Biblical and Medieval Precedents

The Bible and Christian teaching provided numerous references to black and white that influenced the construction and interpretation of characters with black and white skin. For example, the Geneva Bible’s (1560) translation of Jerimiah 13:23 states, “Can the black More change his skin? or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.” Although the passage says nothing about the actual spiritual conditions of peoples with black skin, the analogy nonetheless links blackness and sinfulness. The Geneva Bible’s gloss to Song of Solomon 1:4–5 also linked blackness to sin: “I am black, O daughters of Jerusalem, but comely, as the tents of Kedar, and as the curtains of Solomon. Regard ye me not because I am black: for the sun hath looked upon me” is glossed as “The Church confesseth her spot & sinne, but hath confidence in the favour of Christ.” In contrast, a passage like Isaiah 1:18—“though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool”—links whiteness with purity. Alongside scripture, Christian teaching and tradition also produced ideas about peoples with black and white skin. According to David M. Goldberg, “the church fathers in the third century began to allegorize the scriptural Black (the ‘Ethiopian’) as sin. . . .The common patristic depiction of devils as Ethiopians was of one cloth with the symbolism in the service of exegesis.”³ Black peoples and their skin, then, became figures, used to stand in for concepts and ideas that were seen as oppositional to Christian whiteness and purity.

Particularly influential in shaping Western Christian ideas about blackness were discussions of Noah’s curse of his son Ham/Cham. According to Leo Africanus, whose Della descrittione dell’Africa et delle cose notabili che ivi sono (1550) was widely disseminated and translated across Europe, there are two kinds of Moors: “white or tawny Moores, and Negroes or Blacke Moores . . . the greatest part of which are thought to be descended from Cham the cursed son of Noah.”⁴ Africanus elaborates a bit later:

For all the Negroes or blacke Moores take their descent from Chus, thes sonne of Cham, who was the sone of Noë. But whatsoeuer difference there be between the Negroes and tawnie Moores, certaine it is that they had all one beginning . . . the tawnie Moores fetch their petigree from the Sebeans, and it is evident that Saba was begotten of Rama, which was the eldest sone of Chus.⁵

While the curse of Ham was not exclusive to Black Moors, black skin nevertheless was understood to be a mark of cursedness.

The English explorer George Best provided a more detail discussion of the curse of Ham in A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie (1578):

Blacknesse proceedeth of some natural infection of the first inhabitants of that Countrey, and so all the progenie of them descended, all still polluted with that same blot of that infection. Therefore it shal not be fare from our purpose, to examine the first originall of these black men, and how by lineall discente, they haue hitherto continued thus black. . . . And of this blacke & cursed Chus came al these blacke Moores which are in Africa … the cause of the Ethiopian blacknesse, is the curse & natural infection of bloud, & not the distemperature of the clymate.⁶

In addition to using “black” and “Moor” (and “Ethiopian,” too) interchangeably, Best argues that black skin signifies an “infection of bloud” passed from Chus to all of his descendants; black skin was seen as proof that an individual was part of a cursed lineage, a cursed race. Best implies that one can know blood and race by looking at the skin.

Renaissance authors also inherited a tradition of linking black skin with evil and non-Christian identity from medieval romances and mystery plays. Chanson de Roland, for example, repeatedly links black skin with evil, in one instance describing “Ethiope” as a “cursed land / Whose black-skinned people are beneath his sway, / They have large noses and great outstretched ears,” and just after that describes “infidels / —Each one of them is blacker far than ink.”⁷ In Medieval mystery plays, which continued to be performed in the Renaissance, Lucifer and his devils often experience a change of color from light to dark after they are expelled from heaven. In the Chester cycle, after their fall Lucifer and Lightborne become “towe feendes blacke.”⁸ Virginia Mason Vaughan suggests that these transformations were manifested in performance, and

Lucifer’s blackened complexion indicates his transformation from moral norm of God’s whiteness and his exclusion from the community of believers. [Blackness] is an easy and convenient signifier for the amateur actor because he needs only don a vizard or smear some soot on his face.⁹

