Twelfth-century Christian learning constructed non-Christians as occupying the margins between humanity and animals

Evidence

It has been observed that the other side of the coin of the ‘renaissance’ of learning in the twelfth century and the ‘discovery of Europe’ was the exclusion of those who did not belong to this new world. A newly self-confident and articulate society came to define itself increasingly through a discourse of belonging in which the Church functioned as a holistic anthropological unit. Jews and Muslims, in denying the logic of the Church as the universal earthly expression of God’s charity, were thus perceived as defying an emerging set of ideas about what constituted humanity. The solution reached in Jacques de Vitry’s re-working of the earlier sketchy material in the Tractatus was to place them within a penumbra of civilisation, occupying a marginal territory between the fully realised humanity of the Church and animals, which lived by instinct rather than by reason. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 221

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader argument in this book about shared genealogies of antisemitism and Islamophobia, and to work on colonial racial categories placing subject peoples on a civilizational ladder. — connects to: Christianity was the non-negotiable core of civilized status in the antebellum Americas
• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘penumbra of civilisation’ concept as a positional framework between full Christian humanity and animals.