Selected annotated 
bibliography of PCRS

Analyzes the interplay between race and temporality in medieval English Christian plays, with primary reference to competing temporalities between Christian and Jewish characters. The work uses the simultaneously multiple times of English Biblical dramas—which pit Christian temporal frames against those of a Jewish past—to explore the anti-Semitic work being done among nonelite playwrights and audiences in medieval England. The work engages conversations in the fields of temporality, social history, dramaturgy, and religion.

Examines how European literature represented Africa as monstrous, dangerous, and lush in early Portuguese imperial writings during the 15th and 16th centuries. The scope of the book focuses on works by Gomes Eanes de Zurara in the 15th century and Camões’s Os Lusíadas in the 16th century to represent the Portuguese imperial discourse. Blackmore engages Portuguese textual matter of Africa during the 16th century to understand an important moment in the history of western expansion.

Investigates the social experiences of enslaved persons in the Roman Empire. The work attends to both the historiographical processes by which contemporary readers can attempt to detect the lives of enslaved persons, and the social climate in which enslaved persons existed in relation to so-called masters. Beyond the dichotomy of that relationship, the work also explores the social lives enslaved persons had with one another, and the processes of gaining manumission. Engages discussions in the fields of social history, enslavement and captivity, and historiography.

Branche examines the racially partisan works of the Luso-Hispanic canon. This book centers on writings of the negro in Portuguese travel writing, Spanish drama, and various texts from the Latin American colonial and postcolonial world from the 15th century to the 20th century. He determines how deep and how widespread were the feelings these works expressed. The book unpacks the concept of race-as-narrative. He points out the importance of race to national discourse both in metropoles and in their colonial and ex-colonial areas of influence.

Explores the usage of the term “Moor” within premodern Christian Iberian discourses, with primary reference to 13th century Castile. The essay argues that “Moor” was advanced as an identifier by Iberian Christians in order to draw a homogenizing distinction between a purportedly unified Christian Iberian populace and a body politic of “foreign” Muslims: both those living outside of Castile and within it. The work engages conversations in the study of premodern Iberia, identity, and erasure.

Analyzes biblical narratives about the sons of Noah across a wide range of Hellenic, rabbinic, medieval European-Christian, and contemporary sources. The essay argues for the hermeneutic flexibility of the sons of Noah narratives, showing for instance that while the figure of Ham was consistently othered, the concepts of Blackness, slavery, and Africa existed in a state of relative disentanglement in premodern contexts. The work engages discussions in the study of religion, the Bible, Blackness, and modernity.

Investigates the processes of conversion to Christianity in early modern England alongside the imaginal limits imposed upon the process by race. The book uses connections between Christianity, conversion, embodiment, and hereditary traits to demonstrate not only how Christian identity was seen as inheritable among white communities, but how English literature reveals a degree of skepticism about baptism’s power to overcome somatic markers, deployed to secure a racially homogenized Christian England. Engages conversations in the study of conversion, embodiment, and English literature.

Explores the construction of the white other in the works of Shakespeare. The book draws upon case studies from Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, and other plays to demonstrate how Shakespeare produced “blackened whiteness” to continue affirming white supremacy in contrast to Blackness, even in the absence of demarcated Black figures. The book engages conversations in the study of Shakespeare, Blackness, and literature.

Investigates the construction of Blackness in Shakespeare's late 16th-century play Titus Andronicus. Brown considers the modes in which the play uses Black characters, such as Aaron and his child, to illuminate a line of tension between racist and anti-racist work being done by the text. Beyond the early modern context, the chapter considers ongoing reverberations of Titus Andronicus in 20th-century film. The chapter engages debates in the study of Shakespeare, English literature, and film studies.

Theorizes the image of people of Islamic faith in Spanish literature during the 16th and 17th century. Burshatin describes the image of people of Islamic faith in two medieval chronicles to illuminate the role of the “Moor” in Iberian discourse. Examines the representation of the “Moor” in text through metaphor, emblem, fictional compilers, and silence.

Explores anxieties about racial typologizing and miscegenation through a 14th century English romance. The essay argues that the romance in question, The King of Tars, engineers scenarios in which characters’ racial and religious identities are subject to ambiguity or failed categorizations, which in turn demands somatic transformations within the narrative itself to provide clarity. The work engages discussions in the fields of conversion, typology, and medieval English literature.

Examines the parallelism drawn between “Vikings” and “Saracens” in medieval English literature and visual arts. The essay argues that the figures of non-Christian Anglo-Saxons and “Saracens” operated in parallel fashion until the 14th century, at which point new consolidations of English identity rendered the comparison untenable. It engages discussions in the study of Christianity, conversion, and English literature.

Examines the connections between antiracism in medieval studies and the abolition of the prison-industrial complex. The essay argues that the study of medieval dance requires certain capacities to prison abolitionist work: “1) an ability to envision what we cannot know; 2) an understanding of how to act collectively even through our estrangement from each other (as medieval dancers did); 3) a willingness to take risks.”

Analyzes slavery in 16th and 17th century England against the widely held conception of early modern England as possessing a culture of voluntary service. The book focuses on the slippery “border between service and servitude” in order to parse the rhetorical techniques inflecting the lives of servants, captives, and others in early modern English contexts. The work engages conversations in the histories of labor, drama, and early modern England.

Investigates theories of race in medieval English works. Through analysis of complex literary events, such as the battle between the knight Guy and the giant Colbrond in Guy of Warwick, the essay encapsulates the significance of “religion, descent, custom, law, language, monstrosity, geographical origin, and species” in addition to somatic markers in medieval English constructions of race. In addition, the essay provides a historiographical overview of contemporary thinking on race and medieval studies. Engages conversations in historiography, literature, embodiment, and religious studies.

A compendium of essays addressing multifaceted temporalities of the medieval and its possible resonances today, with particular attention to postcolonial hermeneutics of medieval materials. The essays range across themes such as Richard the Lionheart, statues of Dante and Joan of Arc in Malcolm X Park, Chaucer, Prester John, and others. The volume engages conversations in the fields of postcolonial theory, historiography, and temporality.

A compendium of essays reimagining European history between 1350 and 1550 through the experiences of "Black Africans, Asians, Jews, and Muslims." The essays explore the intersection of race with environment, religion, science, politics, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and more in a range of Renaissance and early modern European contexts.

An examination of constructing Jewish racial difference in Shakespeare's late 16th century play The Merchant of Venice. Coodin argues that the psychic and affective details placed onto a female Jewish character—namely, religious self-loathing and shame—are critical devices by which female Jews were racialized; and that these details were shown to be factors in Christian theorizations of conversion. The article engages conversations in the study of religion, Judaism, the history of emotion, and early modern Europe.

Investigates a spectrum of possible techniques regarding how to teach the early modern English plays of Shakespeare with an attention to racial formation. The work excavates relationships between past and present Anglophone discourses on race to argue for a need to embed such a consciousness about race within pedagogical praxes today. By doing so, this work sits at the intersection of early modern studies, Shakespeare studies, and the study of Anglophone literature more generally.

A critical lexicon of terminology used to configure racial difference in the context of early modern English. The entries provide historicizations of key concepts such as Alien, Moor, Citizen, Convert, Denizen, Exile, Foreigner, Heathen, Indian, Jew, Mahometan, Pagan, Savage, Turk, and Vagrant. The work thus participates in a broad range of fields including study of early modern England, cultural history, and the English language.