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by Mark Dawson (Author)
Bodily contrasts - from the colour of hair, eyes and skin to the shape of faces and skeletons - allowed the English of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to discriminate systematically among themselves and against non-Anglophone groups. Making use of an array of sources, this book examines how early modern English people understood bodily difference. It demonstrates that individuals' distinctive features were considered innate, even as discrete populations were believed to have characteristics in common, and challenges the idea that the humoral theory of bodily composition was incompatible with visceral inequality or racism. While 'race' had not assumed its modern valence, and 'racial' ideologies were still to come, such typecasting nonetheless had mundane, lasting consequences. Grounded in humoral physiology, and Christian universalism notwithstanding, bodily prejudices inflected social stratification, domestic politics, sectarian division and international relations.
Back Jacket
This book examines how bodily difference was understood by the people of early modern England. Using an array of sources - from sermons, polemics, and newspapers to medical case-notes, almanacs, diaries, and dramas - it traces people's attitudes to somatic contrasts, both among themselves and, as they ventured across the Atlantic, among non-Europeans.
The book demonstrates that individuals' distinctive features were thought to be innate, even as discrete populations were believed to have fleshly characteristics in common - whether similarities in skin-tone, facial profile, hair colour, or demeanour. According to most scholarship, bodies constituted from the same four elemental fluids as Adam and Eve's - the phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric, and melancholic humours - were not the stuff of visceral inequality or racism. But this book contends that people routinely judged others on sight according to the ostensible balance, or complexion, their humours. Complexions vouched for distinctions in social status, physical cum moral fitness, national allegiance, and religious affiliation. But to establish whether this scrutiny had a racist potential, we need to determine if the people of the day had an entirely naturalistic view of themselves and the world they inhabited.Author Biography
Mark S. Dawson is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the Australian National University, Canberra
