ENGL4564 · English

Race in the Renaissance: Spenser, Marlowe, Milton

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

This course investigates the rich, sometimes-hostile, sometimes-appreciative relationship between critical race theory and early modern poetry. Early modern poetry has been a key resource for historicizing the contingent, fitful development of race-thinking in English culture and language, even as the mythology of the "Renaissance" has been leveraged to reinforce racial inequities throughout the English-speaking world since the seventeenth century. This course focuses on three poets: Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and John Milton who worked in a range of forms (epic, lyric, elegy, sonnet) and wrote extensively on contemporary politics, education, culture, and society. Although these authors did not often write about race, their literary works shaped the language and narratives around racial similarity and difference that we continue to live with in 2025. Over the course of the semester, we will read premodern critical race studies and twentieth and twenty-first century critical race theory, exploring how this scholarship can inform our interpretation of Milton's Paradise Lost, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Note: The courses satisfies EITHER the pre-1700 or the Race, Blackness and Language requirement for English majors