Race/Rase/Raze in Richard Eden’s 'The Decades of the Newe Worlde'
Richard Eden’s 1555 English translation of Pietro Martire d'Anghiera’s The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India begins with ‘A Preface to the Reader’ in which Eden reflects on Iberian colonial expansion and religious motivations for colonialism. Considering the Christian civilising possibilities of such ventures, Eden asserts that while many would identify that “desyre of golde was the chiefe cause that moued the Spanyards and Portugales” to explore ‘West India’, “a warrior or a marchaunte” can be also a “Christian” (C3r). As such, travelling soldiers and traders might also be able to “encrease Christian religion” through their endeavours, regardless of what their original pursuits may have been (C3r). Eden proceeds to compare the Iberian relationship to indigenous inhabitants of the so called ‘new world’ to “menne” who at the “beginning of the world” would first:
[…]use them selues amonge beastes that they were not hurte of them: but shortly after, used them for theyr commoditie: Then begunne to weare their skinnes: And in fine, fell to eatynge of theyr flesshe, and to use certeine partes of thē[m] for remedies ageinst diseases. (C3r)
In Eden’s analogy, the Europeans represent the first men on earth and the indigenous people of North America are the animals with whom those men interacted before using them for their “commodities”. Eden uses this analogy to highlight the scope in those initial interactions between European colonisers and indigenous populations, for Europeans to bring “barbarians” into “trewe religion”, even if only by “accidental” means (C3v).
There is much to say here about how Eden’s analogy demonstrates the development of early modern ideas about race through the trope of animality. However, in today’s post I am interested in considering the racial implications of what Eden says next:
For lyke as they that goo much in the sonne are coloured therewith although they go not for that purpose, So may the conversation of the Christians with the gentyles induce theym to owre religion, where there is no greater cause of contrarye to resyst as is in the Jewes and Turkes, who are alredy drowned in theyr confirmed error. But these simple gentiles, lyvinge only after the law of nature, may well bee lykened to a smoothe and bare table unpainted or a white paper unwritten, upon the which you may at the fyrst paynte or write what you lyste, as you cannot uppon tables alredy painted, unlesse yow rase or blot owt the fyrste forms. (C3v)
Eden makes a comparison here that demonstrates how closely race and religion were linked as organising mechanisms of difference in early modern colonial thinking. This link is implicit in the parallel Eden draws between the way that inhabitants of the ‘new world’ are incidentally racialised or attain a dark skin colour by their proximity to the sun, and the way they might incidentally become Christian through their proximity to Europeans. According to Eden, since the physical differences of the “barbarians” are produced by their environment, it makes sense that the spiritual sameness and thus assimilation of these indigenous inhabitants might be likewise achieved.
Eden proceeds to use an interesting metaphor to compare the ease with which indigenous inhabitants of the new world may be converted. By contrast to the Jews and Muslims of the old world in the East, Eden sees the indigenous Americans as “a smooth and bare table unpainted or a white paper unwritten” on which Christian values can be “paynte[d]” or written on. The “Jewes and Turkes” are harder to inscribe since, Eden asserts, they are like “tables alredy painted” which “you cannot” mark “unless yow [first] rase or blot owt” the “forms” of “confirmed error” that are already there.
What I find intriguing in Eden’s analogy is his use of the act of ‘rase’, in the sense of removing or erasing, to imagine colonial processes of racial and religious organisation. This is because in the sixteenth century when English spellings were still gradually being regularised, this early modern word used to denote ‘erase’ represented a homonym of the noun ‘race’, which was used as a category to denote lineage or kinship.
For example, in John Palsgrave’s Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse (1530), a bilingual dictionary published a few decades before Eden’s edition of The Decades, ‘race’ and ‘rase’ are used interchangeably to describe the practice of erasing.1 Palsgrave describes to “rase” and to “race” as to: “take out a worde with a pomyce or pen knyfe/ so that I may write in the same place[...r]ace out this worde[...a]ll the worlde maye se that this writynge hath be raced”.2 Palsgrave’s translations also include examples such as “This writing is raced” or “This indenture is raced all the worlde may se it”.3 In the same lexicon, Palsgrave describes the noun “Rase as the rase of Bretayne”.4 Later in the sixteenth century, Lucas Harrison’s publication A Dictionarie French and English (1571) includes translations that define the noun “race” as “ofspring” and kin.5
As early modern race scholars have shown, although the noun “race” did not have the same meanings it accrued in the development of the scientific racism that emerged in the nineteenth century, it still held many of the connotations of social organisation that it would become increasingly attached to in later centuries. The concept of descent which “race” signified in the early modern period was certainly used as a mechanism for creating hierarchies between groups of people based on ideas around biological difference. Blood, for example, was a physical feature that held social significance and was managed through the concept of lineage. “Race” was also frequently used to identify and characterise groups of people from different religious and national groups, including the ‘race of Turks’ or the ‘English race’. It is interesting therefore to reflect on the effects of the fact that ‘race’ and ‘rase’ were both used as spelling forms for the verb ‘race’ (meaning to destroy and erase) as well as the noun ‘race’ in early modern England.