Renaissance Anti-blackness

Christian tradition shaped what black skin signified in medieval romance and mystery plays, which in turn shaped what black skin signified in Renaissance texts—the antithesis to Western Christian mores. In canto 43 of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Anselmo receives an indecent proposal from a Black man who offers him a sumptuous palace in exchange for sex. Not only does Anselmo agree to have sex with a man, demonstrating that his greed overruns both what we are to assume are his sexual inclinations and his Christian culture’s condemnation of sodomy, but also agrees to have sex with “an Aethiopian with a broad nose and thick lips; he had never before or after seen a more foul and disagreeable face.”¹⁰ Although the scene’s moral may be clear (Sir John Harington states in his 1583 English translation that the tale teaches us to “learne to loth beastly covetousness”), the moral is clarified through employing prejudice against Black Africans and their bodily features.¹¹

Jo Ann Cavallo provides a useful close reading of the Ethiopian’s features:

The Ethiopian is never given an individual identity but is referred to generically and pejoratively as ‘il negro’ (‘the negro’) . . . and ‘il bruto moro’ (‘the ugly Moor’). . . . His licentious proposal explicitly exposes his nature as ‘bestiale’ (‘brute’) rather than human.¹²

Ariosto’s description also links racial difference with sexual difference, an example that, as Jonathan Burton and Ania Loomba observe, “Gender reversals as well as ‘abnormal’ sexualities—intemperance, hermaphroditism, lesbianism, and ‘sodomy’ in its various forms—were systematically attributed to people from across the globe” and note that in the Renaissance authors claim “Chinese, Native Americans, Turks, and Negroes are given to sodomy.”¹³ The episode from Orlando Furioso may provide a moral lesson, yet it also effectively communicates its morality by positioning White Christian values in opposition to sexual licentiousness, which are embodied in a Black man.

Figurative readings of blackness as sinful and evil alongside explanations of the origins of black skin, then, doubly damned people with dark skin. The Renaissance theater did much to reproduce ideas about Black people and distribute those ideas to a wider audience. The theater, after all, traffics in visual spectacle, and producing differing skin colors in a play provides the audiences with additional information for assessing characters. Not surprisingly, giving a character black skin became an easy way to signal a character’s villainy. When George Peele tells the story of the conflict between Abd-el-Malek (Abdelmelec, “King of Morrocco”) and his nephew Mohammed El-Mesloukh (Muly Mahamet), the playwright emphasizes that Muly Mahamet is the villain by giving him black skin. The Battle of Alcazar (1591), the first English play with a Black Moorish character, opens with the Presenter telling the audience that it is the “barbarous Moor, / The negro Muly Hamet, that withholds / The kingdom from his uncle Abdelmelec.”¹⁴ Just a few lines later the Presenter adds that Muly Mahamet is “black in his look, and bloody in his deeds.”¹⁵ In contradistinction to his uncle, Muly Mahamet is “barbarous,” “negro,” “black,” and “bloody,” and the play even goes so far to suggest a connection between the villain’s “black looks” and “bloody deeds.”

The blackening of Muly Mahamet was not Peele’s invention. The source for the play, John Poleman’s The Second Part of the Booke of Battailes (1587), a translation of Thomas Freigin’s Historia de Bello Africano (1580), notes the skin colors of the history’s hero and villain. In Poleman’s translation, Muly Mahamet is described as “of coulour so blacke, that he was accompted of many for a Negro or black Moore. He was of a perverse nature, he would neuer speak the trueth, he did all things subtlety and deceitfully.”¹⁶ Poleman does not explicitly link the color of Muly Mahamet’s skin with his deceitful character, but mentioning skin color in close proximity to character nevertheless suggests that there is a relationship between them. Such a relationship is further suggested when read alongside the description of Abdelmelec, who is

of a fine proportion of bodie, with brode shoulders, white face, but intermixed with read, which did gallantlie garnish his cheeks, a blacke beard thicke, and curled, great eies and graie. In summe, he was a verie proper man, and veriy comelie in all his actions and iestures, and verie strong: the which strength he conserued by continuallie excising of himself in skirmishes. . . . And although he professed Mahamet, yet he so loued Christians, and of them Spaniards, that I cannot express with words the loue and good will which he showed towards many captiues & prisoners.¹⁷

As Ambereen Dadabhoy argues, “the text transforms him into the perfect picture of chivalric gallantry” through noting his behaviors and his love of Christians.¹⁸ Conveniently, the characters of Muly Mahamet and Abdelmelec, in both Poleman and Peele, coincide with the traditional moral attachments associated with black and white. Poleman’s history and Peele’s play both suggest that skin color communicates vital information about an individual’s nature.¹⁹ Drama borrowed from already established discourses about black and white skin to establish a visual vocabulary for communicating information about characters to the audience.

