Kimberly Anne Coles. Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. xiv + 204pp. ISBN 9780812253733. $65.00 hardback.
The “principal project” of Bad Humor, writes Kimberly Anne Coles, is “to describe a process of color-coding, whereby certain Christians—Irish Catholics, Spanish Catholics, converted Africans, and Indigenous peoples—are marked as pagans for colonial purposes” (1). The book thus engages with several questions posed and explored by scholars invested in the religious dimensions of early modern race-making. The most pertinent of these is: How did the myth of innate moral or spiritual difference linked to corporeal characteristics persist in a context where membership in the Christian church, including the Reformed church, was increasingly broad? Coles’ thought-provoking innovation is to locate the origin of, and justification for, this religious essentialism in humoral theory and, more specifically, in the physiological disorder of melancholy. Throughout Bad Humor, she insists that it is internal “complexion”—of which skin color is merely a superficial indicator—which excludes the groups named above from full participation in “right religion”, regardless of their nominal status as Christians (117).
A core tenet of Coles’ argument is that from the early sixteenth century onwards, European Christian thinkers were increasingly attentive to the relationship between the body and the soul. The theoretical groundwork for this claim is laid in the author’s preface and elaborated on in the introduction and subsequent chapters, with material from the works of Marsilio Ficino, Philip Melanchthon, and Timothy Bright deployed to show how Galenic models of the soul were rewritten in the period to account for this relationship. Crucially, Coles notes that “Christian physicians insisted on the immortality of the soul, but most accepted that the soul’s capacity for reason could be compromised through bodily corruption” (25). Unsurprisingly, Robert Burton also makes regular appearances in Bad Humor. Coles returns repeatedly to his assertion that the delusion of false religion is a form of melancholy and, thus, “religious error is a fact of the body” (114). This physiological disorder, which was thought to manifest visibly in darkened skin, thus constituted a “somatic weakness that forbids the light of true religion” (113).
Demonstrating this “somatic weakness” at work in an English subject, the first part of chapter one explains that John Donne’s religious anxiety (or that of his speakers) is often communicated through the language of bodily corruption. For Coles, this language goes beyond a concern with the status of a body marked by original sin and instead indicates the capacity of the unstable “humorous” (32) body to threaten God’s ability to work on the soul. In the latter parts of the chapter, Coles turns to the work of Donne’s friend and neighbor Christoper Brooke—specifically his Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia, which responded to the 1622 raid on Jamestown by Powhatan warriors, in which 347 English colonists were killed. Closely reading this poem for evidence of humoral thinking, Coles notes that Brooke describes the perpetrators (and the Powhatan people in general) as “Soules drown’d in flesh and blood” (45). Here, the corporeality of the soul—which, for Donne, posed a threat to communion with God—is used to justify indiscriminate retaliatory action against a people deemed to be constitutionally irreligious.
By placing works by Donne and Brooke in conversation with one another, Coles models a strategy which she repeats in the following two chapters. In the introduction to Bad Humor, she describes her intention to articulate a “mainstream attitude” before considering how that attitude is elsewhere “polluted by a political agenda” (13). Accordingly, chapter two explores the use of blackness as an index of religious error in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness before tracing the evolution of this trope in Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. In the former case, Coles notes the capacity for conversion mediated by the illuminating power of King James’ metaphorical rays, which—according to the terms of her argument—produce an internal change in their targets that subsequently alters “outward complexion” (49). In the case of Wroth’s sonnet sequence, on the other hand, both the presumed internal state of the “Indians, scorched wth the sun” (60) and the corresponding dermal signifiers are presumed to be fixed rather than alterable.
This principle of fixity is explored at greater length in chapter three, which opens with a consideration of Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam. “The embodiment of moral differences in the play, color-coded in black and white,” Coles writes, “are grounded in prevailing medical theory as it attaches to rank and lineage” (71). In this instance, as elsewhere in Bad Humor, the argument is that skin color is only morally meaningful on account of the internal humoral complexion it is presumed to indicate. This claim is carried over to the final part of the chapter, which explores the representation of Irish constitutions—and, more specifically, the presumed moral obduracy of both the Gaelic and Anglo Irish (85)—in a number of New English tracts. When the author of The Supplication of the Blood of the English describes the Irish as “blacke Moores” whose moral “hue” will never be altered, for example, Coles reads this as an indication of their entrenched humoral complexions, once again characterized by “an excess of black bile” (84).
Chapter four of Bad Humor is likely to be of particular interest to readers of The Spenser Review, because it engages at length with The Faerie Queene. Coles’ central claim in this chapter is that the “fleshly materiality of Spenser’s allegory” (111) is best understood with reference to the inextricability of the body and the soul as described in the preceding chapters. Whilst the Christian body is identified with the properly tempered body, Coles argues, those who “live outside of the spirit—Catholics, Muslims, and Savages” are presumed to embody a religious error which “resides in flesh itself” (113). One important implication of this perspective is that the disciplining of deformed and distempered bodies in Spenser’s poem can be read not merely as an allegory for spiritual improvement, but as the enactment of that very improvement. Because the soul and the body are inextricable, Coles explains, the tempering of the latter is essential to the reformation of the former.
In order to make this case, Coles first turns to the episode at the House of Alma, explaining that this fortress of humoral health is assailed by the melancholic Maleger because he represents the “challenge that the body poses to the soul’s direction” (94). Spiritual affliction is thus represented as both a physical and a metaphysical problem (93)—one which is ultimately solved via corporeal means when Arthur performs a pseudo-baptism on his foe. Medina’s House of Temperance offers another site for Coles’ exploration of the relationship between body and soul, with confessional differences here manifesting in differences in humoral complexion. “The religious affiliations of Hudibras and Sansloy,” she argues, “are depicted as inclinations compelled by bodily disorder” (108). Both here and in the case of Redcrosse, whose slip into “irreligion” is also interpreted through the prism of corporeal inadequacy, spiritual recovery is mediated through “the body’s reform” (110; original emphasis).
