Spiller Elizabeth. Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance
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e conversion of the reader 149
At the end of Part 1, Quixote’s fictional and fictive conversion as
a knight is most fully achieved in Zoraida’s real conversion. Because
Quixote’s faith sustains and enables the fictions of belief that occur wher-
ever he is, he indirectly makes such conversions possible. e intertwined
stories of Luscinda, Dorothea, and Zoraida, all of whom enter the pages
of Quixote like romance heroines, largely displace the comic chivalric
romance of Don Quixote from the point at which Quixote and Sancho
first find Cardenio’s notebook in Chapter 23 until Don Fernando helps
the barber and priest contrive the cage that takes Quixote back home in
Chapter 47. ese narratives of faith, blood, and romance in Part 1 end
in optimism. Although we do not witness the baptism of Zoraida and
her final transformation into the Christian María, the narrative leaves
us confident that Don Fernando’s brother will “act as godfather” at the
baptism; we feel assured that faith will and has created new identities in
each of these inset and interlaced romances (369). When Quixote and his
companions part ways with Don Fernando and the other lovers, he offers
us the narrative’s promise that he will write to the priest to tell him how
their stories have turned out and implies that those endings will be happy
ones (407).
By the time that Part 2 of Quixote was published in 1615, the historic
situation is different. e 1609 expulsions of the moriscos fundamentally
changed life in Spain. In the case of Don Quixote, they also changed fic-
tion and, in particular, symbolically put an end to the kind of romance
that Zoraida represents. In some way, Cervantes’ Zoraida and her story
have been expelled from the boundaries of the literary imagination just as
much as real moriscos had been expelled from the actual lands of Spain.
It is no longer possible to write a story that imagines that faith – whether
the kind that Quixote, Zoraida, or even Cervantes, who was deeply com-
mitted to proselytizing while in the bañios of Algiers, expresses – can
change identity by creating Christians through acts of faith rather than
through facts of birth when the state said otherwise. Indeed, the events
of 1609 rewrite the conversion of Don Quixote to the faith of chivalry as
much as they do that of Zoraida to that of Christianity. What we see in
Don Quixote, Part 2, is that 1605 turned out to be nearly the last possible
historic moment at which to write a romance of conversion; thus, a set of
responses and rewritings of Montalvo that begins with de Silva, Amyot,
and Herberay ends with Cervantes.
In Part 2 the story of Zoraida is replaced by that of Sancho’s neigh-
bor Ricote and his daughter Ana Félix, the exiled moriscos. In this story,
Sancho and Quixote first meet Ricote, a morisco shopkeeper who was once
Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance150
Sancho’s neighbor, now disguised and traveling with a group of German
pilgrims. Recognizing his old neighbor, Sancho immediately exclaims,
“tell me, who turned you into a foreigner” (811).
100
Of course, the answer
to Sancho’s query is the king, with his proclamation “that threatened the
unfortunate members of my race so severely” (811).
101
Ricote, we learn, left
Spain for first France, Italy, and finally Germany to find a place where his
family could live and remain Christian (813). He has returned to find his
wife and daughter, as well as the money that he told his daughter to have
buried outside their village (814). His daughter, who had left for Barbary
with her uncles, also returns to Spain in disguise. Quixote and Sancho
encounter Ana Félix, dressed as corsair, in Barcelona: having assumed
man’s clothing and captained a brigantine out of Algiers as part of a com-
plicated attempt to rescue her Christian lover, she is captured and sen-
tenced to be executed because of her role in the death of two soldiers. It is
at this moment of reckoning that she reveals that she is not a Moor, Turk,
or renegade, but a Christian woman (878).
Ana Félix should be a second- or third-generation Zoraida, but in the
new historic context of Part 2, she cannot be. We must instead imagine
her as a kind of story about what happened to Zoraida after she con-
verted, after conversion turned out not to be the resolution that it had
seemed to be even in 1605. Born in Spain and raised in Christianity,
Ana Félix is by faith a true Christian, but she is nonetheless of “that
nation,” the moriscos (879). Like Zoraida, she seems to have inherited
her faith in and through her mother: “I drank in the Catholic faith
with my mother’s milk” (880).
