Bad humor : race and religious essentialism in early modern England / Kimberly Anne Coles.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Coles, Kimberly Anne, 1966- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English literature.

Race--Religious aspects--Christianity--History.

Race.

Human body--Religious aspects--Christianity--History.

Human body.

Race awareness--England--History.

Race awareness.

Religion and literature--England--History.

Religion and literature.

Body and soul in literature.

Race in literature.

Religion in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (218 pages)

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Race, in the early modern period, is a concept at the crossroads of a set of overlapping concerns of lineage, religion, and nation. In Bad Humor, Kimberly Anne Coles charts how these concerns converged around a pseudoscientific system that confirmed the absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics, guaranteed the noble quality of English blood, and justified English colonial domination.Coles delineates the process whereby religious error, first resident in the body, becomes marked on the skin. Early modern medical theory bound together psyche and soma in mutual influence. By the end of the sixteenth century, there is a general acceptance that the soul's condition, as a consequence of religious belief or its absence, could be manifest in the humoral disposition of the physical body. The history that this book unfolds describes developments in natural philosophy in the early part of the sixteenth century that force a subsequent reconsideration of the interactions of body and soul and that bring medical theory and theological discourse into close, even inextricable, contact. With particular consideration to how these ideas are reflected in texts by Elizabeth Cary, John Donne, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Mary Wroth, and others, Coles reveals how science and religion meet nascent capitalism and colonial endeavor to create a taxonomy of Christians in Black and White.

Contents:

Introduction

“Soules drown’d in flesh and blood” : The Fluid Poetics of John Donne and Christopher Brooke

Bad Faith : The Color of Wrong Religion in Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness and Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

Moral Constitution : The Color of Blood in Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam and the New English Tracts

“Soule is Forme” : The (Re)formation of the Body in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

Moral Husbandry : Cultivating Right Religion in New Worlds

Coda. The One-Drop Rule.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780812298352

0812298357

OCLC:

1294146004