Culture is not politically neutral. This is particularly true of the culture of the early modern period in which politics is engaged through poetic production. One need not be committed to the study of literature as a political project to recognize that poetry and culture are inherently political. David Norbrook suggested some time ago, "Certainly one should not deny the distinctions between poetry and other forms of discourse. But in the Renaissance these distinctions were by no means as absolute as they become in Romantic theory. . . . The issue is not so much why one should politicize poetry as why critics have for so long been trying to depoliticize it." 1 Edmund Spenser was invested in the use of poetry as a vehicle for the transmission of political ideas. His politics were deeply embedded in the English colonial project, and we have both argued elsewhere, "the politics and economics that ultimately produced settler colonialism, chattel slavery, the forced migration of peoples, and the development of the British empire animate . . . early English texts." 2 Spenser's poetry and politics have different afterlives, and the ideologies that pass through his works adhere to us today. Our bodies themselves signify according to cultural history; understanding what and how they signify requires attending to the histories that have been overlaid on them. When we transmit the terms and relations that produced these histories, we are not simply failing to unravel them, we are, to some extent, reproducing them.Over the past thirty years, early modern studies has been increasingly interested in the emergence of race as a category of identity, one that could variously demarcate groups of people along lines of lineage, nationality,
Chapter 1 surveys writings by important English theologians—including William
Tyndale, Thomas Becon, John Hooper, and John Whitgift—and shows that race became
a powerful tool for clarifying the Church of England’s theology concerning
baptism and the origins of Christian identity. Race functions in two ways in the
Church of England’s baptismal theology: one, in arguments against English
Anabaptists, as the Church of England asserted that the children of Christians
should be baptized just as the children of Jews were circumcised; and two, in
arguments asserting that the children of Christians who died before being
baptized were nevertheless saved because God is also the Father of Christian
“seed.” This chapter also shows that the rhetorical force of theological
arguments about baptism often presupposes a belief among English readers that
infidels, namely Turks, were racially different from themselves.
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