102
Ana Félix is pardoned for the crimes
that she did not commit when her true identity and situation are made
known. Still, what the narrative recognizes but many of the characters
evade is that while the identity she reveals may exonerate her from the
accusations at hand, in other respects that identity is itself enough to
indict her.
As a morisca, Ana Félix’s fate provides a kind of conclusion to Zoraida’s
tale. Zoraida’s tale had ended with a future of promised baptism – an
event that stood as a testimony to the notion that faith can indeed, as
Quixote promised and Cervantes hoped, create identity. With Ricote’s
daughter, though, the ending is more ambiguous. Although Don Antonio
Moreno is able to convince the viceroy not to execute Ana Félix, it is not
at all clear that he will be able to save her, or her father, from the more
inexorable sentence of the king’s edict. e renegade, who had helped
Ana Félix in her escape, returns to Algiers and is able to achieve a remark-
able rescue of Don Gaspar Gregorio (891).
e conversion of the reader 151
e edict against moriscos, however, means that the reunion of the
young lovers in Barcelona does not end their story. Whatever that ending
will be, it is not one we can know. e viceroy and Don Antonio both
believe that there is no reason why “so Christian a daughter and, appar-
ently, so well-intentioned a father” should not be able to remain in Spain
(891);
103
Don Antonio thus offers to go to court to try to negotiate on their
behalf. While Don Antonio seems optimistic that special dispensations
might be achieved, no certainty is possible and the narrative, necessarily
unfinished, does not really hold out hope for those possibilities. More
importantly, Ricote himself seems to suggest that the king was right to
expel them. Ricote thus insists that, however terrible it is to his people
who weep for Spain, it was “divine inspiration that moved his Majesty
to put into effect so noble a resolution” (813); “a heroic decision by the
great Felipe III” (892). Ricote also expresses skepticism as to whether Don
Antonio’s efforts will be effective and insists that “one must not place
hope in favors or gifts” (891).
Cervantes’ own opinions are necessarilty difficult to discern. Richard
Hitchcock has documented how Ricote’s arguments supporting the
expulsion of moriscos align with those in a large number of texts, religious
polemics as well as histories, in the period 1610–15.
104
roughout Ricote’s
extended commentaries on the expulsions, the narrative as a whole seems
to take the perspective of Ricote rather than that of Don Antonio. It is
telling that Cervantes here speaks in the voice of the convert, if only to
suggest the implications of his narrative, and not to reveal his political
opinions.
I have suggested that in Part 1 the two converts, one literary, the other
religious, create the perspectives that best define Cervantes’ aspirations
in this novel. In their different ways, Quixote and Zoraida exemplify the
kind of belief that drives the fiction of Part 1. In Part 2, Cervantes uses
Ricote to again ask us to take the perspective of the convert. Insofar as
Ricote repeats, in the ways that Hitchcock demonstrates, the claims of
contemporary Dominican polemic against moriscos, we do not hear any-
thing like a revisionist history.
Cervantes’ attitude toward the moriscos may ultimately be less import-
ant here than his attitude toward belief. In Ricote, Cervantes now gives
us a character who encourages us to disbelief, to blood over faith. Ricote
is a character who ultimately lacks faith. He may or may not be a good
Christian. He himself does not seem to know or be certain: “I know for
a fact that my daugher, Ricota, and my wife, Francisca Ricota, are true
Catholic Christians, and though I am less of one, I’m still more Christian
Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance152
than Moor” (814).
105
Regardless of what Ricote thinks about God, though,
he has no faith in the sense, so crucial to Quixote, that he does not and
cannot believe the impossible. He insists that they must not hope for gifts
and favors because the authorities believe, in ways that he does not entirely
dismiss, that “the entire body of our nation is contaminated and rotten
.… none of our people can stay behind or be concealed, like a hidden root
that in times to come will send out shoots and bear poisonous fruits in
Spain, which is clean now, and rid of the fears caused by our numbers”
(891–92).
106
He knows, as Quixote refuses to know, that the identity of
blood has now overcome that of faith. is conclusion does not mean the
end of Quixote but it is part of the narrative process that inevitably leads
to Quixote’s recantation at the end of Part 2.
