Renaissance humanism and ethnicity before race

The Irish and the English in the seventeenth century

Ian Campbell

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780719088360
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526102652
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

The modern ideology of race, so important in twentieth-century Europe, incorporates both a theory of human societies and a theory of human bodies. Ian Campbell's new study examines how the elite in early modern Ireland spoke about human societies and human bodies, and demonstrates that this elite discourse was grounded in a commitment to the languages and sciences of Renaissance Humanism. Emphasising the education of all of early modern Ireland's antagonistic ethnic groups in common European university and grammar school traditions, Campbell explains both the workings of the learned English critique of Irish society, and the no less learned Irish response. Then he turns to Irish debates on nobility, medicine and theology in order to illuminate the problem of human heredity. He concludes by demonstrating how the Enlightenment swept away these humanist theories of body and society, prior to the development of modern racial ideology in the late eighteenth century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on conventions
• Introduction: Defining race
• 1 Two problems in the history of Irish humanism and ethnicity
• 2 English humanism against Gaelic Irish society
• 3 Gaelic humanism against English Irish society
• 4 Humanists and genealogists on nobility and the human body
• 5 Irish doctors and theologians on heredity and the human soul
• 6 Irish Enlightenment, human societies, and human bodies
• Select bibliography
• Index