Race before Race in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene

Summary

Both geographically and historically, Tudor England uniquely forms a liminal border between the old world and the new; like the Roman god Janus, facing both past and future, it is both rightly called “the Renaissance” and “the Early Modern Period.” The sixteenth century, at the height of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, is still medieval inasmuch as it is still definitively and even triumphantly Christian. Firmly but turbulently Christian, the Tudor historical gaze peers even further back in time as English Renaissance thinkers rummage about in classical antiquity to find cultural capital with which they can create new identities with antique origins. But the sixteenth century also witnesses some of strongest pangs in the birth of modernity and, for England (among other nations), it is the beginning of the age of colonization. Searching for a conception of race and identity in Tudor England is thus an exceptionally difficult task.

As Loomba and Burton point out, race in the Renaissance “is routinely understood as drastically different” from how it was conceptualized in the Enlightenment and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for the Renaissance is generally thought of “as a premodern time when racial ideologies had not taken root.” Responding to Kwame Anthony Appiah's famous 1990 article on “Race,” Peter Erickson likewise argues, “the renaissance cannot meet the stringent definition of race gathered from the 19^th century” and study of race in the early modern period should begin with “sustained Portuguese contact with West Africa in the fifteenth century.” In order to uncover Early Modern and Renaissance understandings of race, we thus must turn to “pre-modern” sources, even though, as Jean Feerick notes, “traces of “ the “modes and logic” of race can be found in prior texts to the Enlightenment in which notions of race were hammered out.

The work of the Elizabethan poet, Edmund Spenser, would seem to be especially fertile ground for postcolonial and race theory; however, there is surprisingly little written on race and Spenser, and what is written focuses primarily on Spenser as an early modern poet and colonist of Ireland.