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New Publications from Associate Professor Kim Coles

May 10, 2022 English

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New works include Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England and Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age (1350-1550)

Kim Coles Book Cover 2022

Associate Professor Kim Coles recently published her new book Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).

From the publisher: Race, in the early modern period, is a concept at the crossroads of a set of overlapping concerns of lineage, religion, and nation. In Bad Humor, Kimberly Anne Coles charts how these concerns converged around a pseudoscientific system that confirmed the absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics, guaranteed the noble quality of English blood, and justified English colonial domination. Coles delineates the process whereby religious error, first resident in the body, becomes marked on the skin. Early modern medical theory bound together psyche and soma in mutual influence. By the end of the sixteenth century, there is a general acceptance that the soul's condition, as a consequence of religious belief or its absence, could be manifest in the humoral disposition of the physical body. The history that this book unfolds describes developments in natural philosophy in the early part of the sixteenth century that force a subsequent reconsideration of the interactions of body and soul and that bring medical theory and theological discourse into close, even inextricable, contact. With particular consideration to how these ideas are reflected in texts by Elizabeth Cary, John Donne, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Mary Wroth, and others, Coles reveals how science and religion meet nascent capitalism and colonial endeavor to create a taxonomy of Christians in Black and White.

Kim Coles book cover

Coles also co-edited volume three of a six-volume-set, A Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021) with Dorothy Kim, Brandeis University, USA.

From the publisher:

How have definitions of race varied and changed over time? What impact have religion, science and politics had on race throughout history, and how has our concept of it been changed as a result? These ambitious questions are answered by 61 experts who - drawing on perspectives from history, sociology, anthropology, literature and medical humanities - deepen our understanding of how race has developed conceptually and in reality between antiquity and the present day.