(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 f