Many years ago, when I was in London’s National Heart Hospital, where my daughter was undergoing surgery, a mother in our support group refused to allow a blood transfusion for her infant daughter on the grounds that a person’s soul resides in their blood. At the time I was mystified, and, even after years of teaching religious studies, I hadn’t realized how powerful and long-lasting this conviction—found in the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 17:11)—was and remains for some Christians. Kimberly Anne Coles’ Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England has removed the scales from my eyes by demonstrating that the concept of mind/body dualism enshrined in Cartesian dualism was more of an ideal than a reality.
For all the valiant ruminations of early modern theologians, philosophers, scientists, and intellectuals, Galenic humoral pathology was a key aspect of Western medical theory and practice up to the 19th century. By its very nature, humoral pathology undermined the distinction between mind and body because the humors, particularly black melancholy, were believed to affect the soul and mind to such a degree that both, in their turn, could “color” the body black. Race was therefore a physical property located in the soul, carried in the blood, and conditioned by the soil and climate in which an individual is born and raised. Superior Whites are separated from inferior Brown and Black people by their constitutions or “complexions,” the term used in the early modern period to refer both to the state of a person’s humors and the color of their skin. This leads Coles to her major premise: modern racism based on physical characteristics cannot be understood without considering its roots in Galenic humoral pathology. But she goes a crucial step further by demonstrating that humoral pathology was not simply a medical theory but a component of Christian theology, inasmuch as black bile was believed to cause of atheism and irreligion:
Early modern medical theory bound together psyche and soma in mutual influence. By the end of the sixteenth century, there is a general acceptance that the soul’s condition, as a consequence of religious belief or its absence, could be manifest in the humoral composition of the physical body. Certain strategies of color, I argue, were premised upon religious identity and identification in a system that assumed the corporeal manifestation of belief and that read the body for its moral code (x).
While many scholars have demonstrated the racial aspects of ancient, medieval, and early modern thought and culture, Coles is one of the few to emphasize the crucial role religion, especially Protestantism, has had in creating modern racism and to show how Protestant theology went hand-in-hand with the politics of Anglo domination and colonialism. The idea of “limpieza di sangue,” or “blood purity,” was therefore not a Catholic concept limited to Spain and Portugal, but a theological premise adopted and adapted by Protestants to assert their authority over not only “heathens,” but also Catholics, who by Protestant definition were not proper Christians.
Coles provides ample evidence to demonstrate that the purported boundaries separating mind from body had been breeched long before Descartes. The Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), for example, attributes atheism to a disease of the soul caused by melancholy or an excess of black bile. This clearly implied that the body could corrupt the soul and vice versa (xii). Robert Burton (1577-1640), the English scholar, writer, and Anglican clergyman, took a similar position in his Anatomy of Melancholy:
as the Body workes vpon the mind, by his bad humours, troubling the Spirits, sending grosse fumes into the Braine and so per consequens disturbing the Soule, and all the faculties of it . . . so on the other side, the minded most effectually works vpon the Body producing by his passions and perturbations, miraculous alterations (50).
Like Ficino, Burton attributed atheism and impiety to the excess black bile that caused melancholy (xiii).
Coles argues that the connection between humoral pathology and irreligion drawn by Ficino and Burton, along with many others, was crucial in allowing the English to ignore established theological and legal arguments stipulating that Christians could only enslave heathens. These arguments went even further, maintaining that conversion to Christianity could trump race and transform individuals into bona fide Christians who consequently could not be enslaved. This had been the accepted practice under medieval Catholicism, but in the early modern period the science of humors asserted the opposite: race now trumped religion, making conversion impossible. Since English colonial ventures involved conflict with other Christians, Irish and Spanish Catholics, along with converted Africans indigenous peoples, had to be turned into non-Christians. Humor pathology made this possible with the result that Galatians 3:28 (“There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”) was simply ignored. Furthermore, according to Protestant theology, baptism was unnecessary for true Christians—namely, Protestants—because identity was passed through the blood. As Coles writes, “religion, or irreligion, was a somatic condition that descends through bloodlines as a bodily concern” (xii).
In making her case Coles relies on major texts in the English tradition: John Donne’s Holy Sonnets (1633), Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blacknesse (1605), Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621), Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queen (1590), and William Shakespeare’s Othello (1603). She pairs these with less well-known but popular texts to show how the ideology of race played out politically in colonial contexts: early modern anxieties about skin color were “knit together to compose fictions about race,” which in turn were used to bolster racialized political hierarchies. (14).
Coles’ book is a timely reminder of just how important the study of history is if we are ever to understand the present. However much the rationale for racism changed over time, we are products of these changes and erasing them from books and classrooms, as so many contemporary political figures seem bent on doing, helps no one. A repressed past does not make for a successful future. As Coles puts it so well, “We are circumscribed by the histories that create us. But understanding those histories also allows us to evaluate the terms and relations that rendered them possible in the first place” (x).
This is a book that will be of interest to anyone concerned with the religious roots of Western racism in general and the particular way Protestant theology was and continues to be politicized to justify White supremacy and stigmatize people of color.
Allison P. Coudert is professor emerita in the Department of Religious Studies at theUniversity of California at Davis.
Allison P. Coudert
Date Of Review:
September 26, 2023
