ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches medieval race through the lens of the senses. Following an introduction to the sensory turn in the scholarship of race and a discussion of examples from across historical periods to show how race has been sensed into being, it probes the role of the senses in constituting, materializing, and maintaining race and racism in the medieval period. The final part of the chapter uses the fourteenth-century anonymous romance Richard Coer de Lyon to investigate how the senses of smell and taste and their relation to emotion and memory can encourage its audience to accept or reject racism and dehumanizing portrayals of Muslims in medieval literature.
