In his influential rereading of Northrup Frye and Erich Auerbach's accounts of the structure of identification that defines romance, Fredric Jameson argues that the genre is structured as much by difference as it is by recognition and identification. For Jameson:

As Jameson stresses, romance is predicated upon a commitment to the twin beliefs that the identity of the enemy is visibly “marked by some absolute difference” and yet that your identity is nonetheless ultimately indistinguishable from theirs. The seeming fixity and absoluteness of identity that characterizes romance also paradoxically demands a correlative fluidity of identity that stands against and alongside that fixity. Within romance, you need to be able to recognize the other less because of his utter difference than because his identity is some version of yours. In the material form of this demand for visible difference, the “black knight” is the enemy only so long as he wears his armor; when he puts that off and reveals his name, the knight who was the enemy becomes a version of the knight himself and must do so for both the social and moral structure of romance to work.

What began in the 1490s as Montalvo's attempt to create a form of romance that would counter the new definitions of race that emerged out of the Inquisition and church policies on conversion ended in Paris in the 1540s with Nicolas de Herberay's reconception of these racial and religious arguments in his widely read French translations of the cycle. The next important romance that Renaissance readers turned to for questions about the nature of race and identity was Heliodorus' Aethiopika. The Aethiopika was written c. ad 250; it appeared in both Greek and Latin editions (editio princeps, 1534), but most Renaissance readers first encountered the Aethiopika through Jacques Amyot's L'Histoire Aethiopique de Heliodorus (Paris, 1547). Amyot's presentation of Heliodorus was enormously influential in the development of sixteenth-century romance and, perhaps more importantly, in the development of sixteenth-century genre theory. Amyot introduced his translation of Heliodorus as a morally and intellectually acceptable alternative to the Amadis romances that, as we shall see, were intensely popular at the French court through the middle of the sixteenth century.

The Aethiopika was, for Amyot, exemplary largely because in both its form and its subject this romance promoted a new kind of reading and, with that, a different kind of reader. Amyot's aesthetic assessment of Heliodorus emerged out of the way in which Renaissance understandings of Aristotelian poetic theory were inflected through the then more familiar terms of Aristotelian physics.

This is a book about early modern book history and race. Thus far, book history and critical race studies have been two very different scholarly activities. Scholarship in the history of the book has given us a rich account of the materiality of early modern texts. The concept of the “sociology of the text” has encouraged us to follow the material life-cycle of texts through the process that began with the making of ink and paper and ended with the printing, sale, and binding of volumes that readers then annotated with their own pens and ink, often beginning a new process of production and consumption. While this approach has produced an exciting and influential body of scholarship, book history has had less to say about the history of human identity that such texts record and create. In particular, book history has not focused on cultural categories such as race primarily because scholarship has assumed a divide between the form of books (their material state, which is part of book history) and their content (which is generally not).

Jacques Amyot presented his translation of Heliodorus' Aethiopika in part out of his concern about what might happen to those who read romances such as Amadis. Despite Amyot's efforts, sixteenth-century readers of Amadis were many. As different versions of the Amadis cycle circulated across Europe and into the New World, in hundreds of editions, large numbers of readers encountered these volumes: Marian Rothstein estimates as many as 500,000 sixteenth-century readers for the French editions alone.

The impact that the Amadis cycle had as it was introduced into print culture by Montalvo and then adapted and transmitted into other vernacular contexts was considerable. Winfried Schleiner characterizes the Amadis cycle as “the most influential work of prose fiction of the sixteenth century.” Publication details and physical states of existing copies make clear that these volumes were among the most widely published and read texts of the period. It is likely that a version of Books 4 and 5, which represent Montalvo's most radical reworking of the manuscript materials that he inherited, was printed first, before the other parts of the cycle, sometime in the 1490s. It is not until after Montalvo's death, though, that we see a strong and constant demand for new editions in the Spanish markets: between 1508, the date of the earliest extant edition of the first four books, and 1540, the date of the first Janot edition in France, there are almost a dozen Spanish editions.

Lady Mary Wroth's remarkable two-part romance, the printed The Countesse of Mountgomerie's Urania (1621) and its manuscript sequel, The Secound Part of the Countess of Montgomerys Urania, provides a key endpoint to this story about how the practice of reading and the history of racial identity developed within printed romances of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Discussions of race and Lady Mary Wroth understandably often begin with Wroth's performance in Ben Jonson's “Masque of Blackness” at Whitehall in January, 1605, where she, Queen Anne, and ten other ladies of the court played the roles of the daughters of Niger in a controversial and much commented-upon performance. Kim Hall thus sees Wroth as “deeply implicated” in the production of a “persistent presence of a discourse of blackness in James' court” and frames her discussion of the Urania through the perspective of Wroth's role in Jonson's masque. Critical attention to the implications of Wroth and the Queen's other ladies performing with “black faces and hands … painted and bare up to the elbows” are consistent with the dominant theatrically-inflected models for understanding racial difference in terms of embodied encounters that I discussed in the Introduction.

Here, though, I would like to approach the topic of identity and racial difference in the Urania as it emerges not out of performance practices but out of reading experiences. Mary Wroth was a reader. As a reader, she had almost unparalleled access to books.

In Richard II, the dying John of Gaunt describes the England he once knew as a special type of place:

John of Gaunt's speech has traditionally stood as both example and expression of an idea of high, imaginative literature. Gaunt's nostalgia seems in this context to provide the groundwork for a critical nostalgia for the literature of the Renaissance. Like John of Gaunt's England, literature exists in a separate place, an ideal if perhaps defensive paradise set apart from the rest of the world both morally and physically. From such a critical perspective, Shakespeare seems to anticipate how his works have become an image of transcendent and transforming genius: if we say that we would choose Shakespeare's Works as our single textual companion on some desert island, we suppose that his works have a power to transform a waste isle into a more bearable paradise. Despite its almost mythic aesthetic power, Shakespeare's description does nonetheless have a specific historical context. The language of transcendent separation that is part of what generates such strong responses to Gaunt's speech itself participates in an ongoing contemporary debate about worldmaking in early modern art, literature, and natural philosophy.

Edmund Spenser and William Harvey are two central Renaissance figures who are in their different ways responsible for defining the disciplines they have come to represent. Spenser is arguably the first significant poet in English literature to define his identity principally as a poet. Harvey not only discovered the circulation of the blood; he also articulated a theory for science that sought to define new scientific practices by distinguishing such practices from those of philosophers, artists, and explorers. Spenser and Harvey are crucially present when our modern ideas of poetry and science are established, yet they are rarely if ever discussed together. If the idea of poetry seems to us very separate from the idea of science, we can say this because of how successful Harvey was in using a kind of a Spenserian model of poetry as the basis for his own new theory of science. What this chapter argues is that Spenser's The Faerie Queene and William Harvey's Disputations Concerning the Generation of Animals are discipline-defining texts because of their shared interest in theorizing the creation of knowledge. Each work addresses and tries to account for the origin of ideas in order to practice a method for making new knowledge for readers. As we shall see, it is not quite an exaggeration to say that the poet Spenser must become something of a scientist in order to give to his reader the knowledge that will make The Faerie Queene, just as the scientist Harvey must become something of a poet in order to complete experiments in Disputations.