Peele’s play and Poleman’s history are unique, nevertheless, for how they disentangle skin color and religion. Medievalists and early modernists who study race now push against Antony Kwame Appiah’s influential assertion that before modern science,

stereotypes were based on an essentially theological conception of the status of both Moors and Jews as non-Christians; the former distinguished by their black skin, whose color was associated with Christian iconography with sin and the devil; the latter by their being, as Matthew’s account of the crucifixion suggests, ‘Christ killers.’²⁰

While Appiah is correct that early modern texts often blacken Moors and other non-Christians, Renaissance texts equally created hierarchies of being, White over Black, independent of religious identity—in both Peele and Polemen, goodness and beauty are attached to white skin, while villainy and perversion are attached to black skin.

The connection between black skin and evil/non-Christian identity was so ubiquitous that non-villainous characters with dark complexions directly confront the assumptions made about them. Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, for example, enters the play stating, “Mislike me not for my complexion.”²¹ His “apologetic entry,” Ian Smith suggests, “attends to his awareness of his skin colour as a disability whose remedy can be found in the linguistic rationalizations he offers.”²² In Thomas Middleton’s London city pageant The Triumphs of Truth (1613), the “King of the Moores” similarly addresses the assumptions of White spectators:

I see amazement set upon the faces Of these white people, wondrings, and strange gazes, Is it at mee? do’s my Complexion draw So many Christian Eyes, that never saw A King so blacke before? *** I must confesse many wilde thoughts may rise, Opinions, Common murmurs, and fixt Eyes At my so strange arrivall, in a Land Where true Religion and her Temples stand: I being a Moore, then in Opinions lightnesse As far from Sanctity as my Face from whitenesse; But I forgive the Judgings of th’Unwise, Whose Censures ever quicken in their Eyes, Onely begot of outward forme and show, And I thinke meete to let such Censurers Know, How ever Darkenesse dwels upon my Face, Truth in my soule sets up the Light of Grace.

In addition to his speech containing the first known usage of “white people” in English, the king directly engages long-standing associations between white skin and Christian identity and between black skin and non-Christian identity. Middleton’s character almost seems to resist what it means to be the subject of the “white gaze,” which the philosopher George Yancy describes as “distortional ‘seeing’ that evolves out of and is inextricably linked to various raced and racist myths, white discursive practices, and centripetal processes of white systemic power and white solipsism.”²³ The king indeed questions White racial epistemology, White people’s presumption to know Black people simply by looking at them—and one should note the heavy usage of sight imagery in the speech. The king’s speech places blackness and whiteness—as they are embodied in persons—as oppositional, even as it labels those who assume a Black person is not a Christian—that he does not have “truth in [his] soul” and “the Light of Grace”—as “Unwise.”

Religious Conversion

The king’s speech undermines the long-standing correlations between blackness and non-Christianity, but the pageant only seems able to do so through incorporating Black people into a narrative of mercantile expansion. The king explains how he, his wife, and his people became Christians:

My Queene and People all, at one time wun, By the Religious Conversation Of English Merchants, Factors, Travailers, Whose Truth did with our Spirits hold Commerse.

Economic trade is rendered as a means to spread Christianity, and the double meaning of “commerse” yokes economic and religious interests.

Although Middleton’s pageant suggests that a popular audience may have only been able to imagine the possibility of Black Christians when it was financially expedient to do so (and ignores the fact that there were Christians in Africa since the 1st century), the king’s speech nevertheless points to religious conversion as a trope that potentially unsettles the mapping of religious identity onto black and white skin. In literary texts, religious conversion created Black Christians and White Muslims. Commerce and piracy in the Mediterranean increased the possibility of interreligious contact and crossover, and scholars have documented numerous historical and literary examples of European Christians converting to Islam in the 16th and 17th centuries—there seem to be fewer instances of Muslims converting to Christianity.²⁴ European romances had long featured the conversions of “infidels” to Christianity, but Dennis Austin Britton argues that “within (and outside) romances, conversions to Christianity are often predicated upon European modes of desire,” demonstrating that skin color and race make some converts desirable and others less so.²⁵ For example, “The Captive’s Tale” in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote tells the story of the beautiful Zoraida’s conversion from Islam to Christianity. Because she has white hands, the captive first assumes that she is a renegade, a Christian who converted to Islam, explaining, “often the Moors are glad to marry slaves of this sort, whom they value more highly than women of their own people.”²⁶ The captive eventually finds out that she is a White Moor who hopes to become a Christian. The tale at once points to the limits of reading skin color as a marker of religious identity, even as it points to how easily skin color is assumed to be such a marker. Arguably, however, religious conversion realigns skin color and religious identity. In numerous romances, white skin seems to be a prerequisite for conversion to Christianity—alongside Zoraida, consider Marfisa in Orlando Furioso, Clorinda and Armida in Gerusalemme liberata, Abigail in The Jew of Malta, and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice.²⁷

