Adin E. Lears reviews White before whiteness in the late Middle Ages

Wan-Chuan Kao. White before whiteness in the late Middle Ages. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024. 456 pp.

Review by Adin E. Lears

12 February 2026

This book attends to a metaphysics of whiteness in medieval Western European literature through an investigation of whiteness as an “operation” (p. 11). It asks how the invisible immanence of whiteness is “‘recognised or misrecognised’” and how it shapes social and political power (p. 9). If the whiteness studies emerging from critical race theory and the medieval studies informed by it are primarily concerned with dermal pigmentation, Kao expands the terms of the inquiry to objects and matter. He argues that white things—skin and bodies, but also clothing, gems, and other pale stuff—produced feelings of fragility, precarity, and raciality that in turn created and reinforced ideologies of chivalric masculinity, imperial dominion, and more. For Kao, “The dearth of whiteness critique in medieval studies that engages both somatic and nonsomatic figurations of whiteness leaves unchallenged the assumed clarity and knowledge of what whiteness is and means” (p. 5). Treating whiteness as unmarked naturalizes it and reproduces white supremacy. A messier picture of the contradictory valences of whiteness denaturalizes it and marks it as an object of inquiry. Scholars outside of medieval studies might take heed as well. Approaches in whiteness studies that link the emergence of racial consciousness with modernity tend to treat the Middle Ages as a precursor to the real development of whiteness. This does not do justice to the other forms of bias engendered in medieval Western European understandings of whiteness nor to its strange cultural work.

The book is organized around three different modes of operation. Part I, on “fragility,” draws on the thinking of Robin DiAngelo and others to examine how medieval identities formed as a reaction to affective and social triggers, for example, grief and loss. The “‘white fragiliacs’” of Middle English literature—male protagonists in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess (1368) and the anonymous dream vision, Pearl (c. 1380–90s)—both view their lost beloveds as gleaming, white objects: a fair epitome of courtly feminine virtue and a personified pearl (p. 20). Against these objects, each man seeks to reinstate his subjectivity and with it ideals of chivalric masculinity or bourgeois fatherhood. The work of Judith Butler and others grounds Part II, on “precarity.” Here, the white film of spiritual blindness in William Langland’s Piers Plowman (c. 1388) together with the whitlether (white leather) costume worn by actors portraying Christ in Middle English mystery plays complement the face like payndemayn (fine white bread) of the eponymous protagonist in Chaucer’s “Tale of Sir Thopas” (c. 1392–95). Such white matter offers ways of attending to the affective and aesthetic effects of deforming whiteness—of stretching it like cloth or squeezing it like a soft loaf. In these examples, whiteness indexes the precarity of the body politic, drawing attention to the ways materiality, aesthetics, and religion are persistently enmeshed with such a politic. Finally, in Part III, on “racialization,” the bloodless, white “lump child” of the Middle English romance, The King of Tars (1330) and the cross-species assemblage of “gentil” white falcon and Mongolian princess in Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” show how whiteness becomes a “technique of premodern racialisation in the West,” demonstrating—via Mel Y. Chen and Elizabeth Povinelli, among others—how medieval racialization operated through degrees of animacy, a continuum of “life” and degrees of “nonlife” (pp. 27, 30).

In Kao’s conclusion, this attention to whiteness vis-à-vis objects or nonhuman entities broadens to examine a “racialist environmentalism” operating as a “retro-futuristic medievalism” (pp. 341, 342). Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant (2015) is the basis for a critique of the current political landscape of identitarian medievalism, which broadly links white identity to environmental peril, yoking a longing for a purer and more natural, medieval past with a sense of present and future threat. For Kao, Ishiguro’s medievalizing narrative of Arthurian Britain suggests how racism can operate in terms of what Peter Sloterdijk calls “atmoterrorism,” creating a feeling—diffused and “ambient”—that pervades the environment (pp. 357, 359). Thinking racism through atmosphere and breath enables Kao to consider the toxicity of higher education, in particular the ways that white liberal comfort marks the intellectual environment of the classroom and extends racist atmoterrorism even as class discussion seems to address racism. Kao’s concluding turn to breath, historically a marker of life force, sits in moving juxtaposition with his invocation of the dying words of Eric Garner and George Floyd. This conjunction speaks to the metaphysical and ethical weight of this book, a call to cultivate a “breathable space” of community in difference (p. 377).