Report on Visiting Fellowship at the School of Advanced Study, University
of London, January-June 2013
Kimberly Anne Coles, University of Maryland
I am very grateful to have held the School of Advanced Study Visiting Fellowship
for the academic year 2012-2013. During my tenure, I enjoyed the invaluable
research opportunities in the area, which allowed me to work at the library at
the Wellcome Collection and the British Library, the Doctor Williams’s Library,
and the Libraries at Senate House and the Warburg Institute. The fellowship
allowed me to considerably advance research on my current book project, “‘A
Fault of Humor’: The Constitution of Belief in Early Modern England.”
The book investigates how the confessional categories of Protestant and Catholic
functioned in early modern England as material categories. Though historians of
religion have compellingly demonstrated that theological commitments were
labile and complex, there was nonetheless a prevailing sense in the period that
belief posited bodily consequences. My project explores what this implies
for religious and racial identification. In “‘A Fault of Humor’: The Constitution of
Belief in Early Modern England, ” I argue that the register of faith had profound
implications for the perceived operations of the body. The body’s technologies,
knowledge of which was indebted to Galenic discourse, were understood to
affect the moral constitution of individual subjects. Crucial to my investigation
are the implications of the construction of a moral constitution or disposition for
religious identity. What does this mean for those people who are understood to
be differently constituted? How does this construction of bodily difference
intersect with national ambitions or anxieties (when offered threats are not from
the remote Ottoman Empire, but from a close Catholic confederacy)? The cultural
construction of difference is always metaphoric: the question is to what degree
political narratives appeal to a difference based upon a received knowledge of
the body. In an early modern world where moral constitution is a condition of
blood and bodily fluids, what we would term “culture”—religious affiliation—is
read as nature.
Obviously, such a project benefits from the study of materials at the Wellcome
Collection. The vast resources at that library were invaluable. But so too were
resources at the Senate House Library: I was able to make good use of the
library’s comprehensive collection of the House of Commons Parliamentary
Papers. While these sessions do not bear directly upon my project, they shed a
bright light on the practice of “transporting” Irish Catholics to the West Indies—a
practice that reached its height between 1649-1690. Indeed, the work force in
the British West Indies was a majority white European population until about
1660. Whether any Irish were serving life sentences is unclear—and there are
conflicting reports from the period. For my purposes, it is important to try to
understand the category and the conditions under which the Irish Catholics were
held: since it was illegal in England from 1640 to impress a fellow Christian into
slavery, a lifetime sentence, even for political insurrection, would run counter to
the law—unless the Irish were somehow written outside of the Book. The
parliamentary debates (particularly the petitions for relief) recorded in journals
suggest that the categories of servitude were by no means straightforward, and
were constantly shifting. Sometimes the punitive element provided cover for
Irish servitude—but in other debates, the pretence was dropped entirely and the
language of slavery is invoked. I am still in the process of shifting through these
materials, but they provide a useful backdrop to a project that tries to appreciate
how religious identity is being accessed and understood in terms of essential
human difference.
I benefited enormously from the scholarly relationships that I formed as a result
of my time at the School. In particular, my project was enriched by discussions
with Angus Gowland, an intellectual historian at University College, London,
whose work closely converges with my own. Aside from being profligate with his
time, and the important stimulation that I received through conversations with
him, Angus read through two book chapters that I completed while on fellowship
(one on John Donne and the other on Edmund Spenser) and provided valuable
comments. I was fortunate also to encounter Guido Giglioni. Guido provided
useful feedback on my project and introduced me to scholars engaged in his own
five-year research project on Francis Bacon, “The Medicine of the Mind and
Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England,” funded by the European Research
Council. The work of these scholars is also proximate to mine, and Guido
initiated useful correspondence and an exchange of ideas. These intellectual
exchanges were some of the most productive encounters that the fellowship
facilitated.
I was deeply gratified by the generous intellectual community that I found at the
School of Advanced Study: Peter Mack and Warwick Gould bear particular
mention in this regard. Peter kindly presided over my presentation at the
Warburg Institute of a portion of my chapter on Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,
“Soule is Forme: Spenser and the Book Of Temperaunce.” Warwick attended the
talk, and was an attentive host in many other ways: he arranged meetings with
other fellows, such as Jim Shapiro, the ST Lee Visiting Fellow, and tickets for an
event at the Globe that was co-sponsored by the Institute of English Studies.
Dean Roger Kain graciously hosted a public lecture that I delivered at the School,
“Moral Constitution: Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam and the Color of Blood.”
My Dean’s Lecture was based on an article that will be included in a forthcoming
collection edited by Melissa Sanchez and Ania Loomba entitled, Rethinking
Feminism: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in the Early Modern World. It will be
revised for a longer chapter that will be part of my monograph, and is one of a
number of publications that have grown out of research effected during my
tenure at SAS. I also wrote the introduction to a special forum that I am coediting (with Gitanjali Shahani) in the upcoming Shakespeare Studies, “Diet and
Identity in Shakespeare’s England.” Additionally, I completed the work for my
own collection, The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900, edited with Ralph
Bauer, Zita Nunes, and Carla L. Peterson, and forthcoming from Palgrave
Macmillan.
I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Peter Niven, Sarah Allan, and
Roger Kain for the warm reception that I received at the School. I was grateful for
the amiable hospitality, which ensured that my time there was not only
productive, but extremely pleasant as well.