This special issue brings together some of the most dynamic current scholarship addressing race and ethnicity in the medieval and early modern periods. The contents include: "The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World" by Thomas Hahn "Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity" by Robert Bartlett "Black Servant, Black Demon: Color Ideology in the Ashburnham Pentateuch" by Dorothy Hoogland Verkerk "Pagans are wrong and Christians are right: Alterity, Gender, and Nation in the Chanson de Roland" by Sharon Kinoshita "On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England" by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen "Medieval Travel Writing and the Question of Race" by Linda Lomperis "Why 'Race'?" by William Chester Jordan