This panel updates and enlarges the vision of earlier Renaissance literary scholarship dealing with ethnic difference between human and other, such as the pioneering attempt by John Gillies in Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge,1994) to place “strangers” and “ethnic outsiders” in the field of early modern ethnography, or that of Page duBois, who challenges not only the human/inhuman but also the male/female binary in Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (Univ. of Michigan, 1982). By combining diverse disciplinary perspectives drawn from more recent studies of early modern science, drama, ethnography, and historical romance, our panel enlarges the notion of difference that subtends early modern differentiations between human and other.

The papers on this panel each test the binary ordering of difference in Renaissance polarities of the in/human in order to frame and expose the point of logical rupture in the categories that sustained and produced such differentiation. Renaissance notions of the boundary between the human and the inhuman revolve around unstable yet historically determined polarities of ancient standing. In particular, the inherited classical definitions of the human and its opposite, the barbarian other, inflected Renaissance understandings of the binary opposition between other inversely related pairings, such as human/animal, male/female, civilized/savage, Christian/infidel., and animate/inanimate. The papers on this panel probe these and other early modern binaries to challenge the “dialectical motive” that anchored early modern thinking.

Dr. Pavneet Aulakh considers early scientific thought regarding perception, both human and non-human, in “In/Human Encounters: Francis Bacon’s Vibrant Matter and the Limits of the Human.” Differentiating between sense and perception, Bacon attributes the latter not only to humans and “scientific” devices such as barometers, but also to elements in nature, such as air and fire, that “have subtile perception of wind rising.” Observable natural phenomena are themselves, that is, organic prostheses with the ability to indicate phenomena that exceed the threshold of the human sensorium. In dislodging the human from its privileged position within an economy of perception, Aulakh argues that Bacon’s provocative reconceptualization of perception invites us to rethink the in/human divide, to consider what it means for the wind, for example, to be a perceptive agent, and how we categorize the human vis-a-vis non-sentient forms of life, enabling us to redefine the respective agencies of humanity and nature.

In “Almost Human: Pastoral Cannibals and Thomas More’s Utopian Ethnography,” Dr. Nina Chordas attempts a triangulation between pastoral, ethnography, and utopia in the early modern period. Early descriptions of the New World frequently portray a landscape depicted in bucolic terms that come close to evoking pastoral, though missing traditional shepherds. However, beginning with Columbus, ethnographic accounts of peoples encountered in these regions contain the element of cannibalism, completely destroying any possibility of a pastoral motif. Moreover, the humanity of these indigenous people was not even officially established until the Papal Bull “Sulimis Deus” issued by Pope Paul III in 1537, twenty years after the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia, which Chordas discusses as an example of early modern ethnography, drawing as it does on Amerigo Vespucci’s descriptions of indigenous life in the Americas. Although More draws on many elements of Vespucci’s accounts for his ideal society, the one element he cannot countenance in his Utopia is precisely the cannibalism that precludes pastoral in the New World. Instead, Chordas argues, More deals with the cannibalism attributed to its inhabitants by displacing it onto English sheep, described by Raphael Hythloday as “man eaters,” and thus by inference onto their owners, exploiters of nascent English capitalism.

Focusing on allegorical “facsimiles of the human” in Book I of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Dr. Julia Major considers the three Saracen knights, Sans foy, Sans ioy, and Sans loi, fell enemies all of Red Cross Knight. In “Do Saracens have Souls? In/Human Infidels in Faerie Land,” she observes that the Saracen trio functions together as one being animated by three faces, and that Spenser characterizes the three alien knight-infidels as outsiders who will forever remain outside the pale of the civis, the cosmopolitan city of Spenser’s imagination and of post-Reformation British polity that maintained a precarious foothold in “savage” Ireland, the location where this epic romance was composed. While Spenser bestows on each knight very human emotions, each of the Saracen knights in turn transgresses the boundaries of lawful Christian humanity configured in Spenser’s Faerie Land, because each is a “barbarian … transgressor of bounds and a violator of prohibitions “(Gillies, 1994) that serve as the very definition of humanity. As such, Major contends, the Saracens confuse the lines of identity that founded early modern taxonomies of the human.

Finally, are ghosts human? The question haunts the English Renaissance as post-Reformation religious doctrine contends with long-established and freshly embellished popular belief about visitations from the returned dead. Embroiled within this question are concomitant concerns about interpersonal trust, social and familial duty, and the ever-human desire to ascertain the truth of life after death. In “Specters of Humanity: Ghosts on the Early Elizabethan Stage,” Kayla Shearer interrogates instances in which early Elizabethan playwrights attempted to incorporate ghosts into their texts with attention to the ways these playwrights manipulated the space of the stage to do so. Long before King Hamlet walked the castle battlements, early ghosts of the English theater were pushed to frame narratives, limited in their motion onstage, and otherwise made spatially and visually distinct from their human counterparts. Shearer shows how these manipulations represent early attempts to balance the perceived otherworldliness of the ghost figure with its apparent lingering interest in the earthly happenings onstage. Ultimately, the unbalanced spatial engagement between ghost and human characters onstage suggests a larger ongoing debate over whether a soul, once freed of its mortal body, was less human than those still living, or more.

The presentations for this panel are limited to 15 minutes delivery time, ensuring sufficient opportunity for discussion afterwards.