The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500–1900 ed. by Kimberly Ann-Coles et al. (review)

Oddly enough, blood is entangled. One of the most potent points of reference in medieval Europe because of its theorized place within humoral medical concepts and practice, blood took on semantic and scientific weight that other humoral substances such as bile and phlegm never did. That this transformation occurred within the complicated and expansive social and political developments of the Early Modern Era made the connection of blood, race, and nation likely, but not inevitable. The book edited by Coles and her colleagues is a welcome analysis of this critical transformation.

The editors organize the volume into three parts. Within each part, chapters deal with a few regions, always including a selection dealing with the Spanish Atlantic, often with early modern England and African American examples. Part I, Race and Stock, provides four different perspectives on blood as a measure of descent and inheritance. Rachel Burk's fascinating chapter proposes a parallel between the materiality in Don Quixote—the tattered, secondhand contraband sources for the retelling of the epic tale—and the fraught paradigm of pureza de sangre. Ruth Hill's following chapter about breeding terms in the Spanish Atlantic deftly places the term raza in a broader context and traces the semantic shift toward racial ideology. Jean Feerick highlights the concept of "rude, uncivill blood" in Milton and Fletcher, contrasting the way the two authors wrangle with the concept. The role of mulatto heiresses that Lyndon Dominique examines shows that neither money nor proper civil behavior can overcome the taint of heritage. This chapter is a fitting conclusion to the colorization of blood.

The second part, Moral Constitution, focuses on the associations of heart, intellect, and soul. M. Lindsay Kaplan turns the chronology of increasing racialization on its head, with inferiority of the Jewish body lessening over time. It takes a mind as brilliant as that of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to argue the corporeality of the mind. Blood, though less prominent a theme in this contribution than in some of the other chapters, is in fact vitally important, as blood is the humor, stimulated by food, that produces the mind. Hannah Spahn's analysis of early African-American literature returns to themes of the introductory chapters, but here she highlights the ways that James McCune Smith employed tropes of blood and character to critique Thomas Jefferson.

The third and final part of the volume takes the corporeality introduced in the previous part and meets the challenge of the book's title: bodies, blood, and politics. Robert Applebaum argues powerfully that the idea of the circulatory system of blood had a profound effect on conceptualizing political systems, with Hobbes recognizing the transformative nature of circulation, particularly of money, within a political economy. Staffan Muller-Wille tackles the often-cited example of Linnaeus's four peoples for the four corners of the world and argues that it does not in fact represent racial thinking. James Downs discusses the racialized metaphor of blood, particularly who sheds blood for the country, and shows how entrenched the resistance was to the humanity of black soldiers and newly freed citizens, effectively draining them of blood. The final chapter of the book, by David Sartorius, outlines the connections of blood and descent to the goals of an emerging nation, Cuba.

Because the book covers so much ground temporally, geographically, and theoretically, it is in some aspects uneven. Several pages of additional reading at the end of the book help to smooth out some of the patchy coverage. The illustrations, though few, are effective. The advantage of the breadth of this work is that it will push scholars in important directions, for example, provoke scholars of Spanish America to pay attention to African-American literature or lead scholars of early modern Britain to ponder nineteenth-century Cuba.