A man from a historically oppressed minority community is accused of a crime committed not far from where he lives. Although there is a dearth, if any, evidence for his having perpetrated this crime, he is arrested, tried, and sentenced to death.

This short paragraph provides a loose description of what happened to Julius Jones, a forty-one-year-old man imprisoned for over twenty years for a crime he claims he did not commit—and for which the evidence has proven ambiguous at best. After a widespread national campaign and heavy mediatization about the case, Jones's execution was cancelled by Oklahoma Governor Stitt only four hours prior to the time for which it was scheduled on November 18, 2021. Many other death row inmates—also black men, also incarcerated for most of their lives, also convicted without careful weighing of the evidence against them, and sometimes suffering from diagnosed learning and cognitive disabilities—were not so fortunate and died at the hands of their state.

But the paragraph above describes not only the experience of Julius Jones and other Black men in the contemporary United States, but also that of Mandl, one of countless German men arrested and sentenced to death in late fifteenth-century Passau, Germany because of his Jewish faith. In Mandl's case, his execution was not stayed at the eleventh hour, and his conversion only served to save him from the fire. As a newly Christian man, he was beheaded rather than burnt alive.

Race in/and the Middle Ages

In opening this introductory chapter in this manner, I hope to emphasize the similarities between these two episodes, ones so far removed in time and space, culture and environment, yet also rendered similar by the harassment and oppression of marginalized individuals. In both cases, men from minority communities are identified, apprehended, and murdered by the very legal system which should provide some respite from continuous harassment.

It is these similarities and the questions they raise about the origins of racism in medieval Western Europe that lie at the heart of the debate about race in the Middle Ages. This debate and the many scholarly articles and monographs devoted to it, as captured by Jonathan Hsy and Julie Orlemanski in their bibliography, “Race and Medieval Studies: A Partial Bibliography,” has gone on for at least thirty years.