Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (review)

In her eloquent and thoughtful book, Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance, Jean E. Feerick reminds readers that “race” in the early modern period was primarily a “social system built in, around, and through the symbolics of blood” (12). Feerick rightly observes that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts tend to “confound the tendency in modern racial ideologies to emphasize taxonomies of colour” (4). Although she does not trace the emergence of color as a marker of racial difference, she indicates that modern racialism depended on the decline of a blood-based social hierarchy that privileged the body’s internal properties as the dominant determinants of identity. Transplantation, Feerick argues, unsettled this older system of stock, lineage, and bloodlines. Attempts in Ireland and Virginia to “reproduce the social body of England in new soils” challenged and ultimately undermined an inheritance structure that tied gentility to blood (18).

For Feerick, Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland is a touchstone text in this history, particularly its discourse of degeneration. New English writers such as Spenser viewed the Old English settlers in Ireland as fallen away from their original stock; this supposed decline on foreign soil led Spenser to question the importance “of blood, stock, and lineage as principles of power and rule” (26). If blood’s properties could be altered through migration and neglect, then gentility became “a practice, rather than a birthright, something to be worked at rather than derived through one’s blood” (34). In book 2 of The Faerie Queene, Feerick contends, Guyon embodies these new principles; his temperate blood, produced through “countless acts of self-restraint,” displaces the blood derived from noble birth (54). Moreover, Spenser’s description of the Old English tradition of employing Irish wet nurses, where the concocted blood of strange breast milk adulterates the child’s lineage, exemplifies the pervasive overlap between nature and culture that Feerick finds in the period’s ideologies of difference.

While Spenser’s writing is the focus of chapters 1 and 2, Shakespeare’s romances Cymbeline and The Tempest take center stage in chapters 3 and 4. Feerick asserts that Cymbeline dramatizes the way that geohumoral theory comes “into direct conflict with genealogical theories of race” (87). Particularly provocative is her contention that Shakespeare’s play “calls for the reproduction of a degenerate [British] people by appealing to the power of geography and native custom” in similar terms as the “great body of tracts urging transplantation to Virginia point to racial slippage as the primary incentive for planting abroad” (107). In chapter 4, she contrasts The Tempest with John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The Sea Voyage. While Shakespeare’s play casts “reproducing abroad” as a “vexed and dangerous activity” (126), The Sea Voyage puts elite blood “to the test,” as the most virtuous aristocrats demonstrate temperance, rather than “land and wealth as the real essence of gentle blood” (129). In the book’s final chapter, Feerick turns to Richard Ligon’s True & Exact History of the Island of Barbardos (1657) to demonstrate how even “in the context of chattel slavery” (23), we can find evidence that gradations of rank and degree shaped this Royalist author’s perceptions far more than the oppositional conceptions of white over black that marked racial ideologies rooted in color. In Feerick’s analysis, there are intimations of Aphra Behn’s privileging of rank over color in Oroonoko, a text she mentions briefly in the book’s coda.

As Feerick’s readings of the Virginian tracts, The Sea Voyage, and Ligon all indicate, much of her evidence does not actually point to a decline in the system of stock, lineage, and bloodlines but to its flexibility and continuing sway. Indeed, Feerick is at her least persuasive when she suggests that the period saw a “cataclysmic shift away from the language of race, bloodline and lineage to that of birthplace” or region “as the defining anchor of...