The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages

by Geraldine Heng

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,...