ABSTRACT
This introduction outlines the argument of Human Insufficiency: that Renaissance representations of embodied weakness sought to racialize slavery. By depicting the human political subject as exceptionally vulnerable, literary and philosophical writers portrayed the English as needing care from bodies imagined to be less than human in their physical sufficiency and therefore predisposed to servitude. The introduction contains close reading of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and a masque performed at the baptism of King James’s son Henry. It contextualizes the argument within scholarship in premodern critical race studies and describes the structure of the book.
