Is it possible to speak of western racism before the eighteenth century? The term 'racism' is normally only associated with theories, which first appeared in the eighteenth century, about inherent biological differences that made one group superior to another. Here, however, leading historians argue that racism can be traced back to the attitudes of the ancient Greeks to their Persian enemies and that it was adopted, adjusted and re-formulated by Europeans right through until the dawn of the Enlightenment. From Greek teachings on environmental determinism and heredity, through medieval...

A Luso-Malay cosmographer who claimed to have discovered Ophir, a Franciscan friar who headed a delegation of shabby fraudulent emissaries from the Orient, a Dominican tertiary's confirmed stigmata eventually revealed as fraud but later venerated again as saintly, a Jewish convert who was suspected of both demonic possession and of feigned sanctity, poor folk who survived by converting time and again in order to enjoy the benefits accorded to neophytes, religious chameleons who adapted themselves to the surroundings in which they found themselves, and a number of possessed girls - these are...