The origins of racism in the West / edited by Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac and Joseph Ziegler.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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