Abstract
The classification of humans into distinct races is first recorded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus it may be doubted whether “race” is a helpful tool for the study of early modern thought. Nonetheless, embryonic concepts of race have been traced to the Renaissance. The period inherited a rich body of ideas of human types, drawing on classical and medieval authors. This material prompted speculation over human nature: Are qualities fixed or malleable? Are all peoples capable of reason and open to conversion to Christianity? Does humanity embrace all types or do some fall outside it? Throughout the period anti-Semitism provided a grim template for defining identity through the “othering” of a particular group of people.
Encounters outside the Mediterranean accelerated from the fifteenth century: the “discovery” of the New World, the enlargement of the slave trade, and expanding commercial networks all shaped perceptions of humans as belonging to groups with distinctive traits. Such mental taxonomies hardened into stereotypes which were disseminated through cultural artifacts and enshrined in ideology. Caricatures of the Jews emphasized their ineradicable internal difference from Christians: in the idea of the “blood purity” of the Jews propagated by the Spanish Inquisition can be seen the origins of a notion of biological race. Around the prevailing types and concepts, heterogeneous discourses can be discerned at a local and individual level. Racial theories generated debates in the fields of law and rights and were integrated into political relations and cultural practices over many fields (Erickson and Hulse 2000).
Similar content being viewed by others
Heritage and Rupture with the Tradition
Medieval Europe offers a diverse set of images of the peoples of the earth. These can be traced to classical sources, including fourth-century BCE Greek accounts of the figures of Indian art, which were apparently taken to be representations of actual people. Monstrous humanoid forms appear, for example, in the writings of Isidore of Seville (c.560–636), the tympanum of Vézelay Abbey (c.1100) which depicts differently formed peoples to be ministered to by the church, the Travels of John Mandeville (1357–1371), and the illustrations of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). These works do not necessarily equate physical with moral monstrosity.
In European consciousness, the Jews occupied a particular category. Over the late Middle Ages, aggressive anti-Semitism led to pogroms and expulsions. Jews were accused of magical powers; the “blood libel,” the accusation that Jews drank the blood of Christian children, dates from at least the twelfth century. Exclusion could foster a sense of exclusiveness. The Sephardic Jews wrote their own history, defining themselves as a separate race going back to the Jews of the Old Testament. From the eleventh century, crusades and pilgrimage heightened awareness of the Muslim Arabs, who were both demonized as enemies of the faith while at the same time their achievements were absorbed into the Western culture across scientific and artistic disciplines (Macdonald 1997).
Around these images of various people, questions arose, in particular the degree to which humans are fixed or self-fashioning. The intellectual community of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance did not unanimously hold racial identity to be an inherited absolute. Against types there is a countervailing concept of a human family: the Vézelay tympanum clearly expresses the idea that all corners of the earth are open to the Word of Christ. Biblical and patristic texts did not provide a coherent account of whether those of darker hue were or were not morally inferior, leaving room for a variety of views (Schwartz 1994).
Innovation and Original Aspects
One innovation was the body of ideas accompanying the encounter with American Indians and the increased trade in black African slaves. The plight of the Indians under the Spanish conquistadors was deplored in a series of polemics by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas (c.1484–1566). These fed the topic of Spanish cruelty, happily recycled by protestant countries like England, themselves culpable of atrocities. In the debates at Valladolid (1550–1551), de las Casas disputed with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573) over the status of colonized people, an important moment in the development of rights theory and international law: at issue was the question of whether the Indians were, or not, fully human and thus free men by the law of nature.
As a strategy for justifying the slave trade, white Europeans developed stereotypes of black Africans as naked, pierced, lazy, sexually promiscuous, unintelligent, and the like. Though black Africans performed a diverse range of tasks, both as slaves and freemen, they are typically depicted in a limited range of activities, capable of imitative but not creative behavior (Earle and Lowe).
Christian vilification of the Jews continued to be intense in the Renaissance. Myths such as the blood libel were quickly spread by the printing press. Preachers such as Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444) called on Jews to reside in special districts with special costumes and badges. In 1492 both Moors and Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. A range of tools was developed to test the sincerity of those who opted to convert; the Spanish Inquisition, in its demand for ethnically “pure” inquisitors, developed a sophisticated bureaucracy for enquiring into individuals’ lineage, an originating point for later notions of biological race. While the stereotype of the African tended to concentrate on external qualities, that of the Jew focused on a supposed ineradicable internal separateness from the Christian. Arabs were equally subject to stereotype, while at the same time the scholarly and artistic techniques they introduced to the West were appreciated by intellectuals and a vital source of cultural renewal.
As a highly flexible term, “race” was not only used of people outside Europe but also as an instrument in internal politics: thus, the English usually employed “race” to mean family lineage, excluding the socially inferior, and described the Irish as another race, exhibiting subhuman qualities (Hall 1995). Racial and national identities develop in parallel. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, besides the much-discussed depiction of the Jew Shylock, characters from other European countries are also open to satiric delineation. Against this, to a modern reader, some of the most original visions of race come from intellectuals apparently resistant to prevailing typologies, such as the passionate Hebraist scholar Isaac Casaubon, who refused to characterize individual Jews by group characteristics, or Montaigne who, witnessing a circumcision in Rome, observed in his Journal de voyage that Jewish babies cried like Christian children at baptism (Grafton 2009).
Impact and Legacy
Renaissance racial thinking underpins imperial expansion and the justification of slavery, land-grabbing, and other forms of exploitation. It served to concretize the notion of humans falling into distinct and fixed categories, subject to pseudoscientific measurement of intelligence and other qualities. Black people formed a counterpoint to the developing notion of “civilized” whites. In the cultural sphere, the notions of the noble savage and the earthly paradise were among discourses that flowed from the encounters of the fifteenth century onward, expressed in a variety of forms, from paintings to travelogues, essays, and drama. While the Renaissance notion of race is elusive, the stereotypes constructed in the period have proven very clearly to be destructive and persistent (The William and Mary Quarterly 1997).
References
Secondary Reading
Earle, Thomas F., and Kate J.P. Lowe, eds. 2005. Black Africans in renaissance Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Erickson, Peter, and Clarke Hulse, eds. 2000. Early modern visual culture: Representation, race and empire in renaissance Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Grafton, Anthony, Race in the Renaissance. 2009. James Baldwin Lecture, Princeton University. http://aas.princeton.edu/blog/event/the-james-baldwin-lecture-anthony-t-grafton/. Accessed 02 Aug 2017.
Hall, Kim F. 1995. Things of darkness: Economies of race and gender in early modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Macdonald, Joyce Green, ed. 1997. Race, ethnicity and power in the renaissance. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Schwartz, Stuart B., ed. 1994. Implicit understandings: Observing, reporting, and reflecting on the encounters between Europeans and other peoples in the early modern era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The William and Mary Quarterly: Constructing Race. 1997. 3rd series, vol. 54. no. 1. Williamsburg: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Hebron, M. (2018). Race, Renaissance Concept of. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_1148-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_1148-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-02848-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-02848-4
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Religion and PhilosophyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities