Middle Ages and Race
Typing the keywords ‘race’ and ‘Middle Ages’ into one of your favorite search engines will bring you to a plethora of resources and authors spouting various understandings of one similar notion: race. However, race in the Middle Ages was far more complicated than you may think. Robert Barlett explores 'race' in the Middle Ages in the article Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity.
He shares that the medieval terminology includes the words gens and natio, which when translated 'most neutrally', can mean people and nation. Continuing, Barlett explores medieval classifying a bit further by sharing Scottish chronicler John Fordun's passage. Fordun illustrates the supposed differences between lowland and highland Scotts by naming the lowland or coastal Scotts as 'civilized' and the highlanders as 'wild...primitive'. Fordun clearly classified the the people of Scotland into separate boxes based on their location and behaviors.
This was a world in which blood and descent were seen as fundamental... solidarities were central to shaping patterns of property, power, and violence. To people who constantly saw fate and fortunes of individuals determined by their birth and descent, it was natural to conceptualize humanity in similarly genealogical terms
Pamela Patton writes on this in her chapter of Whose Middle Ages? titled '"Blackness, Whiteness, and the Idea of Race in the Medieval European Art:"
The human classification of the Middle Ages... enabled them to assign status, control movement, and limit agency for groups that they identified as different from, and thus in their view inferior to, their own.
So, in the medieval period, people were already being classified according to genealogy, people, and nation. What role did color play in classifying people?