Transnational genealogies: Jews, blacks and moors in early modern English and Spanish literature, 1547--1642

This dissertation is a comparative study of early modern English and Spanish literature and historical documents. It focuses on representations of blackness, purity of blood and intersections of theories of purity of blood with those of rank, gender and inheritance. Scholars of English and Spanish literature and history have increasingly emphasized the centrality of Spain to the development of racial ideologies in the early modern period, focusing on the legacy of the reconquista and Spain's "pure blood statutes," which discriminated against those of Jewish and Muslim descent and thus began to define religion as an inherited, quasi-racial characteristic. I take this interest in early modern Spain as my starting point, comparing English and Spanish texts to show significant variations among English and Spanish representations of race as well as the complex ways that early modern English literature repeatedly evokes Spain as a site of racial difference. Specifically, I show that Spanish representations of purity of blood revolve around social mobility and class identity, and are often harshly critical of rigid definitions of "pure blood." Further, English discourses of blood difference do not simply absorb these Spanish discourses of "purity of blood," as has been posited; on the contrary, they alter them to offer more essentializing representations of racial difference. I also attend to representations of Iberia's slave population, which by the late sixteenth century was predominantly (though not entirely) black, in both Spanish and English literature. In part because Spain has been so closely linked with one kind of racial discourse (that of purity of blood), another significant influence on developing discourses of race in early modern Spain and England has remained occluded: Spain's substantial sub-Saharan slave population, which was a frequent subject of early modern Spanish drama and which also influences early modern English representations of blackness. By drawing on early modern Spanish as well as English literature, my project reorients our understanding of the role played by Spain in developing discourses of race in early modern Europe.