153
Chapter 4
Pamphilia’s black humor: reading and racial
melancholy in the Urania
Lady Mary Wroth’s remarkable two-part romance, the printed e
Countesse of Mountgomerie’s Urania (1621) and its manuscript sequel, e
Secound Part of the Countess of Montgomerys Urania, provides a key end-
point 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 under-
standably 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 dis-
cussion of the Urania through the perspective of Wroth’s role in Jonson’s
masque.
1
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 encoun-
ters that I discussed in the Introduction.
2
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.
3
Mary Wroth was a reader. As a reader,
she had almost unparalleled access to books. When she was nine months
old, Wroth’s father Robert Sidney was appointed governor of the port of
Flushing, but Wroth grew up largely at Penshurst with her mother and
siblings and at Wilton House and the other estates of her aunt, Mary
Sidney Herbert.
4
e library at Penshurst was extensive: the antiquary
Antony Wood marveled in 1671 that for “Seven score years” the Sidneys
“have been collectors of books and have furnished such an eminent library
that there were 3 thousand folios in it.”
5
e Wilton House library was,
if anything, even more illustrious. In the 1590s, Mary Sidney Herbert
Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance154
created a vibrant literary and cultural environment by bringing Samuel
Daniel, Ben Jonson, Abraham Fraunce, and omas Moffet to Wilton
House; at the same time, though, John Aubrey described Wilton House
as being “like a college” not only for the “many learned and ingenious
persons” there but also because of the “noble librarie of bookes, choicely
collected in the time of Mary Countess of Pembroke.”
6
Of Mary Wroth’s personal library, less is known. David McKittereck’s
complaint that the “comparative neglect of the history of women’s read-
ing and book ownership contrasts strangely with the many projects and
publications concerned with women’s writing” certainly applies to Wroth.
We do, however, know that Wroth’s books were important enough to
her that when her husband added a codicil of “speciall Legaceys” to his
will he specifically bequeathed to her “all her books and furniture of her
studye and closett.”
7
While we do not have a library catalogue or commonplace book that
might provide more precise material evidence documenting Mary Wroth’s
personal reading, it is clear that Wroth’s Urania emerges directly out of
an engagement with a central tradition of early modern printed romances,
most notably Sidney’s Arcadia, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Montalvo’s
Amadis, and Heliodorus’ Aethiopika. e printed romances that I have
been considering throughout this book were well represented on the
library shelves at Penshurst, Wilton, and Loughton halls. While work-
ing to improve his Spanish, Wroth’s father Robert Sidney wrote to Mary
Wroth’s cousin, William Herbert, to request that he obtain a copy of
“that Spanish Amadis de Gaule” for him.
8
In dedicating his 1618 and 1619
editions of his Amadis translations to Philip Herbert, Anthony Munday
comments on the proliferation and dispersal of these romances: remark-
ing on the “manifold impressions of this history, the Bookes thereof being
now come to be five and twentie in number, and printed in places far dis-
tant a sunder,” Munday thanks Herbert’s wife, Susan de Vere, for her help
in providing him with “such Bookes as were of the best editions.”
9
Abraham Fraunce, who was closely affiliated with Mary Sidney
Herbert, likewise undertook a partial translation of Heliodorus’
Aethiopika that was included in his Countess of Pembroke’s Ivy Church
(1591), while John Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso was read
carefully by Robert Sidney.
10
Anne Clifford’s Appleby triptych, which is
committed to creating a visual document of the intellectual and material
lineage she was claiming, captures some of the Herbert family’s commit-
ment to romances in this period, including both the Shelton translation
of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1612, 1620) and a 1593 edition of the Arcadia.
11
Pamphilia’s black humor 155
Even the Arcadia, which initially circulated in manuscript as a “scribal
publication,” became increasingly a product of print culture under Mary
Sidney Herbert’s ongoing involvement in the editing and publishing of
the composite Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. It is this later, printed ver-
sion of the Arcadia, rather than the earlier manuscript one, that most
impacted Wroth’s romance: as Josephine Roberts speculates, the publi-
cation of the Urania in 1621 was probably timed to coincide with a new
edition of the Arcadia.
12
Mary Wroth was a reader of printed romances and the Urania was
written out of her experiences as a reader of these fictions. Roberts and
others have traced the literary expressions of Wroth’s acts of reading –
the textual borrowings, the generic reshapings, the engagements and cri-
tiques – that appear within the pages of the Urania.
