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...
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Book Review|
December 01 2024
Bad Blood: Staging Race between Early Modern England and Spain
Bad Blood: Staging Race between Early Modern England and Spain
. By Emily Weissbourd. Philadelphia
: University of Pennsylvania Press
, 2023
. 218
pp.
Victoria M. Muñoz
Victoria M. Muñoz is assistant professor of global early modern studies at Adelphi University. She specializes in early modern Anglo-Iberian literary and imperial relations with a focus on romance literature and drama. Her first book, Spanish Romance in the Battle for Global Supremacy: Tudor and Stuart Black Legends, appeared in 2021.
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Modern Language Quarterly (2024) 85 (4): 486–489.
Citation
Victoria M. Muñoz; Bad Blood: Staging Race between Early Modern England and Spain. Modern Language Quarterly 1 December 2024; 85 (4): 486–489. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-11426470
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