Selected annotated 
bibliography of PCRS

Analyzes and theorizes the presence of the Hispano-Moorish in Spanish imperial theater in the 16th and 17th centuries. The book discusses how Spain visualized the religious and dark-skinned outsider. Beusterien seeks to depict how theater in imperial Spain showed blackness as a defiled religion and skin color.

Presents the transatlantic transfer of knowledge and language of mining developed in the 16th and 17th centuries from the Americas that contributed to European colonization of the New World. This study describes how the impurity of ores and metals was employed to describe the religious, racial, and gender markers of the mine and metalworkers. Bigelow uncovers ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors.

Analyzes a series of texts from antiquity and their reception among medieval intelligentsia on Black women’s bodies. The essay demonstrates a typography and conceptualization of Black women as objects of sexual desire through scientific traditions, such as the theory of humors. The essay engages conversations in the study of Blackness, sexuality, and history of science.

Examines figural representations of Black bodies in medieval European Christian visual arts, including manuscripts, portraiture, and sculptures. The work addresses a wide array of contexts—including Black saints, such as St. Benedict and St. Maurice, and literary characters such as Othello—to trace a range of attitudes on Blackness. The work engages the fields of art history, religion, and embodiment.

Analyzes the interplay between race and temporality in medieval English Christian plays, with primary reference to competing temporalities between Christian and Jewish characters. The work uses the simultaneously multiple times of English Biblical dramas—which pit Christian temporal frames against those of a Jewish past—to explore the anti-Semitic work being done among nonelite playwrights and audiences in medieval England. The work engages conversations in the fields of temporality, social history, dramaturgy, and religion.

Examines how European literature represented Africa as monstrous, dangerous, and lush in early Portuguese imperial writings during the 15th and 16th centuries. The scope of the book focuses on works by Gomes Eanes de Zurara in the 15th century and Camões’s Os Lusíadas in the 16th century to represent the Portuguese imperial discourse. Blackmore engages Portuguese textual matter of Africa during the 16th century to understand an important moment in the history of western expansion.

A study of skin color, complexion, and physical differences as described in 1750-1775 newspaper advertisements for runaway servants, fugitive slaves, and missing persons. The piece suggests that racial distinctions begin to codify through this written material. It also investigates the racial and gendered aspect of advertisement descriptions that quantitative data elucidates. This work engages in discussions of racialization, gender, and early American history.

Investigates the social experiences of enslaved persons in the Roman Empire. The work attends to both the historiographical processes by which contemporary readers can attempt to detect the lives of enslaved persons, and the social climate in which enslaved persons existed in relation to so-called masters. Beyond the dichotomy of that relationship, the work also explores the social lives enslaved persons had with one another, and the processes of gaining manumission. Engages discussions in the fields of social history, enslavement and captivity, and historiography.

Branche examines the racially partisan works of the Luso-Hispanic canon. This book centers on writings of the negro in Portuguese travel writing, Spanish drama, and various texts from the Latin American colonial and postcolonial world from the 15th century to the 20th century. He determines how deep and how widespread were the feelings these works expressed. The book unpacks the concept of race-as-narrative. He points out the importance of race to national discourse both in metropoles and in their colonial and ex-colonial areas of influence.

Explores the usage of the term “Moor” within premodern Christian Iberian discourses, with primary reference to 13th century Castile. The essay argues that “Moor” was advanced as an identifier by Iberian Christians in order to draw a homogenizing distinction between a purportedly unified Christian Iberian populace and a body politic of “foreign” Muslims: both those living outside of Castile and within it. The work engages conversations in the study of premodern Iberia, identity, and erasure.

Analyzes biblical narratives about the sons of Noah across a wide range of Hellenic, rabbinic, medieval European-Christian, and contemporary sources. The essay argues for the hermeneutic flexibility of the sons of Noah narratives, showing for instance that while the figure of Ham was consistently othered, the concepts of Blackness, slavery, and Africa existed in a state of relative disentanglement in premodern contexts. The work engages discussions in the study of religion, the Bible, Blackness, and modernity.

Investigates the processes of conversion to Christianity in early modern England alongside the imaginal limits imposed upon the process by race. The book uses connections between Christianity, conversion, embodiment, and hereditary traits to demonstrate not only how Christian identity was seen as inheritable among white communities, but how English literature reveals a degree of skepticism about baptism’s power to overcome somatic markers, deployed to secure a racially homogenized Christian England. Engages conversations in the study of conversion, embodiment, and English literature.

Explores the construction of the white other in the works of Shakespeare. The book draws upon case studies from Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, and other plays to demonstrate how Shakespeare produced “blackened whiteness” to continue affirming white supremacy in contrast to Blackness, even in the absence of demarcated Black figures. The book engages conversations in the study of Shakespeare, Blackness, and literature.

Investigates the construction of Blackness in Shakespeare's late 16th-century play Titus Andronicus. Brown considers the modes in which the play uses Black characters, such as Aaron and his child, to illuminate a line of tension between racist and anti-racist work being done by the text. Beyond the early modern context, the chapter considers ongoing reverberations of Titus Andronicus in 20th-century film. The chapter engages debates in the study of Shakespeare, English literature, and film studies.

Theorizes the image of people of Islamic faith in Spanish literature during the 16th and 17th century. Burshatin describes the image of people of Islamic faith in two medieval chronicles to illuminate the role of the “Moor” in Iberian discourse. Examines the representation of the “Moor” in text through metaphor, emblem, fictional compilers, and silence.

Explores anxieties about racial typologizing and miscegenation through a 14th century English romance. The essay argues that the romance in question, The King of Tars, engineers scenarios in which characters’ racial and religious identities are subject to ambiguity or failed categorizations, which in turn demands somatic transformations within the narrative itself to provide clarity. The work engages discussions in the fields of conversion, typology, and medieval English literature.

Examines the parallelism drawn between “Vikings” and “Saracens” in medieval English literature and visual arts. The essay argues that the figures of non-Christian Anglo-Saxons and “Saracens” operated in parallel fashion until the 14th century, at which point new consolidations of English identity rendered the comparison untenable. It engages discussions in the study of Christianity, conversion, and English literature.

Examines the connections between antiracism in medieval studies and the abolition of the prison-industrial complex. The essay argues that the study of medieval dance requires certain capacities to prison abolitionist work: “1) an ability to envision what we cannot know; 2) an understanding of how to act collectively even through our estrangement from each other (as medieval dancers did); 3) a willingness to take risks.”

Analyzes slavery in 16th and 17th century England against the widely held conception of early modern England as possessing a culture of voluntary service. The book focuses on the slippery “border between service and servitude” in order to parse the rhetorical techniques inflecting the lives of servants, captives, and others in early modern English contexts. The work engages conversations in the histories of labor, drama, and early modern England.

Study of anti-Blackness at work in early modern England. Drawing upon English dramas as evidence, the book argues that the early modern English placed Black Africans outside the scope of humanity as a key facet of constructing not only their own humanity, but that of non-Black “Others” as well. This book is likely to be of interest to students of English, Shakespeare studies, Black studies.

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