Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Disclaimer
- Introduction: women, race, and Renaissance texts
- 1 Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge
- 2 Sex, race, and empire in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
- 3 Dido and Sophonisba of Carthage: marriage, race, and the bonds between men
- 4 The disappearing African woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn
- 5 Race, women, and the sentimental in Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko
- 6 Chaste lines: writing and unwriting race in Katherine Philips' Pompey
- 7 The queen's minion: sexual difference, racial difference, and Aphra Behn's Abdelazer
- Conclusion: “The efficacy of Imagination”
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: women, race, and Renaissance texts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Disclaimer
- Introduction: women, race, and Renaissance texts
- 1 Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge
- 2 Sex, race, and empire in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
- 3 Dido and Sophonisba of Carthage: marriage, race, and the bonds between men
- 4 The disappearing African woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn
- 5 Race, women, and the sentimental in Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko
- 6 Chaste lines: writing and unwriting race in Katherine Philips' Pompey
- 7 The queen's minion: sexual difference, racial difference, and Aphra Behn's Abdelazer
- Conclusion: “The efficacy of Imagination”
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In 1507 and again in 1508 the court of King James IV of Scotland mounted a tournament of the wild knight and the black lady. Surviving accounts of these splendid occasions constitute a rare record of the representation of African women in the early modern period.
We know that the king was outfitted in black and gold, from his doublet and hood to the weapons he carried and possibly later presented as prizes. His attendants may even have worn silver and gilt horns as part of their costumes, and ridden contraptions rigged up to look like wild beasts. Mounted during a period when James was attempting to pacify the Gaelic Scots of the Highlands, the tournament of the wild knight performed for court consumption a kind of flirtation with the cultural notion of wildness. As the wild knight who wins the black lady and then reveals himself as the king, James symbolically crosses out of the self-consciously civilized and magnificent precincts of his court at Edinburgh, secures a prize from outside the borders of that court through at least partial symbolic appropriation of the tools of the unknown, and then returns home to the admiration and acclamation of his subjects.
This notion of voyaging outward and then returning with knowledge of and booty from the outside gains significance from the position of the black lady as the prize to be won.
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- Women and Race in Early Modern Texts , pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002