13
In this chapter, I
would instead like to approach the Urania as a text that suggests how
reading – and the reading of printed romances, in particular – might be
understood to change not just how and what Mary Wroth wrote but also
who she was. In this sense, my goal here is to begin to construct a critical
history that is in keeping with my argument that a material history of
reading must include not just that which inheres in the physical state of
early modern texts, but also that which would have been understood to
inhere in the bodies of readers themselves. While we lack the common-
place books and shelf lists that might allow us to construct the first his-
tory, Wroth’s romance offers key evidence for the second set of inquiries.
As I have suggested, reading impacted identity because it was experi-
enced within the body. Humanists, physicians, and translators made it
clear that what you read could change mind, soul, and body, transform-
ing how you thought, felt, and even appeared. roughout this book I
have used the critical accounts of Vives, Amyot, La Noue, Wright, and
other contemporary critics to construct a phenomenological model to
explain how romance reading was understood and probably experienced.
Here, it may be useful to set Wroth’s Urania alongside those accounts,
not so much to read Wroth through the perspective implied by their argu-
ments, but as an instance of an allied but ultimately separate phenomen-
ology of reading. When we approach Wroth’s work in this manner, we
see an account of reading that fractures from this dominant tradition in
ways that arise out of shifting understandings of racial identity and out of
changing attitudes toward printed romance.
Had they considered the activities of reader like Lady Mary Wroth –
and the same conclusions would likely apply to Susan de Vere, Philip
Herbert, Mary Sidney Herbert, and probably Robert Sidney – Vives and
Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance156
other critics who warned against romance reading would have been able
to make a clear prediction. Reading the kinds of romances that were
available in the library at Penshurst, circulated through the coterie at
Wilton House, and probably shelved in Mary Wroth’s personal closet was
a dangerous activity. Readers who were exposed to these kinds of texts
were thought to be likely, as we have seen, to become melancholy, black,
impassioned, and lascivious.
Mary Wroth’s fiction provides a good textual frame against which to
read this diagnosis of romance readers. Wroth’s fiction is, first, the most
autobiographical of the romances that I have considered. e Urania is
about Wroth. Pamphilia and the other characters who shadow Wroth
within the fiction tell us a good deal about her life and loves; they also,
I will suggest, tell us a good deal about Wroth’s experiences as a reader.
Second, Wroth’s romance is also arguably the most self-conscious of the
romances that I have discussed. While the self-reflexivity of Cervantes’
romance arises out of his interest in breaking the genre, Wroth’s fiction is
self-reflexive in ways that arise out of a quite different desire on Wroth’s
part to return to a lost genre and the age it seemed to celebrate. Finally,
Wroth had a personal interest (and in this she is not unlike Feliciano de
Silva and Cervantes) in romance as a genealogical document that might
allow her to create literary kinship with the uncle who died a year to the
day before she was born and the two illegitimate children whose identities
she hoped to have recognized by her cousin and lover, William Herbert,
Earl of Pembroke. e Urania is thus a meditation both on Wroth’s per-
sonal experiences and on the genre of romance; indeed, these two are
closely intertwined for her.
As I have suggested, humoralism became associated with romance as
a trope that seemed to offer a physiological explanation for the conse-
quences that reading had on the body and its passions. Within the texts
of early modern romance itself, however, humoral physiology did not typ-
ically play as large a part in the construction of character as it did in
genres such as drama. Readers of romances were themselves understood
to have humoral bodies in the ways that Vives and other humanist crit-
ics suggested, but, with some notable exceptions, comparatively few of
the characters within those romances did. e emphasis on humoralism
within the Urania importantly integrates the theory and practices that, as
we have seen, were widely associated with romance reading into its fiction.
is chapter returns us to the physiological language of the Introduction
and it does so because of the degree to which Wroth incorporates contem-
porary philosophical and cultural concerns about reading romances into
Pamphilia’s black humor 157
her fiction. Like Quixote, Wroth’s Urania marks itself as a late romance in
part through its self-conscious attention to the acts of reading that define
this genre; Wroth’s Urania differs from earlier romances in part because
of the way that she brings the experience of reading romance into her
construction of character and identity.
Speaking of Philip Sidney, H. R. Woudhuysen notes that “the writer,
in his works, becomes a fictional character, becomes up to a point, a
hero in his own right.”
14
A similar claim could be made about Wroth’s
understanding of the relationship between fictional character and auto-
biographical identity. As a character and authorial alter ego, Pamphilia
brings Wroth’s experiences – both as a lover and as a romance reader –
into the text. From this perspective, what is most notable about Wroth’s
depiction of Pamphilia is how she differs from what Vives and other
critics of romance would predict. Pamphilia is melancholy. She is impas-
sioned. She is also, in the terms that critiques of romance reading would
suggest, arguably black. In these respects, Pamphilia conforms closely
to prevailing accounts of the emotional and physical consequences to
reading romances. She is not, however, inconstant or lascivious. Indeed,
as I will suggest, Wroth is able to depict Pamphilia’s constancy as itself
a type of humor and is able to do so in the first part of the Urania
because she draws on the geo-humoral tradition of black melancholy.
is chapter will thus explore how and why Wroth is able create a
character who, as a version of Wroth herself, tacitly stands as a refuta-
tion of the kinds of arguments that Vives, La Noue, Amyot, Malón de
Chaide, and others made about the physical consequences to reading
romances.
More so than any other of the romances that I have discussed in this
volume, the two parts of Wroth’s Urania are written across the shift from
pre-racial to racial bodies. Competing understandings of humoral and
racial complexion informed how Wroth created her characters and imag-
ined herself, and, as I will suggest, they also determined how her romance
was published and could be read. In pursuing this argument, I will focus
on how Wroth’s construction of Pamphilia as a black melancholic in the
first part of the Urania emerged out of her experiences and understand-
ing of reading. Pamphilia’s melancholy is, in part, a story about race and
the kind of national “body” identity that aristocratic Englishmen were
working to claim for themselves in the early seventeenth century. In the
context of romance, though, the fate of Pamphilia is also a story about
reading. e Pamphilia of the print Urania is imagined in the context of
a humoral model of the body and, by extension, of the acts of reading that
Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance158
were implied by that body. e Pamphilia of the manuscript continuation,
by contrast, exists as a proto-racial character. In the conclusion of the
chapter I will then consider two events that distinguish the manuscript
continuation of the Urania from the printed first volume: first, how emer-
gent discourses of racialism, emblematized by the publication of Robert
Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, changed the meaning of melancholy for
Wroth; and second, how William Herbert’s designation of his nephew,
rather than his and Wroth’s illegitimate children, as his heir, changed
Wroth’s potential readership. Considered together these two events, his-
torical and personal, ended Wroth’s hopes for constructing genealogical
identity through her fiction.
Before turning to the understandings and practices of reading that are
integrated into the Urania, though, I would like to begin with an account
of two very different contemporary readers of Wroth’s romance. e first
of these, Sir Edward Denny, was a reader who read Wroth’s romance in
ways that she had not intended; the second, William Herbert, was a reader
who failed to read the romance in the ways she had hoped. When Wroth
published the first part of the Urania in 1621, she did so in self-conscious
emulation of the printed romances that had influenced her work. e
results were probably not quite what she had expected: they were almost
certainly not what her publishers had hoped for.
John Marriott and John Grismond entered Wroth’s romance in the
Stationers’ Register on July 13, 1621. ree days earlier, they had both been
examined about their involvement in the purportedly unlicensed publi-
cation of George Wither’s satiric poem, Withers Motto, which had been
refused by the censors but had been published anyway. Wither was impris-
oned, not for the first time; Marriott, Grisham, and the printer Augustine
Matthews were fined and, in the case of Marriott and Grisham, briefly
imprisoned.
15
While the consequences to publishing Wither’s overtly
vicious (and very popular) satire might have been anticipated, Wroth’s
publishers and printer probably did not anticipate a similar uproar over
her seemingly fictional romance. However, Wroth’s romance almost
immediately prompted a storm of widely-circulated criticism from courtly
readers, most notably Edward Denny, Baron of Waltham; as Roberts has
demonstrated, after complaints were made directly to the king, Wroth
seems to have withdrawn the volume from sale.
16
e responses of Denny and other readers are worth returning to here
because they turned on questions about a relationship between reading
and identity that was understood to be specific to romance. As Roberts
notes, the Urania was a self-consciously “quixotic romance,” and that