Bodies Complexioned

This book examines how bodily difference was understood by the people of early modern England. Using an array of sources - from sermons, polemics, and newspapers to medical case-notes, almanacs, diaries, and dramas - it traces people's attitudes to somatic contrasts, both among themselves and, as they ventured across the Atlantic, among non-Europeans.

The book demonstrates that individuals' distinctive features were thought to be innate, even as discrete populations were believed to have fleshly characteristics in common - whether similarities in skin-tone, facial profile, hair colour, or demeanour. According to most scholarship, bodies constituted from the same four elemental fluids as Adam and Eve's - the phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric, and melancholic humours - were not the stuff of visceral inequality or racism. But this book contends that people routinely judged others on sight according to the ostensible balance, or complexion, their humours.

Complexions vouched for distinctions in social status, physical cum moral fitness, national allegiance, and religious affiliation. But to establish whether this scrutiny had a racist potential, we need to determine if the people of the day had an entirely naturalistic view of themselves and the world they inhabited.