Jewish to Christian Conversions

Although Renaissance texts frequently linked religious identity and skin color, Jewish identity presented a problem—European Jews had white skin. To be sure, Renaissance texts often replicate medieval anti-Semitic tropes, but the question scholars have grappled with is to what extent Jewish identity was understood as a racial, ethnic, religious, or cultural identity. Similar to representations of Black Africans, representations of Jews were informed by Christian tradition, especially as Christians had long grappled with their relationship to Judaism and Jewish people. Christendom needed to deal with its Jewish heritage and sought to differentiate itself from Judaism. The Pauline theological distinction between carnal and spiritual Israel—Jews are the carnal Israel of the Old Testament, and Christians are the spiritual Israel of the New Testament—provided a foundation upon which Jewish difference eventually became racial difference in the Christian imagination. According to Janet Adelman, “Insofar as Jews constituted both a lineage and a people, perhaps they were ideally situated to mediate between older and the newer senses of ‘race’ and hence to be early victims of racism.”²⁸

European distrust of the sincerity of Jewish to Christian conversion stems from the belief that Jewish difference was heritable, residing in the blood, and thus unalterable. Christian Spain’s anxieties about conversos (Jews who converted to Christianity), its obsession with limpieza de sangre (blood purity), and the Inquisition all played a part in the racialization of Jewish identity. Spain’s so-called problem with conversos was known throughout Europe. Edward Grimeston’s 1612 Historie of Spaine, an English translation of a 1583 French history written by Louise de Mayerne Turquet, stated that due to Jewish “profession, either true or fained, of Christian religions,” “the noble families of Spain, allying themselves by marriage to that race, did wholly contaminate and pollute themselves both in blood and belief.”²⁹ The text not only points to the distrust of conversos, but it also provides a commentary on interracial marriages. Here, “race” is primarily used to mean lineage. Although many converso families had been in Spain for generations, the text suggests that conversos are still not Spaniards; regardless of whether the converso’s profession is “true or fained,” a converso remains a Jew. Intermarriage between Spaniards and Jews pollutes Spanish blood and religion. Jewish blood is rendered an inalterable polluting agent.

Discussions of converted Jews played a significant role in Renaissance constructions of race and became a source of interest for literary writers as well. Deborah Skolnick Rosenberg notes that the converso was a recurrent figure in picaresque novels: “The presence of converso protagonists in several picaresque novels at the beginning of the seventeenth century testifies to the relevance of issues centered around inherited ‘Jewish’ traits, societal assimilation, and the religious salvation of New Christians.”³⁰ Part 1 of Mateo Alemán’s enormously popular Guzmán de Alfarache (part 1 published in 1599, part 2 in 1604) went through twenty-three editions and was translated into French in 1600, Italian in 1606, German in 1615, English in 1622, and Latin in 1623.³¹ Alemán had converso ancestry, and his narrator is a converso protagonist who has been read as critiquing the racial politics of limpieza de sangre.³² In one instance, the protagonist reveals the wickedness of an innkeeper who attempts to pass mule meat as veal. The village officials then justify their right to pass judgment. Guzman, however, makes fun of their justifications:

they digg’d up their Grandfather’s graves, twitting one another in the teeth with their fathers and their mothers, not sparing one another’s wives, ripping up their faults, and the course of life that they led; wherein perhaps they did not lie (1:142).

