Abstract
Scholars who study race and racism in early modern and Renaissance-era England are often told that their work is anachronistic. Although the field has been more willing to interrogate such claims in recent years, many scholars hold fast to a notion of England’s innocence in the early development of racial ideologies. The disavowal of culpability in early race-making has long been predicated on the idea that England was late to the transatlantic slave trade, merely following in the footsteps of Spain and Portugal and therefore less to blame for its horrors. In Bad Blood Emily Weissbourd carefully contravenes such academic narratives that attribute the origin of racialized violence to Iberia and so “implicitly valorize England as innocent of such preoccupations” (4). Indeed, one of Weissbourd’s most incisive arguments is that England deployed a specific “idea of Spain” (5), as shaped by propagandistic myths such as the so-called Black Legend of Spanish cruelty, to position Spain as the source of early modern discourses about racial difference (7). This book’s intersectional study of racialized depictions of Spanish and Moorish characters deftly exposes the fact that racialized slavery had a far greater impact on early modern English drama and culture than has been previously believed.