Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance. Dennis Austin Britton. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Pp. v+259.
2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 113; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/683315
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeBook ReviewBecoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance. Dennis Austin Britton. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Pp. v+259.Sujata IyengarSujata IyengarUniversity of Georgia Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDennis Britton’s excellent Becoming Christian uncovers with rigor, clarity, and breadth a hitherto neglected, protoracialist component to early modern Christianity. Conversion to Christianity and the religious discourse surrounding such a transformation might seem to offer Moors, Turks, Jews, and other marginalized non-Christian groups in early modern England a chance for integration and acceptance into mainstream social life, perhaps even to transcend race, gender, national origin, or ethnicity. Recent studies, however, including Daniel Vitkus’s Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and Jane Hwang Degendardt’s Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (University of Edinburgh Press, 2010), identify both the ubiquity and the constraints of early modern conversion tropes. Vitkus locates Turk, Protestant, and Catholic as shifting positions in a network of commodities. Degenhardt finds a potentially racialized movement in early modern religious tracts through the romance figure of the converted (female) Moor who can retain a measure of power even within a reliably patriarchal structure, in contrast to the inevitably tragic male Christian who converts to Islam.Britton’s original, invaluable contribution to this ongoing discussion identifies for the first time the racialized component of English Protestantism as it adapted the Catholic sacrament of baptism. The persistent phenomenon of infant baptism within the Church of England, coupled with its rejection of Catholic sacramental beliefs, implied, he suggests, that some elements of religious piety are racially transmitted from parent to child. This contradiction between the demand for a ceremony of conversion, or proof of intention, for those of non-Christian parentage and the assumption that white-skinned English babes somehow inherited their parents’ Christian faith enables Christianity to manifest as a racial category within the period.The book’s introduction, “Not Turning the Ethiope White,” carefully synthesizes and develops the work of earlier scholars to argue that in soteriological debates (theological discussions of salvation or grace), “race emerges to provide assurance of salvation” (12). Combining Ania Loomba’s observation that the very possibility of conversion precludes bodily “purity” or “authenticity” (“Delicious Traffick,” in Shakespeare and Race, ed. Catherine Alexander and Stanley Wells [Cambridge University Press, 2000], 209) together with Julia Reinhard Lupton’s influential argument that we should distinguish religion from “culture” and from other identity markers because of its tenacity (“The Religious Turn [to Theory] in Shakespeare Studies,” English Language Notes 44 [2006]: 145–49), Britton draws on Geraldine Heng to argue that (as Heng writes) “race thinking…will produce races at need” within particular historical contexts (Empire of Magic: Medieval Race and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy [New York: Columbia University Press, 2003], 71). To a certain extent, however, his project attempts to liberate faith from the implied accusation that religious belief invariably evokes “race thinking” even as he asserts the inseparability of doctrine from race: “Although there are…many instances where constructions of race draw from religious discourse, this study examines how a theology created race in order to resolve doctrinal controversies” (13–14).Britton’s first chapter investigates these convoluted controversies in pellucid detail. The Reformed Protestant Church added an emphasis upon God's “saving power” to the baptismal service, distinct from the Latin Sarum Rite, but it retained Catholicism’s practice of infant baptism (39). Drawing on St. Paul’s analogy of circumcision to baptism, Protestant divines, especially Thomas Becon, defended pedobaptism with “resonances of genealogical election,” or lineage, in order to distinguish between the “Christian elect” (43) and Christianity’s racially distinct Jewish progenitors. Chapter 2 explores theological questions about whether baptism can erase original sin before a series of thoughtful readings of book 2 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and its Ovidian precursors. Where Leonard Barkan’s influential The Gods Made Flesh (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990) argued that metamorphosis annihilates personality, Britton refreshingly suggests that “metamorphosis allows the retention of an originary self” and that this Ovidian core informs Spenserian baptism as a process that only imperfectly remakes the believing soul (77).Chapter 3 sensitively analyzes Sir John Harington’s evocation of St. Paul as convert to argue that this motif itself converts Catholic romance into Protestant allegory. Later chapters powerfully connect the thwarted comic structure of Othello to Iago’s unconversion of the hero for the purpose of a “restorative romance” (137) and uncover the power of “tragicomic martyrdom” in a timely reading of Fletcher’s The Island Princess (161). A brief afterword sheds light on the persistent, unsubstantiated belief in the United States that President Obama must be a Muslim: for Obama and Othello, observes Britton, “Both figures’ Christian identity seems to be gainsaid by their genealogy and geographic origin” (174–75).Although Britton’s core reading of Othello—that Iago works alternatively with Othello’s racial and religious differences “in order to see which will prove more effective in propagating Othello’s alterity” (126)—is on point, Britton perhaps overstates prior neglect of the topic. On the one hand, Lupton’s germinal article “Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations” (Representations 57 [1997]: 73–89) is widely cited by other scholars. On the other, actors and directors have long been aware of the conditional nature of Othello’s acceptance among the play’s born Christians and have long presented Desdemona’s murder as an “unconversion” scene, from Ira Aldridge’s scimitar in Constantinople (ca. 1858), Paul Winfield’s ritual chant in Atlanta (1979), and John Kani’s startling unsheathing of his “tribal” dagger at the Market Theatre (1987), to Carlo Rota’s “Moor” on Canadian television (2008). I also would have liked more discussion about whether blackness in the early modern Protestant church connotes an especial aptitude toward conversion because of the extensive commentaries by Origen and others in praise of “Ethiopia” (see Sujata Iyengar, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005], 24), or whether such commentaries might, in light of Britton’s work, instead evoke a contingent and conditional salvation. But such cavils are small, because this erudite and generous book offers essential reading for both scholars of early modern race, romance, and religion. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 113, Number 3February 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/683315 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
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