Rosenberg argues that the mule is a symbol of the converso as miscegenated, and Emily Weissbourd, following Rosenberg’s observation, asserts:

The quarrel itself is presented as ridiculous, as a series of self-important local officials strive to assert their right to manage the situation—and one measure of that ridiculousness is the villagers’ reliance on flinging insults based on purity of blood (or rather lack thereof).³³

Although Guzman makes fun of the villagers’ attempt to prove their racial purity, the novel nevertheless points to the real social effects of limpieza de sangre—a kind of violence done upon one’s ancestry in the pursuit of social assimilation and authority.

Indeed, Jewish converts to Christianity only seem acceptable—however precariously—when they adamantly disavow their Jewish parentage. Jessica in The Merchant of Venice not only escapes from her father’s house but also announces that she is ashamed of her Jewishness:

Alack, what heinous sin it is in me To be ashamed to be my father’s child! But though I am a daughter to his blood I am not to his manners.

Adelman has suggested that limpieza de sangre indeed provides a context for understanding the racialization of Jewish identity in Shakespeare’s play. Salerino’s insistence that “there is more difference between [Shylock’s] flesh and [Jessica’s] than between jet and ivory; more between [their] bloods than between red wine and Rhenish” is but one example of “the play’s repeated insistence that Jessica cannot escape her father’s blood,” putting

Jessica in the position of those conversos, who are Jewish whether or not they convert. The extent to which Jessica is trapped in this racializing structure even when she most seems to escape it can perhaps best be measured by the odd moment in the play when she posits a quasi-biological difference between her and her father.³⁴

Jessica’s solution to having Jewish blood, Adelman argues, is to marry a Christian, yet the play still undermines Jessica’s ability to escape her Jewishness and become a Christian—she is remarkably unhappy at the end of a comedy that celebrates the Christian defeat of a Jew.³⁵

Racial “Others” with White Skin

Arguably, it was the ability of Jews to pass as Christians due to their white skin that led to the elaborate racial politics of blood purity and fantasies of somatic difference—the Jewish smell (foetor judiacus), male lactation, and a variety of other physical deformities. Jews had long presented a problem to the fiction that white skin was the mark of Christian identity. The insistence that racial-religious identity was carried in the blood and expressed itself in “barbarous” behaviors provided an alternative to tropes of visible somatic difference. Indeed, anyone whose beliefs differed from accepted orthodoxy—Jews, Muslims, “pagans,” and even other Christians—could be depicted as racially different. This was especially true of Irish Catholics in English Protestant texts.

According to Christopher Highly,

in the Renaissance’s emergent discourses of race and ethnicity, the inhabitants of Ireland were reconceptualized as ‘a race apart.’ As a genealogically integrated group, occupying a bounded space, and displaying common linguistic and cultural traits, the Irish were not only constructed as different but also as socially inferior to the English.³⁶

When it comes to the racialization of the Irish, Edmund Spenser looms large because of his work as a colonial administrator in Ireland, his extended discussion of the Irish in A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), and the allegorization of Ireland and Irishness in The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). Spenser’s primary concerns were what he saw as the racial degeneration of the “Old English” settlers, who had become too much like the Irish, and the seeming inability of the Irish to be civilized through the English colonial project.³⁷ His attention turns most explicitly to Ireland in Book 5 of The Faerie Queene, when Artegall liberates Irena (Ireland) from the tyrannical giant Grantorto (often read as Philip II of Spain), but scholars have noted allusions to and representations of Irishness in various episodes of the epic. The “salvage nation” of cannibals, for example, who abduct and attempt to eat the fair Serena in Book 6, have often been read as figuring the Irish:

Thereto they vsed a most accursed order,      To eat the flesh of men, whom they mot fynde,      And straungers to deuoure, which on their border      Were brought by errour, or by wreckful wynde.      A monstrous cruelty against the course of kynde.

(6.8.35.1–5)

Scholars have linked this moment to 16th-century accounts of Irish blood drinking both in battle and in the Roman Catholic Eucharist, which to be sure propelled English Protestant views of Irish/Catholic barbarity.³⁸ Scholars have also noted that this moment in the epic would have undoubtedly conjured the image of the supposed cannibals in the Americas, suggesting how racial differentiation employs “traveling tropes,” which, according to Loomba and Burton, “might be drawn from one location or people and conceptually assimilated to another to confer value or contempt, and in turn to facilitate political practice.”³⁹ The racialization of the White Irish was assisted through images linking them to Spain and to non-White peoples outside of Europe.