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 …