(Early) Modern Women and Race

Abstract

More than twenty years before John Hawkins emerged as one of the heroes of the victory over the Spanish Armada, he sailed from England and helped abduct more than 1,200 Africans from the coast of what is now Sierra Leone for sale and trade in the NewWorld. His rise to the status of savior of the nation was prefaced by a different kind of achievement: the establishment of England’s place in what would become a global triangle trade in sugar, tobacco, and human beings. International and global preeminence was thus shadowed and underwritten by the slave trade; nation rested on race. The history of the slave trade shadows and envelops the development of early modern literature. When we study the Atlantic traffic among texts, modes, and authors, we must often read by slavery’s baleful light, and we know now that this flickering light may not always allow us to see clearly the black and brown women who are the continuing occasion of my studies.When Pieter de Marees wrote that the women along the Guinea coast were prone to “lust and uncleannesse” from their youth and that they aimed this natural lecherousness at the Dutch traders who began to arrive in the region in the seventeenth century, how did he know this? What did he know—or think he knew—about the circumstances under which sexual relations between Dutchmen and African women took place? It is