The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

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2. Introduction

   1. Introduction

      • Kimberly Anne Coles, Ralph Bauer, Carla L. Peterson, Zita Nunes

      Pages 1-22

3. Race and Stock

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 23-23

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   2. Metamateriality and Blood Purity in Cervantes’s Alcaná de Toledo

      • Rachel L. Burk

      Pages 25-44

   3. The Blood of Others: Breeding Plants, Animals, and White People in the Spanish Atlantic

      • Ruth Hill

      Pages 45-64

   4. “Rude Uncivill Blood”: The Pastoral Challenge to Hereditary Race in Fletcher and Milton

      • Jean E. Feerick

      Pages 65-83

   5. African Blood, Colonial Money, and Respectable Mulatto Heiresses Reforming Eighteenth-Century England

      • Lyndon J. Dominique

      Pages 84-104

4. Moral Constitution

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 105-105

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   2. “His blood be on us and on our children”: Medieval Theology and the Demise of Jewish Somatic Inferiority in Early Modern England

      • M. Lindsay Kaplan

      Pages 107-126

   3. Sor Juana’s Appetite: Body, Mind, and Vitality in “First Dream”

      • Anna More

      Pages 127-145

   4. Blood and Character in Early African American Literature

      • Hannah Spahn

      Pages 146-167

5. Medicalizing the Political Body

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 169-169

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   2. Flowing or Pumping? The Blood of the Body Politic in Burton, Harvey, and Hobbes

      • Robert Appelbaum

      Pages 171-190

   3. Linnaeus and the Four Corners of the World

      • Staffan Müller-Wille

      Pages 191-209

   4. “Who Got Bloody?”: The Cultural Meanings of Blood during the Civil War and Reconstruction

      • James Downs

      Pages 210-228

   5. Colonial Transfusions: Cuban Bodies and Spanish Loyalty in the Nineteenth Century

      • David Sartorius

      Pages 229-250

6. Back Matter

   Pages 251-274

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The essays of this collection explore how ideas about 'blood' in science and literature have supported, at various points in history and in various places in the circum-Atlantic world, fantasies of human embodiment and human difference that serve to naturalize existing hierarchies.

• Race
• blood
• human difference
• science
• literature
• humor
• humoral
• civil war
• England
• history
• Judaism
• reform

“The essays in this volume are motivated by the interconnection between blood and the concept of race. … The Cultural Politics of Blood works to interrogate and often undermine the most commonly accepted cultural histories of blood and race. … This challenging and provocative collection will be of great value to scholars of blood, race, or any related concept within the period covered.” (Ariane M. Balizet, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 69 (3), 2016)

• Department of English, University of Maryland, USA

  Kimberly Anne Coles, Ralph Bauer, Zita Nunes, Carla L. Peterson

Robert Appelbaum, Uppsala University, Sweden Rachel Burk, the University of Pennsylvania, USA Lyndon J. Dominique, Lehigh University, USA Jim Downs, Connecticut College, USA Jean E. Feerick, John Carroll University, USA Ruth Hill, Vanderbilt University, USA M. Lindsay Kaplan, Georgetown University, USA Anna More, University of Brasília Staffan Müller-Wille, University of Exeter, UK David Sartorius, University of Maryland, USA Hannah Spahn, University of Potsdam, Germany

Policies and ethics