A Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age

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The past is always an interpretive act from the lens of the present. Through the lens of critical race theory, the essays collected here explore new analytical models, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches in attempting to reimagine the European Renaissance and early modern periods in terms of global expansion, awareness, and participation. Centering race in these periods requires that we acknowledge the people against whom social hierarchies and differential treatment were directed. This collection takes Europe as its focus, but White Europeans are not centred in it and the experiences of Black Africans, Asians, Jews and Muslims are not relegated to the margins of a shared history. Situating Europe within a global context forces the reconsideration of the violence that attends the interaction of peoples both across cultures and enmired within them. The less we are attentive to the cultural interactions, cross- cultural migrations and global dimensions of the late medieval and early modern periods, the less we are forced to recognize the violence, intolerance, power struggles and enforced suppressions that attend them.

Author Bio

Kimberly Anne Coles is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, USA. She is the author of Religion, Reform, and Womens Writing in Early Modern England (2008), and Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England (2022). She has co-edited several collections on the topics of race and gender. She also serves on the Editorial Board of Renaissance Quarterly.

Dorothy Kim teaches Medieval Literature at Brandeis University, USA. Her research focuses on critical race, gender and sexuality, digital humanities, medieval womens literary cultures, medievalism, Jewish/Christian difference, book history, digital media, and the alt-right. She is the associate editor for the Journal of Early Middle English and the co-editor for the medieval to early modern section of Literature Compass.