According to the OED, the verbs “race” and “rase”, which were used to denote erasure, were variants of the verb “raze”, meaning to abolish or destruct.6 Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1578) for example translates “Inducere. Cic.” as “To race: to cancell: to put out: to abrogate”; “Excindo” as “To rase: to ouerthrowe: to destroye; and “Aboleo” as “To abolishe: to vndoe: to put out: to rase: to disanull”.7 In turn, the etymology of these words can be traced to the Latin “rãdere” meaning to scratch, scrape or strike-off. 8 Ostensibly then, the verb “rase” as it is used by Eden is thus not etymologically associated with the noun ‘race’. Moreover, verbs linked to the noun ‘race’, such as ‘racialize’, only enter English parlance much later in the twentieth century.9
However, early modern lexicons like those considered above demonstrate that the definitions and uses of ‘race’ and ‘rase’ were extensive and that the spelling forms of these words were inconsistent. Such uses of these terms invite us to consider whether, in the context of the linguistic and social fluidity characteristic of early modern England, there may have been slippages between the English word “race” as an act of destruction and erasure, as well as race as a biologically-based mechanism of organising groups of people and creating social hierarchies. This slippage becomes even easier to imagine when considering the etymology of the noun ‘race’. The OED links the English noun “race”, in its meaning as a “group of people, animals or plants” connected by “common descent” to earlier European counterparts such as the Italian noun “razza” and the Spanish “raza” - words which are phonetically and visually like the word ‘raze’.10
What is intriguing, then, about Eden’s preface is that it suggests that such exchanges in meaning may have been occurring in early modern English thought, whether consciously or subconsciously. Eden uses the verb rase (read also as race/raze) in the context of his discussions on processes of race-making and colonial racial organisation attached to the noun ‘race’. His use of a race/erasure image to make large scale comparisons between racial and religious ‘others’ in the old world and the new world invites us to consider how different vocabularies of race interacted with one another during the early emergence of colonial racial discourse.
Given the visual and phonetic equivalence of the alternative forms of raze and the noun for race in the period, how and where might this language have directly or indirectly associated acts of power and violence to the understandings of race and social difference in pre-colonial, early modern England?
Here are a few critical works I’ve been looking to, to think through these ideas further:
B.K. Adams, Erika Boeckeler, Claire M. L. Bourne, Jill Gage and Miles P. Grier, Early Modern Typography/Race/Gender Roundtable (YouTube), The Bibliographical Society of America, 2021.
Miles P. Grier, “Inkface: The Slave Stigma in England’s Early Imperial Imagination” in
Scripturalizing the Human: The Written as the Political, ed. by Vincent L. Wimbush (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp.193–220.
Sujata Iyengar, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Joyce Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).
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1. All lexicon entries included in this post have been, in the first instance, via the database Lexicons of Early Modern English <https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/> edited by Ian Lancashire and hosted in partnership with the University of Toronto Library and Press.
2. John Palsgrave, “I Race”, “I Rase”, in Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse (London: 1530), in Lexicons of Early Modern English <https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/> [Accessed 15 January 2022]
3. Ibid.
4. John Palsgrave, “Rase” in Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse (London: 1530), in Lexicons of Early Modern English <https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/> [Accessed 15 January 2022]
5. L.H, “Un Race” in A Dictionarie French and English (London: 1571), in Lexicons of Early Modern English <https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/> [Accessed 15 January 2022]
6. OED race, v. 2.
7. Thomas Cooper’s, “Inducere. Cic.”, “Excindo”, “Aboleo” in Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (London:1578), in Lexicons of Early Modern English <https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/> [Accessed 15 January 2022]
8. OED race, v. 2.; raze, v.
9. OED, racializing, n; racialize v.
10. OED, race, n. 6, I. 1. Thanks to Jessica Minieri for highlighting the similarity of European equivalents of ‘race’ to ‘raze’.
