The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900

The essays of this collection explore how ideas about 'blood' in science and literature have supported, at various points in history and in various places in the circum-Atlantic world, fantasies of human embodiment and human difference that serve to naturalize existing hierarchies.
Metamateriality and Blood Purity in Cervantes’s Alcaná de ToledoThe Blood of Others: Breeding Plants, Animals, and White People in the Spanish Atlantic“Rude Uncivill Blood”: The Pastoral Challenge to Hereditary Race in Fletcher and MiltonAfrican Blood, Colonial Money, and Respectable Mulatto Heiresses Reforming Eighteenth-Century England“His blood be on us and on our children”: Medieval Theology and the Demise of Jewish Somatic Inferiority in Early Modern EnglandSor Juana’s Appetite: Body, Mind, and Vitality in “First Dream”Blood and Character in Early African American LiteratureFlowing or Pumping? The Blood of the Body Politic in Burton, Harvey, and HobbesLinnaeus and the Four Corners of the World“Who Got Bloody?”: The Cultural Meanings of Blood during the Civil War and ReconstructionColonial Transfusions: Cuban Bodies and Spanish Loyalty in the Nineteenth Century
Robert Appelbaum, Uppsala University, Sweden Rachel Burk, the University of Pennsylvania, USA Lyndon J. Dominique, Lehigh University, USA Jim Downs, Connecticut College, USA Jean E. Feerick, John Carroll University, USA Ruth Hill, Vanderbilt University, USA M. Lindsay Kaplan, Georgetown University, USA Anna More, University of Brasília Staffan Müller-Wille, University of Exeter, UK David Sartorius, University of Maryland, USA Hannah Spahn, University of Potsdam, Germany