Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance

Elizabeth Spiller

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781139066198
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Elizabeth Spiller studies how early modern attitudes towards race were connected to assumptions about the relationship between the act of reading and the nature of physical identity. As reading was understood to happen in and to the body, what you read could change who you were. In a culture in which learning about the world and its human boundaries came increasingly through reading, one place where histories of race and histories of books intersect is in the minds and bodies of readers. Bringing together ethnic studies, book history and historical phenomenology, this book provides a detailed case study of printed romances and works by Montalvo, Heliodorus, Amyot, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Munday, Burton, Sidney and Wroth. Reading and the History of Race traces ways in which print culture and the reading practices it encouraged, contributed to shifting understandings of racial and ethnic identity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: print culture, the humoral reader, and the racialized body
• Chapter 1 Genealogy and race after the Fall of Constantinople: from The King of Tars to Tirant lo Blanc and Amadis of Gaul
• Chapter 2 The form and matter of race: Heliodorus’ Aethiopika, hylomorphism, and neo-Aristotelian readers
• Chapter 3 The conversion of the reader: Ariosto, Herberay, Munday, and Cervantes
• Chapter 4 Pamphilia’s black humor: reading and racial melancholy in the Urania
• Notes
• Index