Empire of Magic offers a genesis and genealogy for medieval romance and the King Arthur legend through the history of Europe's encounters with the East in crusades, travel, missionizing, and empire formation. It also produces definitions of "race" and "nation" for the medieval period and posits that the Middle Ages and medieval fantasies of race and religion have recently returned.

Drawing on feminist and gender theory, as well as cultural analyses of race, class, and colonialism, this provocative book revises our understanding of the beginnings of the nine hundred-year-old...

This book challenges the common belief that race and racisms are phenomena that began only in the modern era.

This book is for readers who may or may not be familiar with the Middle Ages, but are interested in race and racism, and want to know how far back in time racism begins to appear. The book does for race studies what feminism, queer studies, postcolonial studies, have done to change how we view the past.