Details

Renaissance humanism and ethnicity before race

The Irish and the English in the seventeenth century

von: Ian Campbell
129,99 €
Verlag:	Manchester University Press
Format:	EPUB
Veröffentl.:	01.11.2015
ISBN/EAN:	9781526102652
Sprache:	englisch
Anzahl Seiten:	240

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Beschreibungen

Titelbeschreibung

The modern ideology of race, so important in twentieth-century Europe, incorporates both a theory of human societies and a theory of human bodies. Ian Campbell’s new study examines how the elite in early modern Ireland spoke about human societies and human bodies, and demonstrates that this elite discourse was grounded in a commitment to the languages and sciences of Renaissance Humanism. Emphasising the education of all of early modern Ireland’s antagonistic ethnic groups in common European university and grammar school traditions, Campbell explains both the workings of the learned English critique of Irish society, and the no less learned Irish response. Then he turns to Irish debates on nobility, medicine and theology in order to illuminate the problem of human heredity. He concludes by demonstrating how the Enlightenment swept away these humanist theories of body and society, prior to the development of modern racial ideology in the late eighteenth century.

Titelkurzbeschreibung

Examines how the elite in early modern Ireland spoke about human societies and human bodies, and demonstrates that this elite discourse was grounded in a commitment to the languages and sciences of Renaissance Humanism

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: defining race
1. Two problems in the history of Irish humanism and ethnicity
2. English humanism against Gaelic Irish society
3. Gaelic humanism against English Irish society
4. Humanists and genealogists on nobility and the human body
5. Irish Doctors and theologians on heredity and the human soul
6. Irish Enlightenment, human societies, and human bodies
Select bibliography
Index

Autorenportrait

Ian Campbell is a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Neo-Latin Studies, University College Cork

Flap copy

Inspired both by debates about the origins of the modern ideology of race and also by controversy over the place of Ireland and the Irish in theories of empire in the early modern Atlantic world, this pathbreaking study argues that ethnic discourse among the elite in early modern Ireland was grounded firmly in the Renaissance Humanism and Aristotelianism which dominated all the European universities before the Enlightenment. Irish and English, Catholic and Protestant, all employed theories of human society based on Aristotle’s Politics and the natural law of the medieval universities to construct or dismantle the categories of civility and barbarism. The elites operating in Ireland also shared common resources, taught in the universities, for arguing about the human body and its ability to transmit hereditary characteristics. Both in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe, these theories of human society and the human body underwent violent changes in the late seventeenth century under the impact of the early Enlightenment. These changes were vital to the development of race as we know it.

Ian Campbell both interrogates neglected Latin-language sources in print and manuscript and re-interprets well-known writings by Richard Stanihurst, Edmund Spenser, and others to build an analysis of Irish Renaissance Humanism as a politically and ethnically relevant tradition densely intertwined with European intellectual life.

Renaissance Humanism and Ethnicity before Race will prove essential reading for students of race, the early modern European empires, and British and Irish history.