Divine Providence, Racial ‘Monstrosity’ and the English Reformation

ABSTRACT This article examines a peculiar body of religious works from the late c.16 and early c.17, which interpreted human difference in admonitory terms. Drawing flexibly on classical accounts of human ‘monstrosity’ and contemporary reports of foreign societies, these texts identified differences from European Christian cultural and corporeal norms as providential disruptions of the natural order intended not to correct the ‘monstrous’ communities themselves but the communities who observed them. The result was to establish an eschatological hierarchy between admonished readers and the monstrous objects of their gaze, with the latter trapped in the status of signifiers. Over the course of the article, I introduce these works and their surprising hermeneutic claims, outlining one way in which the doctrine of providence could be mobilised to essentialise human difference and justify social hierarchies founded upon that difference, thereby participating in the making, legitimating and enacting of ‘race’ itself.