(Un)Doing History: Thinking with the European Middle Ages

Against the grain of much contemporary scholarship within medieval studies, this work emphasizes the radical alterity and historical rupture that the Middle Ages represents in European history.

Through an engagement with three contentious debates in medieval studies - historiography, race and individuated subjectivity - Vanita Seth’s work employs postcolonial and postmodern theorizing to explore questions of ontology, epistemology, facial privileging, and emotion and identity in the European Middle Ages and early modern period. While the subject matter of this book is historical, the stakes are contemporary and political. Seth’s contention is that it is the very alterity that the medieval represents that enables contemporary scholars and activists to recognize as historical that which is so often posited as ’natural.’ Writing a history of absence while also engaging radically different ways of being in the world, this book argues, helps to disrupt the self-evident naturalization of the face, to contest knee-jerk celebrations of individuality tethered to the human visage, and to recognize racism not as an age-old nemesis but as a distinctly modern form of organizing power.

This work is interdisciplinary, engaging scholarship in history, history of art, science studies, philosophy, feminist theory, anthropology, race studies and literature, and presumes no prior specialized knowledge in medieval studies and/or history. Essential reading for scholars and students in the fields of medieval and early modern history, race, historiography, identity and emotion studies.

Vanita Seth is an associate professor in the Politics Department, University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include histories of race, postmodern and postcolonial theory, feminist theory and early modern political thought. Seth is the author of Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500-1900, 2010. She was a former co-editor of Postcolonial Studies and is currently on its International Editorial Board.