Race Before Race

Historical Context Essay

Emily MacLeod (Penn State University); Anita Raychawdhuri (University of Houston-Downtown)

Ed. by Virginia Mason Vaughan, Clark University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.03: English Writing and Culture: Renaissance (Elizabethan and Jacobean periods) , 1485-1625.
Vol. editors: William M. Hamlin (Washington State University), J A Roe (University of York), Virginia Mason Vaughan (Clark University), Ema Vyroubalova (Trinity College Dublin)

Domains

Race

Dates

Date of occurrence c.1500

Places

United Kingdom (Location)

Resources

Recommended Reading

When people today visualize early modern London, what do they imagine? Crowded streets, alive with a wide array of smells and sights, such as an occasional person decked out in a ruff, doublet, and hose, as is depicted in the CBBC series Horrible Histories or the 1998 flick Shakespeare in Love. Based on these images from popular culture, they might also assume that everyone in early modern England was white, and that race as we define it today was not actually a concept back then. This current assumption is notable in outrage about, for example, Jodie Turner-Smith (a Black woman) being cast as Anne Boleyn in the miniseries of the same name. Some angry viewers protested the casting choice because it went against …

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6731 words

Citation: MacLeod, Emily, Anita Raychawdhuri. "Race Before Race". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 December 2022 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19691, accessed 26 April 2024.]

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