and assigned to the character of an entire people: “[T]he soil of Ireland would be fertile if it did not lack the industry of the dedicated farmer; but the country has an uncivilized and barbarous people … lacking in laws and discipline, lazy in agriculture” (William of Newburgh, qtd. by R. R. Davies 124).43 The Irish people are … a people getting their living from animals alone and living like animals; a people who have not abandoned the first mode of living – the pastoral life. For when the order of mankind progressed from the woods to the fields and from the fields to towns and gatherings of citizens, this people spurned the labors of farming. (Gerald of Wales,...

Caricatured as a primitive land – an undeveloped global south lying to the west of England – Ireland was accordingly positioned as a project in need of evolutionary improvement and instruction, in order to force the “savage Irish” (“irrois savages” [Lydon, Lordship 283]) to emerge one day from their barbaric cocoon into a state of enlightened civilization – an agenda, Robert Bartlett observes, that “would not be out of place in nineteenth-century anthropological thought” (Gerald 176).45

The not-yet of racial evolutionary logic then becomes perpetual deferment, a “not yet forever” (Ghosh and Chakrabarty 148, 152). Thus we find four centuries later that England’s authors – Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland is especially eloquent – are still derisively lamenting the premodern, backward, savage, uncivilized Irish.46 “So,” R. R. Davies wonders, “what was it … about the Irish which persuaded Edmund Spenser that they would never be able to reach that

of the Latin West after the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. Yet “[t]o be merus Hibernicus (‘pure Irish’) meant that one could never be the equal of an Englishman, whether one born in England or in Ireland

The Statutes of Kilkenny are rightly identified by scholars as racial law – legislating “a racial moment,” as Kathy Biddick puts it (“Cut” 453), in “the language of racism,” as James Lydon puts it (“Nation and Race” 106). Yet, issuing centuries after initial colonization, this edict merely ratifies rather than enacts race-making ab origo: “[t]he famously discriminatory 1366 Statutes of Kilkenny … merely codify a policy long pursued” (Hoffman 7).