Race and Beauty

Early Modern Cosmetics and the Mythology of Whiteness

Josie Schoel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040337837
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

This work examines how beauty standards, specifically the ideology of "fairness", contributed to the racialization of bodies in early modern England. Schoel emphasizes the need to dismantle whiteness's invisibility in historical criticism, noting that it has long been an unexamined norm. By focusing on the materiality of cosmetic whiteness, the text aims to disrupt colorblind ideologies and reveal the mechanisms behind white supremacy.

Drawing on diverse texts like sonnets, travel literature, and medical treatises, the book discusses how light skin and hair were idealized, symbolizing Christian virtue and femininity. This rhetoric of fairness not only promoted racial hierarchies but also constructed whiteness through cosmetics like whitening creams and exfoliants. These practices, associated with Queen Elizabeth I's image and widely reproduced in theater, medicine, and household texts, led to a "cult of whiteness". The locus of the cult was Queen Elizabeth I, whose materially constructed reds and whites in her portraiture and on the surface of her skin resounded throughout the commonwealth. If the cult of whiteness was founded by Elizabeth's propagandistic image campaign, it was facilitated and reproduced through theatrical productions, medical treatises, household manuals, and the birth of the apothecary, which made the materials of whiteness accessible to a wider socially diverse network of consumers.

The book is not only an ideal resource for students and scholars of early modern studies, performance, and Critical Race Studies, but for all those seeking an introduction to constructions of race in early modern England.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction “Scorched No More.”: Performing Whiteness
• 1 “Bought, Borrowed, and Sold Complexions”: Cosmetics and Anglo-Ottoman Traffic
• 2 “Fair Figures”: The Portraits of Elizabeth I
• 3 “Dappled Ladies”: Maculation as Racial Coding
• 4 “Strange Shoppes of Drugges”: The Apothecary and Marketing of Whiteness
• 5 “Lyke unto a Lyvely Thing”: The White Effigial Body
• 6 “A noble confection”: Ben Jonson’s Masque of Gypsies Metamorphosed
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index