{"product_id":"the-equality-of-flesh-materialism-and-human-commonality-in-early-modern-culture-hardback-9781501775659","title":"The Equality of Flesh; Materialism and Human Commonality in Early Modern Culture (Hardback) 9781501775659","description":"\u003cfont face=\"Georgia\"\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"6\"\u003eThe Equality of Flesh\u003c\/font\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\r\n\u003cfont size=\"5\"\u003eMaterialism and Human Commonality in Early Modern Culture\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"4\"\u003eBrent Dawson (Author)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e9781501775659\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003eHardback, published 15 June 2024\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e252 pages\u003cbr\u003e22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.907 kg\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs scholars seek what has created the modern concepts of racism and human rights, Dawson makes a compelling case for looking to this earlier time to see how views of the body and early British colonialism led to a nation contemplating the relationships between humans from different nationalities and their commonalities long before they are often given credit for doing so. This is a welcome addition to the scholarship concerning these topics.\u003c\/p\u003e (Choice)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Equality of Flesh\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e traces a new genealogy of equality before its formalization under liberalism.\u003c\/b\u003e While modern ideas of equality are defined through an inner human nature, Brent Dawson argues that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conceptualized equality as an ambivalent and profoundly bodily condition. Everyone was made from the same lowly matter and, as a result, shared the same set of vulnerabilities, needs, and passions. Responding to the political upheavals of colonialism and the intellectual turmoil of new natural philosophies, leading figures of the English Renaissance, including Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, anxiously imagined that bodily commonality might undermine differences of religion, race, and class.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAs the period progressed, later authors developed the revolutionary possibilities of bodily equality even as new ideas of fixed racial inequality emerged. Some—like the utopian radical Gerrard Winstanley and the republican poet John Milton—challenged political absolutism through the idea of humans as base, embodied creatures. Others—like the heterodox philosopher Margaret Cavendish, the French theologian Isaac La Peyrère, and the libertine Cyrano de Bergerac—offered limited yet important interrogations of racial paradigms. This moment, Dawson shows, would pass, as bodily equality was marginalized in the liberal theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. In its place, during the Enlightenment pseudoscientific racism would come to anchor inequality in the body. Contending with the lasting implications of material equality for modernity,\u003ci\u003e The Equality of Flesh\u003c\/i\u003e shows how increasingly vehement notions of racial difference eclipsed a nascent sense of human commonality rooted in the basic stuff of life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eIntroduction\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003ePart One: Common Matter and Colonial Encounters\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e1. \"No Earthly Thing Is Sure\": Spenser's Slime and the Colonial Body\u003cbr\u003e 2. \"The Fire that Quickens Nilus' Slime\": Egyptian Mud in Antony and Cleopatra\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003ePart Two: Material Equality in Revolutionary Politics and Global Relations\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e3. \"Fellow Creatures\": Milton and the Politics of Material Equality\u003cbr\u003e 4. The \"Common and Impure Earth\": La Peyrère, Preadamite Cosmopolitanism,and Polygenetic Racism\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003ePart Three: High Equality and Racial Pseudoscience\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e5. \"Infinite Several Kinds of Creatures\": Cavendish, Bergerac, Race, and Extraterrestrials\u003cbr\u003e 6. Of Mushroom Men and Rational Creatures: Hobbes, Locke, and Modern Equality\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003c\/font\u003e","brand":"Cornell University Press","offers":[{"title":"Brand New","offer_id":52608270401816,"sku":"9781501775659","price":40.19,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/freshlyprintedbooks.co.uk\/products\/the-equality-of-flesh-materialism-and-human-commonality-in-early-modern-culture-hardback-9781501775659","provider":"Freshly Printed Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}