Bad Humor Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England

"By analyzing how theology and natural philosophy of the period inform works of early modern English literature, [Bad Humor] traces the development of a racial logic that ultimately upholds and justifies English colonial rule by rendering impossible the religious conversion of Irish Catholics, Spanish Catholics, Africans and Indigenous people. Coles examines canonical works by John Donne, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare alongside readings of Mary Wroth, Elizabeth Carey and Aphra Behn to document an emerging relationship between melancholy and religious error that assumes the heritability of (un)belief. Writing within a contemporary American context that has witnessed a rise in white Christian nationalism, Coles offers a timely exploration of how race and religion become intertwined." (Times Literary Supplement) "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...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...[A]n important contribution to early modern critical race studies through its alignment of race, religion, and science." (Renaissance Quarterly) "Locating religion and race along a single axis, Kimberly Anne Coles measures the role of the connection between body and soul in the oppression and alienation of groups of people. Her argument gets at the foundations of race-making in a book that is thoroughly grounded in literary criticism, early modern race studies, religious history, early modern medical theory, and early American law." (Jonathan Burton, Whittier College) "Bad Humor is a timely contribution to ongoing conversations about how religion informed early modern race-thinking. Arguing that earlier conceptions of hereditary blood and rank enabled 'Black melancholy' to be tethered to irreligion, Coles shows that faith comes to be seen as less a feature of belief than an inheritable somatic condition. First articulated in relationship to Europeans and later to Black Africans, the idea that there exists a 'complexion of the soul' reveals early modern theology, natural philosophy, humoral medicine, and Protestant literature to be early contributors to white supremacy." (Valerie Traub, University of Michigan) "Uncovering how humoral theory entwines with philosophical and theological discussions of the relationship between body and soul, Kimberly Anne Coles makes clear that English Protestants rendered belief and non-belief heritable, and that this understanding of the heritable nature of belief was used to justify colonialism and the enslavement of Africans. Bad Humor provides important new insight into the racialization of religion in early modern English literature." (Dennis Austin Britton, The University of British Columbia) "In Bad Humor, Kimberly Anne Coles traces a logic whereby humoral imbalance-in particular, the excess of black bile supposedly registered in dark complexions-constitutes an essential moral inferiority that renders Christian conversion and civic affiliation impossible; those so cast outside the body politic are marked as legitimate objects of enslavement and genocide. Bad Humor compels us to attend to the enmeshment of science and religion in shaping early modern iterations of hierarchy and heredity attuned to the demands of emergent racial capitalism." (Melissa E. Sanchez, University of Pennsylvania)