Race and Beauty

Early Modern Cosmetics and the Mythology of Whiteness
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-49933-8
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 190 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 298 g

Reihe: New Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Culture

This work examines how beauty standards, specifically the ideology of "fairness", contributed to the racialization of bodies in early modern England. Schoel emphasizes the need to dismantle whiteness’s invisibility in historical criticism, noting that it has long been an unexamined norm. By focusing on the materiality of cosmetic whiteness, the text aims to disrupt colorblind ideologies and reveal the mechanisms behind white supremacy.

Drawing on diverse texts like sonnets, travel literature, and medical treatises, the book discusses how light skin and hair were idealized, symbolizing Christian virtue and femininity. This rhetoric of fairness not only promoted racial hierarchies but also constructed whiteness through cosmetics like whitening creams and exfoliants. These practices, associated with Queen Elizabeth I's image and widely reproduced in theater, medicine, and household texts, led to a "cult of whiteness". The locus of the cult was Queen Elizabeth I, whose materially constructed reds and whites in her portraiture and on the surface of her skin resounded throughout the commonwealth. If the cult of whiteness was founded by Elizabeth's propagandistic image campaign, it was facilitated and reproduced through theatrical productions, medical treatises, household manuals, and the birth of the apothecary, which made the materials of whiteness accessible to a wider socially diverse network of consumers.

The book is not only an ideal resource for students and scholars of early modern studies, performance, and Critical Race Studies, but for all those seeking an introduction to constructions of race in early modern England.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schoel, Josie

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
Introduction: “scorched no more.”: Performing Whiteness
Chapter 1: “Bought, Borrowed, and Sold Complexions": Cosmetics and Anglo-Ottoman Traffic
Chapter 2: “Fair Figures”: The Portraits of Elizabeth I
Chapter 3: “Dappled Ladies”: Maculation as Racial Coding
Chapter 4: “Strange Shoppes of Drugges": The Apothecary and Marketing of Whiteness
Chapter 5: “Lyke unto a Lyvely Thing”: The White Effigial Body.
Chapter 6: “A noble confection”: Ben Jonson’s Masque of Gypsies Metamorphosed
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Josie Schoel is a professor at the Department of English at Endicott College, specializing in early modern British literature and culture. Her work, which has appeared in SEL: Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900 and Dynamic Matter: Transforming Renaissance Objects, explores cosmetic materiality and emerging notions of cultural difference and racial meaning.