"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 Masqu eof 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.
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."-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.