This book offers a refreshing new approach to early modern critical race studies by investigating the correspondence of early modern science and religion in the construction of race and its manifestation in colonial practices. Specifically, Coles traces the process whereby wrong religion, caused by excess of melancholy corrupting the body and soul, becomes marked on the skin. She clarifies that in early modern England “the assignation of color is the index of religion—or its absence” (13). By merging early modern science and religion in her study, Coles demonstrates how theories of the body and soul were manipulated to designate people of color and their offspring as non-Christian in order to justify colonial oppression.
Coles weaves together close readings of sonnets, masques, closet drama, epic poems, and stage plays alongside religious history, early modern medical theory, and early American law. In the first three chapters of the book, Coles examines discursive transactions of body and soul to prove their mutual exchange of corruption, the corrupt soul's manifestation on the skin, and its dissemination to offspring. In each of these chapters, she first analyzes a mainstream literary text and then juxtaposes it with a discourse demonstrating its exploitation for political purposes. Chapter 1 explores the construction of Catholic identity in John Donne's Holy Sonnets in order to reveal the instability of the soul and the resulting correlation of religion and humoral disposition in Christopher Brooke's Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia. Chapter 2 underscores the pervasive idea of the soul's materiality by showing how melancholic bodies of religious others in Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blacknesse and Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus are unworthy of divine love. Chapter 3, which focuses on Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam, uncovers how Catholic identity is transmitted through the bloodstream, an ideology used to assert the inherent inferiority of Irish subjects in texts such as John Temple's The Irish Rebellion.
The final two chapters delineate the ways in which religious essentialism buttresses the treatment of bodies in colonial contexts. Chapter 4 analyzes Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in order to emphasize Spenser's understanding of body and soul as mutually constituted and his application of these views in A View of the Present State of Ireland as a means for suppression of irredeemable Irish subjects. Chapter 5 investigates how religious essentialism attaches to chromatic difference in William Shakespeare's Othello and Thomas Southerne's stage adaptation of Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko: A Tragedy.
This fifth and final chapter accomplishes the clearest articulation of Coles's argument, in my view. According to Coles, Othello stages a contest between two different kinds of racial thinking, that of rank and religion, in which the latter supplants the former. Coles argues that in spite of his “superior lineage and the evident virtue that it supplies, Othello is unable to overcome defects of nation and inherited paganism” (124). Similarly, Southerne's play addresses questions of lineage in the New World through the status of Oroonoko and Imoinda's child, particularly given that Southerne changed Imoinda's character to a white woman. To cement her literary arguments, Coles usefully outlines the transformation of laws in early America, which justified the proliferation of slave populations through a program of rape in order to increase profits. These laws eventually determined that all children of slaves would be enslaved and thus inherit a pagan identity.
As Coles puts it, the book's project is to “describe a process of color-coding, whereby certain Christians—Irish Catholics, Spanish Catholics, converted Africans, and Indigenous peoples—are marked as pagan for colonial purposes” (1). The book certainly achieves this objective, making an important contribution to early modern critical race studies through its alignment of race, religion, and science. Coles navigates an array of thorny historical and literary material in order to convey multifaceted points in each chapter, and finally, in the coda, she connects these findings to the one-drop rule, emphasizing that black skin continues to carry moral signifiers in our modern era due to this racist history.
