SOURCE: Bartlett, Robert. “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (winter 2001): 39-46.

In the following excerpt, Bartlett examines William's use of language to describe and differentiate people by race, nationality, and ethnicity.

Historians working in the present day, just like their medieval and early modern predecessors, are confronted with difficult choices when they write of human population groups.¹ When, if at all, is it reasonable to employ the word race, the word nation, the word tribe? What collective term best describes, say, the Goths, the English, the Jews? What meaning does the concept “ethnic identity” have? It is hard to do without some collective terms, but neither the medieval nor the modern terminology of race and ethnicity is simple or uncomplicated. Even the distinction between those two central terms, race and ethnicity, is drawn in different ways by different...