I'm of two minds about this! Because on one hand, this is a topic that really, REALLY needs exploration and Heng's book is really important in actually opening up the conversation beyond "well, race is a thing invented during the Age of Exploration, """medieval people""" (by this people almost always mean Latin Christian Europeans) were just super antisemitic and islamophobic"! 

But it's still very much a first attempt, you know? Heng's approach of looking at literary sources rather than political or legal ones isn't even bad, but it does hurt your concept when you write "the definitive book on race in the Middle Ages" and the inside is like "well in story a x and y happens, and in story b y happens too, but so does z"... along with how dense some of the chapters were (often with information that was relevant to the source Heng was analyzing, but not race-making itself), this made the book tedious to read. It's definitely a workable jumping off point as well as a good place to mine for sources if you're interested in "x people group in Medieval European literature," but I can't say I wasn't sometimes frustrated with the needlessly wide scope of the analysis.

Speaking of scope: I get that the book is about the European Middle Ages, but there's so much more race-related stuff going on in the Medieval World that would have strengthened the argument, I feel like. Obviously it's good to limit your scholarship to a time and place but if your scope is already going to be wide enough to include 10th century Norse-Indigenous interactions and 14th century Italian-Mongolian interactions under the same umbrella of "European"... well, the only thing connecting those two European groups is the fact that they're both white in modern, American constructions of race. Idk man. Excited for the class discussion.