Confessional Race: Blood Purity, Religion, and the Making of Human Rank in the Early Modern Iberian World

The study of race has been canonically divided between the time before and after Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae (1758). This teleological divide separated visible race from metaphorical hierarchies seemingly too foreign, “unscientific,” and incommensurate with modern race. Against transhistorical models of race of the 1990s, Iberian and Latin American historians qualified their work on early modern sites and agents as “proto-race.” These works both defined and operationalized the concept of raza/raça in the daily existence of their subjects. In this paper I term the analytical category of “Confessional race” to reject such dichotomies. I argue instead for the need to historicize race in its context and track its contingencies in meaning rather than clearly differentiate between “pre- scientific” race and period concepts of genetics. Referencing purity attestations, theological literature, and Inquisition sources from Spain, Portugal, and Brazil, I demonstrate how early modern raza was already endowed with naturalistic qualities and a materialistic ontology. I show how Christianity was perceived as physical and metaphysical through regulatory practices of reproduction in racialized communities to avoid racial “contagion” via bodily fluids. In the process this paper decenters the Linnaean moment and explores how religion constituted the principal language of authority about the natural world in the early modern period when the Christian Bible was the authoritative explanation of human difference. “Confessional race” escapes Linnean classification by stressing how early modern Atlantic racialization was defined by Christianity.
Consequently, one either “had race” or one had “pure blood” (“without race”)
based on Catholic belonging.