A major reassessment of the place of racism in pre-modern European thought.

1. Introduction Benjamin Isaac, Joseph Ziegler and Miriam Eliav-Feldon; 2. Racism: a rationalization of prejudice in Greece and Rome Benjamin Isaac; 3. The invention of Persia in classical Athens H. A. Shapiro; 4. Racism, color symbolism, and color prejudice David Goldenberg; 5. Early Christian universalism and modern forms of racism Denise Kimber Buell; 6. Illustrating ethnicity in the Middle Ages Robert Bartlett; 7. Proto-racial thought in medieval science Peter Biller; 8. Physiognomy, science, and proto-racism 1200-1500 Joseph Ziegler; 9. Noble dogs, noble blood: the invention of the concept of race in the late Middle Ages Charles de Miramon; 10. The carnal knowing of a coloured body. Sleeping with Arabs and Blacks in the European imagination, 1300-1550 Valentin Groebner; 11. Was there race before modernity? The example of 'Jewish' blood in late-medieval Spain David Nirenberg; 12. Religion and race: Protestant and Catholic discourses on Jewish conversions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Ronnie Po-chia Hsia; 13. Vagrants or vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies in Early-Modern Europe Miriam Eliav-Feldon; 14. The peopling of the New World: ethnos, race and empire in the Early-Modern world Anthony Pagden; 15. Demons, stars, and the imagination: the Early-Modern body in the Tropics Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra.