Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Renaissance humanism and ethnicity before race: The Irish and the English in the seventeenth century
ISBN: 9781781706022
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Manchester University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Intellectual History; Early Modern History (1500 to 1700) Modern History (1700 to 1945) British History;

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.