Heliodorus’s Greek romance, Aithiopika or Ethiopian Story (ES, 230–275 CE), has obsessed scholars and critics in three historical periods: the English Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance, and our own era.¹ It narrates the difficulty of reading the body, in particular, that of its heroine, Chariclea, born fair-skinned to the dark-skinned King Hydaspes and Queen Persina of Ethiopia because her mother gazed upon a religious icon—a picture of their white-skinned ancestress and deity Andromeda—during conception. Secretly exposed at birth by Persina (who fears the imputation of adultery), raised by a succession of foster fathers, during the course of the...

I continue to explore the transmission of ancient texts—and their negotiations among skin color, inherited characteristics, and religious belief—in early modern English culture by turning now to a Hebrew poem, the biblical Song of Songs, Canticles, or Song of Solomon. Like the Aithiopika, the Song displays a heroine whose skin color is ambiguously related to her rank, her beauty, and her national origin. In the King james Version (KJV, 1611), she describes herself thus:

I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.

Look not upon me,...

The question of whether blackness is the most significant mark of “race” in the early modern period continues to inspire critical debate. Most recently, the discussion has coalesced around the early modern Irish, and whether their status as a colonized and subjugated nation in the era affords them an identity as “racial” or “blackened.” Erickson argues that it is of limited use to compare, say, the black Mricans in Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (Blackness, 1605) to the Irish in Jonson’s Irish Masque at Court (Irish, 1613) because “the concept of blackness stands out as a separate category even at this...

Jonson’s Niger praises his daughters’ beauty for its unchanging, “firm hues” (Blackness, line 117); unlike European ladies, his daughters have no need to resort to “paint” (line 133) to conceal their “passion” (line 129), no need to hide a face that grows pale or turns red. Niger reads his daughters’ unchanging skins as signs of their constancy and virtue, but his confidence is unusual. More typical are the early modern moralists Thomas Wright and Nicholas Coeffeteau, who in Passions of the Mind in General (1601) and A Table of Humane Passions (1621) emphasize the importance of blushing and social shaming...

Anticosmetic writers Tuke, in A Treatise Against Painting and Tincturing (1616), and Barnfield, in “The Complaint of Matilda Fitzwater” (1594), blame women’s use of fucus, or make-up, for masking or falsifying the blush, thereby rendering pink cheeks unreadable as signs of innocence or guilt, prurience or purity, Englishness or strangeness.¹ But early modern stage plays turn the invisible, intangible emotion of a blush into dramatic action, its existence into metatheatrical self-consciousness, and its absence into a trope of the viewer’s powerlessness to distinguish between what seem like self-evident categories. Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (Ado, c. 1598), the anonymous Lusts...

Much Ado About Nothing blackens both Beatrice and Hero. Benedick associates the “sunburnt” Beatrice with “Prester John” and the “Pigmies,” and Hero hides behind her “Ethiop[ian]” veil. Here I shall argue that Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (Ven.) and Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepheard (AS) interrogate these expected associations of color and chastity, but neither in praise of women nor in the service of an originary heterosexuality. Both provide, problematically, examples of mixed kind or genre—Venus and Adonis an abortive epyllion, The Affectionate Shepheard a failed pastoral eclogue. Both poems seem to shift into complaint mode, but they change mode yet...

In the Renaissance, the so-called Gypsies were thought to come from Egypt, although Sir Thomas Browne includes this belief as one of the “Vulgar and Common Errors” that his Pseudodoxia Epidemica attempts to correct. Browne calls the Gypsies “Artificial Negroes” or “counterfeit Moors” who darken their skins cosmetically: “Artificial Negroes, or Gypsies acquire their complexion by anointing their bodies with Bacon and fat substances, and so exposing them to the Sun” (PE, 3:255). But, as is now well known, the Gypsies call themselves “the Romany people” or “Roma,” and their language, “Rom.” Linguists note that the Romany language resembles Punjabi...

This chapter contrasts the associations between black skin and wealth in the city pageant and in the ethnographic accounts of dark-skinned Africans produced by England’s first slave traders. I begin with a short history of England’s involvement in the African slave trade before moving to the Jacobean interest in exotic, dark-skinned foreigners and to city pageants that feature sun-worshiping Moors “hurling … gold and silver.”¹ The connection of blackness with wealth elides the forced labor employed in the American mines, as I pointed out in Chapter Three. I maintain that, in addition, it conceals England’s renewed involvement in a commerce...

I end, as I promised, where I began-with an investigation of romance and the marvelous. Where versions of Heliodorus, however, relied upon pseudoscientific evidence from the classical world and upon anecdote, the work of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, engages with seventeenth-century empiricism. When Cavendish published Observations on Experimental Philosophy (Observations) in 1666, she became the first British woman to write and publish scientific work.¹ Perhaps eager to demonstrate her knowledge of the newest scientific theories, Cavendish added a new section to the second edition of Observations in 1668, a section that responded, as Rosemary Kegl remarks, to current debates...