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What does an early modern literary scholar have to say, what do early modern literary studies have to say, to Black History Month? Black writers are notable on English Renaissance literature modules by their absence; if you pick up your Norton Anthology of English Literature, you won鈥檛 find any before Olaudah Equiano鈥檚 Interesting Narrative (published 1789). Does this make the literature of the preceding centuries irrelevant to readers and students interested in questions of racial identity? Worse: is there something wrong with early modern literary studies as a discipline if its period focus leads to its excluding black voices?

It would be foolish to be complacent about these questions. The Renaissance, as a potent cultural myth, can easily be put to dubious political purposes, potentially authorising an elitist and Eurocentric vision of the past. (As a brief but alarming internet trawl quickly showed me, the word 鈥楻enaissance鈥� also seems to exert a certain fascination for white supremacists, although I doubt that they鈥檙e thinking of Erasmus or Montaigne.) That makes it all the more important that historians and literary scholars offer a nuanced picture of that past, one that doesn鈥檛 鈥� for example 鈥� elide the presence of people of colour in early modern Britain. Texts such as David Olusoga鈥檚 Black and British: A Forgotten History, or Miranda Kaufmann鈥檚 Black Tudors, which focuses on the lives of ten people of African descent in early modern England, offer a corrective to historical whitewashing; so does Imtiaz Habib鈥檚 Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677, which includes an array of sources testifying to the presence of black people in London and beyond. (You can currently access his essay, 鈥楾he Resonables of Boroughside, Southwark: An Elizabethan Black Family Near the Rose Theatre鈥� for free at . Full disclosure: I am an editor of the journal in which it appeared.)

Literature scholars face a different situation from historians, of course: the absence of black authors from the literary corpus for our period of specialism. However, it remains the case that Africans, Asians, and inhabitants of the New World are a widespread presence in the texts we study, albeit 鈥� and it鈥檚 a big albeit 鈥� voiced, troped, and represented by white people. Some examples of this are obvious: Othello, of course, or Aaron in Titus Andronicus. Others are less so. Here are some ways in which non-Europeans figure in texts taught on the second-year Renaissance Literature module:

• In Astrophil and Stella 8, where Cupid is said to have come to England because the Turks have conquered Greece, and 30, where courtiers discuss the growth of the Ottoman empire.
• In The Faerie Queene, Book I, where Redcrosse follows Duessa after killing her lover Sansfoy, 鈥楢 faithlesse Sarazin鈥�; Sansfoy鈥檚 brother Sansjoy will seek revenge, and his other brother Sansloy will go on to abduct Una.
• In Volpone, where Mosca tells Corvino (not necessarily inaccurately) that Volpone has over a dozen children 鈥榯hat he begot on beggars, / Gipsies, and Jews, and black-moors, when he was drunk鈥�, and where Volpone fantasises about dressing Celia up (for sexual purposes) like 鈥榯he Persian Sophy鈥檚 [i.e., Shah鈥檚] wife / Or the Grand Signior鈥檚 [Ottoman Emperor鈥檚] mistress 鈥� Or some quick Negro, or cold Russian鈥�.
• In Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 25, where Mary Wroth鈥檚 speaker compares herself and her experience of love to 鈥榯he Indians scorched with the sun, / The sun which they do as their god adore鈥�: both are wounded (in Wroth鈥檚 view of blackness, disfigured) by the object of their worship.

Moments like these can cause problems for lecturers like me. Firstly, how do we 鈥� should we? 鈥� integrate into our teaching of other topics (genre, narration, history, subjectivity, gender) references that can be marginal and fleeting? Secondly, how can we do so responsibly, given the way they articulate offensive views of race, religion and sexuality that continue to influence discourse in 2017?

As my students will testify, I don鈥檛 think I鈥檓 anywhere near a satisfactory response to those questions. In the context of this blog, though, I think the instances above offer grounds for comment. Sidney鈥檚 poems are a reminder that in the 1580s the Ottoman Empire was England鈥檚 military superior: there may be phobia, but there is not condescension in Astrophil鈥檚 references to it. Spenser鈥檚 stanzas may leave us asking: what does it mean for Duessa, who allegorically figures the Pope and the Catholic Church, to be the lover of a Muslim? How are attitudes that we would consider Islamophobic shaped by the anti-Catholicism that pervades The Faerie Queene? Volpone鈥檚 alleged sexual history, however dismissive of black women as the objects of his drunken lust, also testifies to the cosmopolitanism of seventeenth-century Venice 鈥� and, by extension, of seventeenth-century London, for which it stands as a surrogate. And Wroth鈥檚 unthinking characterisation of blackness as not beautiful demands that we review the valorisation of whiteness in so much of Renaissance poetry, whether in Stella鈥檚 alabaster skin or Leander鈥檚 neck, which 鈥榮urpassed / The white of Pelops鈥� shoulder鈥�.

None of this is to mitigate the racist assumptions that underlie textual moments like those I鈥檝e identified. But focusing on them does two things. Firstly, it asserts the textual presence of people of colour in Renaissance literature, just as the work of Habib and others asserts their presence in early modern Britain. And secondly, it helps us see how preconceptions about race (and, in the cases of Spenser and Sidney, about Islam and the Ottoman empire), shaped the way early modern people thought about politics, about religion, about sexuality, and about beauty.

The above is a reflection on my experience of teaching Renaissance literature at the University of Sheffield; I am very far from being an expert in the specific topic of race in Renaissance studies. For those seeking expertise, here is some suggested reading:

• Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells, eds, Shakespeare and Race (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000)
• Jerry Brotton, This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (London: Allen Lane, 2016) and see also Marcus Nevitt鈥檚 review at
• Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995)
• Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003)
• Margo Hendricks, 鈥楻ace and Shakespeare Studies鈥�, Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 19鈥�20
• Arthur Little, Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002)
• Joyce Green MacDonald, ed., Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997)
• Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia UP, 1999)
• Daniel J. Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570鈥�1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

You might also be interested in the 鈥榬eading list of scholarship by people of colour on slavery and colonialism, c.1500-1750鈥� put together by Brodie Waddell of Birkbeck:

Written by Tom Rutter 22 October 2017