These observations accord with Coles’ broader claim in the chapter, which is that Books II and III of The Faerie Queene describe the corporeal means by which Book I’s titular virtue is to be enacted: “Chastity shows how the body can be prepared for grace” (108) and temperance “is the means by which the body is re-formed so that ‘Holinesse’ can be achieved” (102). There are, of course, notable limits to the enactment of this process of corporeal and spiritual reformation. As well as gesturing towards the prospect of reformation, The Faerie Queene also represents a number of figures whose “grotesque configurations […] represent them as figures that literally cannot (re)form” (88-89). In the final part of the chapter, Coles brings Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland into the conversation, proposing that the Irish—unlike Redcrosse, or even Hudibras and Sansloy—are “so committed to flesh they cannot be incorporated into the body of Christ” (116). It is in these closing moments, which describe “a wholly humorous Irish nation that cannot be recuperated,” that the racial implications of Coles’ argument become clear (116). Humoral constitutions which inhibit “right religion” are here attributed not just to individual characters, but to an entire nation presumed to be linked by inherent and heritable characteristics, which both fix their moral capacities and, potentially, manifest visibly in the body.
The fifth and final chapter of Bad Humor returns to the question of dermal difference which animates chapters two and three. In it, Coles reads William Shakespeare’s Othello and Thomas Southerne’s stage adaptation of Oroonoko in relation to one another, concluding that in both cases black people—or, more accurately, bodies blackened by a melancholic disposition—are resistant to conversion and thus inherently “pagan”. Importantly, in the near century between these two works, Coles identifies a shift in focus from internal humoral complexion to external dermal complexion as the preeminent marker of religious identity and moral capacity (117). The final parts of this chapter record the encoding of religious essentialism in colonial laws, which made blackness synonymous with paganism and whiteness synonymous with Christianity, as well as fixing the legal and religious identity of children based on the status of their mothers. Here, Coles notes the existing scholarly consensus that legal changes instantiated “the separation of free and enslaved people based upon chromatic distinction,” but proposes that “this distinction is premised upon the potential for recuperation of the soul—and that such potential resides in the nature of blood” (131). Once more, the grounds for religious essentialism are located in physiology.
The key contribution of Bad Humor is thus to attend to the relationship between humoral complexion and spiritual (in)capacity, making the provocative claim that certain kinds of bodies—marked by the dark skin which signified melancholic disorder—were presumed to be incapable of proper belief. Whilst this line of argument certainly offers a novel and interesting perspective on how human difference was made legible through a hybrid medico-theological discourse, it also opens up a number of questions which are not quite resolved by the monograph’s close.
The first of these concerns the persistent focus on what Coles describes as the “history of black and white” (2). At various points, the materials under discussion pull away from this strict binary and suggest more complex formations. This is particularly notable in chapter four, where, despite the declaration that Spenser’s characters are “scored in black and white” (88), there is no discussion of chromatic complexion—whether in the body or of the skin—beyond a brief mention of Maleger’s “pale and wan” body (91). A generalized sense of fleshliness, which sometimes manifests in corporeal monstrosity (104) is the far more prominent sign of humoral imbalance and intemperance within the chapter (110). Elsewhere in Bad Humor, passages from Donne (38) and Thomas Elyot (73) make unfavorable comparisons between pure whiteness—whether of the soul or of the skin—and the preferable ruddiness which is the mark of humoral balance. Whilst the violent and painful legacies of contemporary racism articulated in the preface and coda provide an indispensable framework for the study as a whole, reading the individual texts through predetermined “binaries of black and white” (82) risks effacing some of the texts’ more interesting and challenging peculiarities.
A related but distinct question concerns the relationship between blackness as a consequence of humoral indisposition—and, in particular, melancholy—and blackness as an innate characteristic of specific groups of people. Whilst Bad Humor proposes a close etiological relationship between these two varieties of blackness, the differences should not be disregarded. The claim that the “common source” of blackness “was understood as an excess of black bile” (55), for example, becomes increasingly tenuous when applied to dark-skinned people at large, as opposed to persons (temporarily) marked by humoral indisposition. Despite Coles’ claim to the contrary (55), the effects of the sun—whether working directly on the skin, or operating through the mediating effect of the humors—continued to be deployed as an explanation for blackness throughout the seventeenth century. In his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, for example, Thomas Browne names two “generally received” causes for blackness: “The heat and scorch of the Sun; or the curse of God on Cham and his Posterity”.1 Whilst he personally disputes both of these claims, their inclusion within his catalogue of widespread errors is evidence of their continued currency in the period.
Bad Humor thus leaves some room for further clarifications and elaborations with regard to the specific relationship between individual humoral complexions and humoral tendencies shared across broader groups; however, the book nonetheless makes a crucial contribution to thinking about the relationship between the body and soul and, in Coles’ words, how “what we would term ‘culture’—religious belief” could be “read as nature” in the period (9). More specifically, Bad Humor proposes a valuable route for exploring how moral disposition might be borne in the body and transmitted through the blood, providing a bridge between fluid and overlapping discourses of “lineage, nation, and religious identity” (82) and the more rigid binaries developed in the colonial context, which, in altered form, persist to this day (117).
Eli Cumings
Columbia University