Introduction

Was the early modern period in England fundamentally anti-Black, anti-woman, classist, antisemitic, and Islamophobic? Early Modern Others asks: what if at least some early modern literature confronted racism and the other biases circulating in and around England? This book shows that the early modern period was hardly of one mind. Alongside misogyny and racism, we also find explicit refutations of misogyny and racism. Furthermore, these challenges are not an avant-garde phenomenon; criticizing racism and proposing alternative political structures circulated widely in the public theater and the book trade, institutions that relied on the market to survive. For example, an English translation of Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short History of the Destruction of the Indies; 1552) was reprinted in 1583, 1656, 1689, and 1699, and each time, the introductory preface explicitly denounces Spanish depredations. For example, in 1699, the preface mourns “the Destruction of many Millions of Indians by all the inhuman methods the Spaniards could invent.”