Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance

Abstract

Elizabeth Spiller studies how early modern attitudes towards race were connected to assumptions about the relationship between the act of reading and the nature of physical identity. As reading was understood to happen in and to the body, what you read could change who you were. In a culture in which learning about the world and its human boundaries came increasingly through reading, one place where histories of race and histories of books intersect is in the minds and bodies of readers. Bringing together ethnic studies, book history and historical phenomenology, this book provides a detailed case study of printed romances and works by Montalvo, Heliodorus, Amyot, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Munday, Burton, Sidney and Wroth. Reading and the History of Race traces ways in which print culture and the reading practices it encouraged, contributed to shifting understandings of racial and ethnic identity.

Re‐writing race in early modern European medicine

“…Representation of race was multifaceted, as consideration of the visual culture of Africans by Europeans has particularly shown (Carerra, 2003; Kaplan, 1979; Parker et al., 2000; Walker, 2017). It is nonetheless clear that what Hall terms the “languages of blackness” mattered, as did “what people did with text”—how they read it, and re‐read it, how text was staged, performed and enacted, and how, by these means, concepts of racial difference were disseminated and reanimated outside the arena of real‐life colonial encounters (Chakravarty, 2020; Hall, 1995; Jones, 2019; Spiller, 2011, p. 21; Thompson, 2008, 2021).…”

Diversifying Shakespeare

“…For some prominent examples, see: Hendricks and Parker; Callaghan; Royster (); Hutner; Archer; MacDonald (); Floyd‐Wilson; Iyengar; Morgan; Earle and Lowe; Vaughan; Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan; and Spiller.…”