Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance [Paperback]

Spiller demonstrates how early modern reading practices were connected to emerging attitudes towards racial and ethnic identity.Bringing together ethnic studies, book history and Renaissance literature, this book 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. Spiller presents detailed case studies of works by writers including Heliodorus, Cervantes and Sidney.Bringing together ethnic studies, book history and Renaissance literature, this book 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. Spiller presents detailed case studies of works by writers including Heliodorus, Cervantes and Sidney.Elizabeth Spiller studies how early modern attitudes toward 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 world 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, Munday, Cervantes, 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.Introduction: print culture, the humoral reader, and the racialized body; 1. Genealogy and race in post-Constantinople Romance: from The King of Tars to Tirant lo Blanc and Amad?s de Gaula; 2. The form and matter of race: Heliodorus' Aethiopika, hylomorphisl#t