The volume Stereotypes and Stereotyping in Early Modern England: Puritans, Papists and Projectors, edited by Koji Yamamoto, provides a fresh reassessment of the making and dissemination of stereotypes in England from the 1550s to the 1750s. This book consists of ten chapters, complemented by an introduction by Yamamoto and Peter Lake and a coda on the dialectics of stereotyping composed by Yamamoto, Lake, and Sandra Jovchelovitch. The essays comprising this volume consider stereotyping as “the attribution of certain characteristics to some category of person, institution, event or thing” (1). Moreover, this volume largely concentrates on stereotypes having negative connotations—particularly stereotypes regarding puritans, Catholics, and projectors. However, as Yamamoto and Lake observe in their introduction, “stereotyping was not always simply harmful to society,” since “stereotypes provided partial, yet powerful, frameworks for understanding and engaging with complex reality, and even taking political actions” (14). Accordingly, “stereotyping was so foundational to social life, and yet so very liable to escalation, that collective engagements with stereotypes often ended up perpetuating or even accelerating the very processes of stereotyping” (14). This phenomenon, defined as “dialectics of stereotyping,” explains why stereotyping has such a powerful impact on societies. Thus, the editor and contributors to this volume take into serious consideration the ongoing engagement of social psychologists with stereotyping, which psychologists describe as a representational practice inherently plural, dynamic, and open to manipulation and negotiation.
The ten chapters can be categorized into five thematic sections. In chapter 1, Tim Harris focuses on religious and national stereotypes in seventeenth-century England with the purpose of investigating stereotypes as false composites. This term denotes descriptions combining stereotypical features that are supposedly evinced by different members of a nation, a religious confession, or an ethnic group, but are never found together in one individual. Chapters 2–4 are devoted to stereotypes as heuristic tools in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. In chapter 2, Lake examines the Reformed preacher George Gifford's reaction to the puritan stereotype. This chapter aims to show that this stereotype initially served the godly Reformers to better understand their specificity and isolation, and only later was employed by their enemies against them. Chapter 3 by Yamamoto and chapter 4 by Lake and Yamamoto complement chapter 2, in that they call attention to the heuristic role of the stereotypes of the puritan and the projector in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays—mainly but not exclusively in the works of Ben Jonson—in a time when theater was emerging as a form of commercialized mass media.
Chapters 5 and 6 analyze coping strategies to contest stereotypes, with particular regard to the cases of Ranters, Quakers, and Catholics. As Kate Peters explains in chapter 5, Ranters and Quakers were denounced for their alleged religious heterodoxy, immorality, and sexual deviance. Consequently, these groups of religious radicals reacted to the allegations against them by refuting those allegations, requesting their opponents to provide evidence of their accusations, and counter-stereotyping—that is, by turning the accusation back on the accusers themselves. Counter-stereotyping is also among the main themes in Adam Morton's chapter 6 on the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, during which anti-Catholic stereotypes, widely employed by Whig polemicists, were eventually turned against Whigs and Nonconformists by Tory royalists. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on the coexistence of contradictory explanatory frameworks about a single subject. In chapter 7, David Magliocco highlights the ambiguity of Samuel Pepys's account of all things French, such as people, clothing, language, and music, which Pepys portrayed as prestigious and refined and, on the contrary, as excessive and immoderate. Such striking ambiguity was also present in seventeenth-century depictions of London as smoky and sinful. These depictions are the subject of William Cavert's chapter 8, which persuasively argues that the dirty air and the immorality of this big city were stigmatized and, at the same time, made acceptable in comedies that ridiculed anti-urban stereotypes.
Last but not least, chapters 9 and 10 clarify how stereotyping conditioned the making of identity and knowledge in Enlightenment England. In chapter 9, Bridget Orr explores how eighteenth-century plays, elaborating on new and existing characters, contributed to the development and spread of social, political, racial, and gender stereotypes. Likewise, chapter 10 by William Bulman explains how, in Enlightenment England, post-Reformation stereotyping about popery and puritanism (which revolved around examples of religious deviance such as imposture, priestcraft, enthusiasm, and fanaticism) influenced the understanding of non-Christian faiths such as Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. Bulman's chapter is illuminating, since it sheds light on the use of post-Reformation stereotypes to make sense of non-Christian religions in eighteenth-century England. However, this volume would have benefited from an additional chapter devoted specifically to anti-Jewish stereotypes, which were widespread in England between the Elizabethan era and the mid-eighteenth century, when a Jewish Naturalization Act was first passed in 1753 and then repealed in 1754. It is indeed no accident that stereotyped Jewish characters appear in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, despite the absence of overt Jews from England until their informal resettlement in 1655–56.
Briefly, Stereotypes and Stereotyping in Early Modern England has significant merits, in that it provides interdisciplinary, convincing, thought-provoking examinations of different instances of stereotyping in early modern England. Far from relying on simplistic and outdated notions of stereotyping as resulting merely from irrationality or moral panic, the essays comprising this volume reconsider the complexity inherent to the production and dissemination of stereotypes, the reaction strategies to stereotypes, and the impact of stereotyping on social attitudes and practices. Thus, this volume enables a better understanding of why stereotypes were so very pervasive in the early modern period and are still so pervasive nowadays, given that the dialectics of stereotyping is still actual and influential in today's societies, in which technological progress is not being matched by an equally advanced civic progress.
